Like ancient Egypt, California is beset by plagues, most of them self-inflicted — homicidal summer wildfires, a crime spike, electricity blackouts, the end of the internal-combustion engine, failing public schools, water shortages, highest-in-the-nation taxes, a COVID response that gutted the economy and did little to contain the virus, metastasizing homelessness, critical race theory, official confusion about obvious differences between men and women, Governor Gavin Newsom, and, of course, University of Southern California head football coach Clay Helton. With all that, it’s hardly surprising that many Californians are fleeing for other states, crossing the Colorado River in a kind of exodus that’s also remindful of Bible stories: For the first time since William McKinley captured the White House, the state’s population is falling.
Even so, it’s a little surprising that the next plague may well be hunger — not actual corpses-in-the-streets famine, but a bacon shortage in which some of the living may envy the dead.
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