Proposition 13

I don't know who it was who first said that travel broadens the mind, but he might have added the warning that the broader the mind, the thinner it tends to get.

Certainly some of the shallowest people in the world – types you used to have to avoid on ocean voyages by remembering pressing appointments with the ship's doctor, or a mislaid friend, or even with a deck quoit – these shallow types, with the thinnest minds, are often people who've been everywhere, on every continent and seen everything through the eyes of a travel brochure. 

Another cliché which is the converse of the first is that people who stay in one place all their lives are not necessarily insular or bigoted. Wasn't it Immanuel Kant who never moved more than a few miles from his home but managed to move the minds of men and women across the globe and down the centuries? Thomas Hardy, I believe, spent all but a few months of his life in his native Dorset, but his mind, however narrow, went as deep as the Grand Canyon and discovered rock-bed truths about men and women that are as true of people in Istanbul or New Orleans as of the early 19th century inhabitants of Dorchester. 

These homely thoughts occurred to me as I watched the cheerful tourists bustling out of the hotels here in San Francisco. San Francisco is second only to New York as THE tourist city of the United States. They were off to see what the package tours tell them to see – Fisherman's Wharf, which used to be, 40 years ago, a colourful mess of boats and Italian-Americans mending their lines or tossing the huge California crabs on to scales. Now it looks as if it had been rustled up by a movie art director as San Francisco Picturesque Location Number One. 

Then there's Chinatown which is as commercial as any Chinatown outside China is, I suppose, bound to be. And it had better be, since the Chinese population's livelihood – existence – depends, like that of the native populations of the Bahamas and the Caribbean islands, depends on truckling to a tourist view of them. I find this always very embarrassing, watching the impassive natives having to put up with naive or fussy or asinine tourists oohing and aahing over objects and little staged ceremonies that the natives, themselves, may very well despise. There's no way of knowing. They keep themselves to themselves. 

So much so incidentally, that when the big issue in America was integration, the forcible integration of the races in schools, in the first place, even San Franciscans were astonished when the firmest protest came not from the white parents, but the Chinese. They didn't want their children to become contaminated by our culture. I remember then visiting the mayor of Chinatown. He didn't put it quite as grossly as that, but he did make it plain that the Chinese feared their children would lose their dignity in becoming half and half or, as he put it, nothing Chinese. 

However, some of the compulsory tourist attractions are, indeed, things that anyone ought to see. I remember just after the war, the late Cyril Connolly, the English literary critic, came to New York for the first time and he asked me what he ought to see. Of course I knew he would, like a homing pigeon, make immediate contact with his own kind. He would stay in Greenwich Village overnight, he would know his opposite numbers, but I apologised for suggesting that he might also take a boat round Manhattan Island and he simply must go to the top of the Empire State Building at sunset, when the lights came on in the skyscrapers and he could see them like a bird as succeeding curtains of jewels. 'It's a very touristy thing to do I'm afraid,' I said. I was greatly relieved when he said, 'But I am a tourist!'. 

Well, whether you're in San Francisco on business or on pleasure, it is a crime not to cross the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County and tumble down its hills and through the roads lined with eucalyptus trees and the wine-red manzanitas and madrones and come on the valley floor to Muir Woods, the nearest grove of redwood trees. It's a little forest, shaggy, with delicate ferns and, above you, the vast towering trees, eight, ten feet wide and sky-high, that were there at the time of Moses. 

Well, I hadn't meant to get off on a tourist talk. All this was by way of introducing the idea that if you're an American who lives here, you will share some, of course of the preoccupations of everybody in the Western world, the still-shuddering memory of the murder of Mr Moro, such chronic pests as inflation, such insoluble horrors as street crime, high school drug addicts and so on. But you'll also have certain preoccupations that belong only to people who live on the West Coast and in California. 

