Bill Maher's California

Bill Maher. Reading his piece at HuffPo yesterday, "New Rule: Conservatives Who Love to Brag About American Exceptionalism Must Come Here to California", I was reminded how much of a hero he was for me in my first few years on this side of the Big Pond. As sometimes happens with infatuations, my previous fan-worship of Maher has gradually worn from thin to non-existent. His donating $1 million dollars to the Obama 2012 campaign was the last straw. Hadn't he got Obama's number after 4 years? I feel certain there were Green or other candidates on the ballot for him, to whom his dosh would have meant far more than it did to our Deceiver in Chief.

We still watch Bill Maher's weekly Real Time show, to hear the views of his guests rather than his own.

Anyway, forget about my naïveté when it comes to TV stars and politics - back to Maher's piece published yesterday, and used in his show last night. He extols the virtues of his now home state, California, contrasting them sharply against red states' blinkered idiocies. I've never visited California, other than overnight stops in Los Angeles, close to the airport, on a "once in a lifetime" trip to Hawaii back in 1984. From what I've read, we wouldn't be able to afford to live in California, no matter how idyllic the political scene there. One pays - high price or bargain basement - for what one gets, in a variety of ways in life.

The benefits Bill Maher describes somehow result in sky high property prices, and I'm sure that's just a start. That'll be fine for multi-millionaires like Bill, of course - for the rest of us, not so much. Cost of living in general will be much higher in California than in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and other red states. In my old homeland, England cost of living was much higher than here. Property prices, hotels, gas, utilities eating out are all expensive there as compared to Oklahoma. Part of this is due to the fact that staff in some occupations are better paid (restaurant, fast food, hotels) and, though unions are less common than they once were, they are still more prevalent than in the USA.

Now, for the benefits of living in a nice house in a nice area, owning a decent (if aging) car, the ability to afford occasional road trips with motel stops, I have to live among people whose politics disgust me, needed to give up the UK's National Health Service and instead pay through the nose for Medicare supplement and a further supplementary medical insurance, and for all medications, in order to to get me anywhere near to the same level of protection healthcare-wise I'd have enjoyed for free if still living in England.

Swings and roundabouts.

I hope Bill Maher is right, in that California's political flavours might eventually bleed out and affect other states, if not in total, then in ways which could begin to bring balance.

That well-known old quote of Will Rogers, like my earlier fan-worship of Bill Maher, also seems to have worn thin over the years: "When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence level in both states."