Bakersfield
National comics mock New Jersey as a kind of smog-stinking cultural wasteland. My sense of Jersey (driving through) was that it contained different areas. They included the pine barrens, where the Mafia hid bodies. And compared to Bakersfield, New Jersey is Ancient Athens at its peak.
California's Central Valley, home to half my ancestors, is the nation's food basket. The southern half, with Fresno and Bakersfield, consists of water wars, massive corporate farms, abused workers, a horrible climate, giant prisons, tule fog, level desolation as far as the eye can see and one asset, country music.
Bakersfield, political base of Kevin McCarthy, is flat and dismal. Imagine a small, nothing town in the middle of absolute nowhere, boiling in summer, damply frigid in winter, with one cafe. It serves what it calls "meat sandwiches." No signs of intelligent life. Then magnify it one thousand times, and you have Bakersfield. The city motto is, "Worse than Fresno."
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