Bus Tour of the New Economy

It has become a ritual of sorts in struggling countries for deputy mayors to cut ribbons over grim concrete fields and declare that the new Free Trade Zone will be the "Silicon Valley of Transcarpathia," or wherever.

These poor souls should be forced, as I was recently, to ride the #20 bus from San Jose to Mountain View, Calif. Nobody except the New Economy's losers will ever board public transit in Silicon Valley. This place was built for luxury cars.

As a tour of this New Economy, you can do no better than riding the #20. The bus winds right past Netscape, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, and nearly half the companies on the NASDAQ exchange. But as a vision of the future, the three-story glass mall campuses, endless parking lots and surrounding planned communities are enough to make one long for Stalinist housing blocks and bars that only serve bathtub vodka.

There are no bars within a 10-minute drive of my father's condo in Santa Clara, which is inside an almost-finished faux-colonial gated community called "Nantucket." Nor can you find any shop or stand that sells a daily paper. There is a Spanish-style mall complex called "The MicroCenter," with two coffee shops, a Kinko's, several restaurants, a huge AMC multiplex and a computer superstore -- but no newspapers, unless you count the Micro Times and other freebie computer rags.

The only signs of commerce along route #20 are the sporadic corner malls, with their Wells Fargo banks and Carl's Jr. hamburger shops. The only signs of human activity are low-wage Mexicans taking their lunch in a local park, or Xenosys employees fighting over a parking space at the nearby TGIF's.

More disturbing is the utter absence of anything beautiful or inspired. In Silicon Valley you can drive past rows of million-dollar homes and clusters of billion-dollar software firms without seeing a single handsome building. The gated housing parks -- Bella Vista, Mansion Grove, etc. -- look like dressed-up tract homes ... and sell for a half-million per unit.

Sitting on the bus, I tried to work out whether it mattered that the generals and lieutenants of the New Economy had no taste. After all, vacuous suburban sprawl is nothing new in California, nor is vulgar wealth. By most measures the state seems to be doing just fine, and you can always live in San Francisco or something if you really insist on walking to your daily transactions or seeing the odd foreign film.

Just then my ears zeroed in on a monologue being given by the woman sitting in the front seat of the bus.

"You know, I've got over a thousand movies on video," she said in the general direction of the bus driver. "But they're taking up all the room in my apartment, so what I'm hoping to do is get them all on laser disc to save space."

It was 1:30 in the afternoon on a Thursday. "Team members" from Internet Video SVC, Collabra Software and Performance Solutions were driving back from lunch at Coco's.

"Did you see Titanic? I saw Titanic four times; I'm going to get that on laser disc. I bought the soundtrack and that's really good too. Did you see the one with that girl from the TV show, what's it called ... you know the one with the comedian guy who does the phone commercials?"

The woman, who seemed to be in her 30s, had a little arm-crutch deal and a slightly glazed look. Maybe she was handicapped and couldn't work, maybe she was recuperating from some injury, maybe she had taken the day off.

Whatever her story, she is Exhibit A of what economists like to call "America's enviable domestic market." With bus riders around the country eager to gobble up every crap-steak dropped on their plates, and buying each upgrade of their technological systems of delivery, Hollywood studios can rely on basic levels of return almost regardless of how costly and putrid, say, "Godzilla" turns out.

This knowledge feeds a publicity/media beast that sustains the majority of glossy magazines, and has led directly to the tripling of celebrity coverage in newspapers and weeklies over the past 20 years. A Martian landing in a Silicon Valley supermarket checkout today would probably conclude that the most significant citizen of Planet Earth is Mel Gibson. Where there were once newspaper companies, now there are entertainment/news/technology conglomerates whose primary function is to make the bus riders get off at the multiplex stop, or at least at Blockbuster.

But the consumers are trained so well, most have absolutely nothing else to talk about. And when the many bubbles on this seven-year economic boom finally start to burst in the coming months, the tragic consequences of creating a dumb, entertainment-eating underclass will take a huge bite out of the Silicon Valley and even Hollywood itself.

It the last few months, the dominant media/entertainment companies like General Electric and Disney have cut huge deals with big Internet companies, starting a process that will soon put San Jose programmers, Brentwood producers and Manhattan editors under the same corporate roof. Problem is, there won't be any clever Americans left to make the gadgets that deliver the product.

"There are simply not enough qualified native workers to meet demand," wrote Daniel T. Griswold, a Cato Institute director, in a March 30 appeal to Congress to grant more high-tech visas. "Immigrants ... comprise 30 percent of research and development scientists and engineers with Ph.D's. More than one-third of the engineers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born."

Local labor unions smell a scheme to keep down wages, but supporting evidence about the level of American education is truly horrifying.

"Almost 50 percent of adult Americans are considered functionally illiterate, reading and writing below 8th grade level," reads a report written by the pro-school-voucher clerks in Newt Gingrich's office. "13 percent are considered totally illiterate, reading and writing below 4th grade level."

American 12th graders recently scored 21st out of 21 countries in advanced math and physics, and 19th in general math, according to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study.

Many go on to close the gap by attending the world's best higher education system, but the ones left behind are not what Al Gore had in mind when he started babbling about the wonders of the 21st century economy.

They have received the civilized world's worst K-12 education, 44 million of them have no access to the world's most expensive health insurance system, and since they've been old enough to crawl, history's most sophisticated marketing machinery has taught them to love Disney, dream of being rich and to be a model employee. They live in ugly neighborhoods, lack even the mythological American entrepreneurial spirit, and assume this is how most civilized people live.

Most of the engineers and financiers of the New Economy were raised in much the same way: oblivious to aesthetic ambition and focused like a laser beam on getting rich. Like Japanese executives, they are happy to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to join unremarkable boating and golf clubs, just because they're expensive. Visit their homes and they're more likely to brag about how much that lamp cost, than gush about its beauty.

For now, with the "new paradigm" and all, it's tempting to think that bad taste, get-rich mentalities and a massive underclass do not matter. As long as the undereducated poor are able to scramble for uninsured work -- which they've been willing to do for most of this decade -- the obedient among them will spend an astonishing percentage of their disposable income on credit card debt, basketball shoes and diet pills.

(Of course the disobedient ones will continue being shipped off to prison in numbers unmatched in world history -- 1.7 million and growing, at last count.)

But when the stock market finally crashes, and it will, the lower third of the food chain will be sawed off like barnacles from a battleship. They will no longer be able to afford converting their videos to laser discs. Computer-chip and potato-chip companies won't be able to sell as many units in America, and production will be cut back. Growing welfare rolls will increase handouts from the government, which is likely to pass the cost along to businesses. The welfare-to-work program will turn into the welfare-to-no-work-or-welfare program.

If immigrants get blamed for "stealing jobs," software companies will have no choice but to move to where the population is more qualified and cheap, like Hungary or India. Hollywood, no longer guaranteed an automatic domestic audience, will be forced to cut expenses by shooting films elsewhere.

This likely outcome was avoidable, but the smart people who should have known better have long ceased having any ethical problems with getting rich by producing garbage for the overfed, dumbed-down masses.

The L.A. Times recently reported that every principal involved with the production of "Lethal Weapon 4" -- with the probable exception of Chris Rock -- had absolutely no enthusiasm for the project, but dragged themselves through it anyway, for the promise of easy money.

When the Day of Reckoning comes, let the first brick be thrown at Mel Gibson's head.

TABLOID news editor Matt Welch used to laugh at the socialists. He still does, but it's no longer especially funny.