And I should say that there are three things at the moment which are boggling the minds and the emotions of San Franciscans. Two of them, at least, concern not only all Californians, but are being watched and argued about around the country. These are Proposition 13 and the Bakke case. 

Now, Proposition 13. California has several customs written into the state law which are as old as the state, the American state, itself. I think we've talked before about the tradition of recall, whereby so many thousand petitions signed by citizens can require the recall or removal from office of state officials, most remarkably, the governor. I don't believe they've ever made it, though the last try was that done to recall former Governor Reagan. 

The other tradition is that of referendum. I don't believe a state-wide election ever comes up which doesn't ask the voters to pass on some proposition. And the big one in next month's election is the so-called Proposition 13. At the mere sound of it, any one of us might want to rush in and sign up as a Californian. It is a full-blown tax revolt. I'll bet most people listening to me now in whatever part of the globe feel angry and dejected every time they get the news that their rates – known here as property taxes – have gone up, yet again. 

Well, the Californians, all those couples who saved up and bought a dream house and now find their rates doubling about every five years, all such people are up in arms. Inspired by the leadership of a Mr Jarvis, a florid and choleric old Californian, they're going to vote on a proposition to reduce all private property taxes, throughout the state, by about half. It would cut the money available for cities to spend by about 22 per cent and it would reduce the money to be spent on education by 44 per cent. Not much will be lost by those services – the airports, water departments, welfare, community health services – which are either under local public ownership or are supported by federal government funds, but the... the really stricken victims will be the public schools – which, in this country, means public not private – hospitals for the handicapped, the local tube, the public library. 

Now the outsider, like me, asks at once, 'How can you possibly keep the schools going by cutting half the revenue that pays for them?' And the answer by the supporters of Proposition 13 is that there is enormous waste in other departments of the state government and that the 44 per cent cut would act as a healthy incentive to use money wisely and spread it around more fairly. I don’t want to get into the really tortuous complications of this proposition but simply to say it is the first sign of a citizens' revolt against big government, growing bureaucracies and the never-ending rise in taxation. 

The directors of education in California say it will kill or strangle the public schools and yet so lofty a national, international figure as Dr Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize winner in economics, says it will do no such thing and will signify a necessary break on too much government. 

Now the Bakke case. B-A-K-K-E, is the name of a man, a medical student, who maintains that although his qualifications for a university medical job were, in open competition, superior to those of a particular black man, the black man got the job. So Mr Bakke sued the University of California on the grounds of racial discrimination. Now this is the first and certainly nationally famous case of a white using the integration ruling of the Supreme Court against a black. The pros and cons have been argued by almost every distinguished law scholar in the country. 

To be blunt about it, the arguments boil down to two opposing contentions. One, that the integration ruling explicitly promises the equal protection of the law to all citizens and that it is just as possible to discriminate in favour of a black as it is against him. Two, the judges, as humane Americans, must bear in mind the long history of deprivation that the blacks have suffered and must not always assume that a particular black man in competition with a white starts on equal ground. You're going to hear a great deal in the months to come about the 'Regents of the University of California versus Allan Bakke'. 

San Francisco has given its own peculiar twist to this protest through the San Francisco Bar Association. San Francisco has recently passed a so-called 'Gay Rights Ordinance' which prohibits discrimination in jobs, housing, employment, so on, against homosexuals. This ordinance, this city law, came about thanks to the work of a committee of the local bar association. That committee is now about to sit down and consider another project. To whit, I quote, 'the extent to which homosexual bars and discothèques discriminate against – wait for it! – discriminate against heterosexuals and other minorities. 

Well, the unwitting joker in that sentence, of course, is the assumption that heterosexuals are a minority. They say, here, that one voter in four, in San Francisco, is homosexual. Whether it's so, it's not wildly exaggerated. At any rate, the glorious prospect dawns of night-time marchers, upright 'straight' citizens parading outside gay bars, bearing banners with the brave device, 'Unfair to Straights! We want in!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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