Tacks Peyer

Theodor Adorno’s modernist insight concerning the omnipresent “identity of the non-identical” applies when pondering the Santa Barbara lifestyle of an ordinary schoolteacher living on the lower-middle-class Westside of town. Despite its reputation as a home of the rich and the Hollywood elite, the actual City of Santa Barbara isn’t wealthy. It’s not even one of the richer cities in California.

The Santa Babylon I live in is almost 60 percent Latino, and my neighbors include electricians, gardeners, contractors, swimming pool cleaners, carpenters, and sheet metal workers. We have shade-tree mechanics and a Latina dentist. Plenty of Westsiders rent apartments and struggle to make ends meet and keep their kids safe.

The snooty “Santa Barbara” reputation derives largely from two hyper-wealthy enclaves adjacent to but technically outside of the city limits, Montecito and Hope Ranch. This image is practically opposite from the reality I’ve experienced as a resident living here since 1966.

The real Santa Barbara can be viewed as a microcosm of the U.S.A.: an American hamburger with its own dialectical opposites, the wealthy insulated from the poor by the ground beef of a threatened middle class. Let’s view this assertion through the lens of my daily bike ride to my teaching job at Crane School in Montecito.

In this vision we travel through the American Empire’s core, starting in my mostly middle-class, mixed-ethnic Westside neighborhood: tidy little homes and gardens with a smattering of small apartment buildings, and plenty of recent immigrants, some legal and many illegal.

This Westside is generally a peaceful region — though if you want to see some gnarly brawling, check out the parking lot at the Foodland Market some evenings after 9 p.m. A few blocks further up San Andres Street, drug dealers allegedly shot a rival to death. Crossing Carrillo Street and wheeling south on San Pascual, by the Guadalajara Market, we find ourselves in the gang-ridden lower Westside, where people have been dragged out of cars and beaten in the past few months.

Older Anglo man moving across the dialectic of post-9/11 imperial America.

The proletarian panorama continues as we cycle past the hobos at Pershing Baseball Field, toward the Pacific Ocean. From Stearns Wharf on around to the Santa Barbara Zoo and Radisson Hotel we witness scores of homeless camping on our wide, beautiful beaches, a great choice for them. It is interesting to note, as many of my Latino students have, that they’re nearly all Anglos. Some carry their stuff in shopping carts hijacked from Vons and Ralphs: hoary modern nomads in a latter-day Hooverville. The trick is to carefully lay the carts on their sides at night so you won’t attract attention. Many have bicycles like mine, only theirs are loaded down with essential survival gear whereas my bike has saddlebags with books, corrected papers, and a daily lunch.

Finally, we ascend the fabled cliffs near the Santa Barbara Cemetery, the Music Academy of the West, the glamorous Biltmore Hotel and Ty Warner’s opulent Coral Casino, then through leafy small lanes to Crane School, off San Ysidro Road, huge pittosporum hedges hiding the haciendas from the street. Now we have climbed to the materialistic heights of imperialism, where everything is beautiful and prodigiously plutocratic. Yet the wealthy are not entirely dissimilar to their homeless counterparts, each group frozen in its own milieu, illustrating the unity of opposites.

It is on the Westside — despite the oddity of a marijuana clinic near Foodland dealing medical dope amid hundreds of school kids — that one observes the real America. Some of us are just one step above falling into a tent on the beach, and some aspire to a tiny $600,000 plot of pseudo-paradise, yet there is a vibrancy and social healthiness here that you have to dwell in to appreciate. Smiling children are everywhere, playing and laughing, and attending neighborhood public schools like Harding, McKinley, and La Cumbre Jr. High.

Community is crucial — the campaign-season mocking of a presidential candidate for his work as a community organizer in Chicago simply reflects how imperial dominance causes social blindness, as Adorno might have said it if he hadn’t died 40 years ago. The hyper-wealthy need to get out and participate in real society, and pay higher taxes, while the middle class have to work harder (I know, I know!) and vote more aggressively for political change, universal health care, and ending feckless foreign wars. If Lincoln’s glorious vision of America as the last best hope of earth is to be realized, we have to begin here at home to tackle our own inequities first. No matter how antithetical our three zones seem, we’re in this together.

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