RUTHFULLY YOURS

California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s.

A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million — not nearly 40 million as it is today — the 99 used to be a high-speed, four-lane marvel. It was a crown jewel in California’s cutting-edge freeway system.

Not now.

The 99 was recently ranked by ValuePenguin (a private consumer research organization) as the deadliest major highway in the nation. Locals who live along its 400-plus miles often go to bed after seeing lurid TV news reports of nocturnal multi-car accidents. Then they wake up to Central Valley radio accounts of morning carnage on the 99.

The 99 is undergoing a $1 billion, multi-decade upgrade to increase its four lanes to six. Promises have been made to build off- and on-ramps in place of haphazard exits and entries from the old days of cross traffic.

In many of the most dangerous southern portions of the 99, huge semi trucks hog two lanes. Speeders weave in and out of traffic. They still try to drive 70 mph in the manner you could 50 years ago when traffic was less clogged. Text-messaging drivers are now even more dangerous than the intoxicated.

The 99 is emblematic of a state in psychological and material decline.

Running parallel to the southern portion of the 99 is an underused, subsidized Amtrak passenger rail line. Not far away is yet another rail corridor, where the state is plowing up some of its best farmland to build the first link of high-speed rail. That boondoggle’s projected price tag has soared from the original $33 billion to somewhere between $60 and $100 billion — without a single foot of track yet laid.

Californians are apparently too sophisticated to allot $10 billion or so to first ensure that the state has adequate north-south freeways. In addition to the 99, state residents must also contend with the equally primitive coastal Highway 101 and the now-overcrowded Interstate 5.

All societies in decline fixate on impossible postmodern dreams as a way of disguising their inability to address premodern problems.

Phony identities are a commonplace in cultural history. In musical history, the most remarkable example remains so-called Gregorian chant, as “rediscovered” through “source-critical” research by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes in the early 19th century. Reeling from the French Revolution which had nearly annihilated their order, the Benedictines sought an authentic medieval Catholic culture, the musical expression of a mythical Age of Faith, and thought they founded it by reconstructing an Ur-chant from the welter of different styles that infested ecclesiastical practice. It was all a scam, a hoax, a goof, as later scholars were to demonstrate, for example Katherine Bergeron in her 1998 study Decadent Enchantments, which I discussed here. Gregorian chant in the Solesmes theme-park version has such a strong association with Catholic worship, though, that many Catholics refuse to believe that they were scammed.

And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he’s been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a “folk,” not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse. We have a distinct culture, but it is a self-created culture, a riff on Pilgrim’s Progress that became Poor Wayfaring Strangers, pilgrims pursuing freedom on a raft down the Mississippi, avenging Western gunmen, hard-boiled private eyes, and–yes–a young man in work shirt and jeans carrying a guitar. I tried to define what uniquely formed American culture earlier this year in a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, published by Tablet magazine here.

We are not a folk but a church, and our native music is church music–the Battle Hymn with its quotation of Isaiah 63, for example, or “The Year of Jubilo,” whose hymnal roots I analyzed here. Our popular poetic language is that of our national epic, the King James Bible. We sang the go-to-meeting songs of the Methodists and other Protestant denominations. This informed the spirituals of black slaves who gave us our first original art form. American folk music? Gospel is as close as we get to such a concept.

The Black Lives Matter movement has fascinated the media for more than two years by pretending that violence against blacks is principally the work of racist cops. But most Americans, regardless of color, know better. Support for police is now at its highest level in decades.

A new Gallup survey out this week finds that a full 76% of Americans say they have “a great deal” of respect for the police in their area, up from 64% in 2015. Another 17% in this year’s survey say they have some respect for local cops, and only 7% say they have “hardly any.”

Strong support for local police cuts across racial lines. Whites have historically been the most supportive in Gallup surveys and that’s true again this year, with 80% expressing great respect for their local cops. But support is also surging among nonwhites, 67% of whom say they have great respect for the police in their area, up from 53% last year.

Politicians like Hillary Clinton have responded to the message of Black Lives Matter by vigorously agreeing that all Americans have a problem of “implicit bias,” if not worse. But on this issue the politicians seem to be way out of step with the people. While Gallup finds rising support for local police across all demographics, the biggest surge in respect for America’s men and women in blue is occurring among political liberals. People in this category expressing a great deal of respect for police shot up to 71% this year from 50% in 2015.

Perhaps they have come to realize that blue lives matter a lot in any successful campaign to save black lives.

State government revenues have swelled 30% in the last five years. That’s a bigger raise than most workers have received, but public unions and their friends are asking voters for more at the ballot box on Nov. 8.

In California unions are seeking to extend a 2012 ballot referendum that raised taxes on individuals making more than $250,000 and bumped the top rate on income above $1 million to 13.3% from 10.3%. Proposition 55 would postpone the income surtax’s scheduled sunset by 12 years to 2030. Ergo, another “temporary” tax increase becomes permanent.

A mere 1% of California earners account for about half of the state’s income-tax revenues and a third of the budget. Since 2012 California’s coffers have grown by nearly 40% thanks to large capital gains. About two-thirds of the new revenues have gone to schools, but for the teachers union it’s never enough.

A recent Field Poll shows voters favoring the tax extension by two to one. Opponents have raised $3,000. Labor groups and hospitals—Medicaid would get a dedicated share of the revenues—muzzled the opposition by vilifying donors to the antitax campaign in 2012 and dumping $60 million into this year’s initiative.

Maine is following California’s leftward lead with an initiative to impose a three-percentage-point surcharge on household income exceeding $200,000 per year—regardless of whether the taxpayer files as an individual or jointly. If enacted, Maine would lay claim to the second highest top individual rate in the country at 10.15% after California’s 13.3%

The Maine Heritage Policy Center estimates that the tax would cost 4,000 private jobs and $265 million in real disposable income by reducing economic activity. Some would shift next door to New Hampshire where the income tax is zero. The Pine Tree State was one of only five states last year to lose population, and the tax hike would make it harder to recruit and retain professionals in high-demand fields like health care. The average salary of a physician in Maine is $210,760, and about half of pass-through business income was reported on returns with income greater than $200,000.