Many thanks to the several appalled readers who sent us Todd S. Purdum's March 29 New York Times piece California Census Confirms Whites Are in Minority : 

"For the first time in the modern era, non-Hispanic whites are officially a minority in California, amounting to a little less than half the population of the most populous state, compared with nearly three-quarters only a decade ago, according to census figures released today..."

We were especially entertained by this comment:

"The Anglo hegemony was only an intermittent phase in California's arc of identity, extending from the arrival of the Spanish," said Kevin Starr, the state librarian and author of cultural histories of the state.

"The Hispanic nature of California has been there all along, and it was temporarily swamped between the 1880's and the 1960's," Mr. Starr said, "but that was an aberration. This is a reassertion of the intrinsic demographic DNA of the longer pattern, which is part of a California-Mexico continuum."

It's real fun, this aberration game.  You can say could say that the Titanic was an aberration between iron in the ground and iron on the sea bed. Prosperity is an aberration between recessions. Peace is an aberration between wars. Life itself, when you think about it, is an aberration – ashes to ashes, dust to dust…No! No! Mustn't violate the Separation of Designated Place of Worship and State.

The aberration game gives you a whole new and comforting way of looking at the world. (The world is an aberration in the void.) And you don't have to think about the role of human design, human error, bad public policy, stupidity – and treason.

April 6, 2001