The Land of Make Believe

Over the past weekend I went on a holiday retreat to Palm Springs, located about a hundred miles northwest of San Diego. It's a man made oasis in the middle of the California desert. After driving through miles of sandy landscape, we descended into the valley to see acres of golf courses, suburban tract homes with well manicured lawns, and gleaming resorts. I'd never been to Palm Springs before but a friend had a timeshare so even though it was one of the least likely places I'd normally agree to go, I said, "Yes."

A little more history on Palm Springs is in order. I think originally, Palm Springs was a place for celebrities to hang out and have an escape from Hollywood. Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Clark Gable, Gene Autry and those good old boys would come out and carouse in the desert sun. Nowadays Palm Springs is probably celebrity free since everyone I know mostly associates the place with old people and golfers. On this last fact, it's jarring to see so much green in the middle of a giant dirt bowl. I immediately wondered where the water was being pumped in from. Turns out it's from the Colorado River and Palm Springs uses more than half of California's share for its farms -- more than Los Angeles and San Diego's usage combined.

Now I don't know how much of this water is necessary for farming but I'd suspect a lot of it goes toward tending those golf gardens. Upon further research I can't even figure out what is being grown in Palm Springs with all this water since the only farms I could find online were references to wind farms. The miles of modern windmills fascinated me by the way. They are awesomely symmetrical looking and I liked spotting the ones that were out of order and not spinning along with its siblings. Well they were awesome until I found out that the electricity generated by the 3000+ windmills is mostly used to keep the Coachella Valley humming. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like there's a lot of water and infrastructure being used here for only a few hundred thousand people.

To be fair, Palm Springs also serves as a semi-oasis for the gays. "Current estimates are that up to thirty three percent of Palm Springs' residents identify as gay and lesbian. In addition, there are a number of gay resorts, bars, restaurants, and clubs. Wikipedia further illuminates by providing this tidbit: Palm Springs has one of the highest per capita rates of HIV/AIDS in the nation because of their extensive health-support systems.

Forget my hastily researched history of what keeps Palm Springs around, let's focus instead on the people. We stayed at very nice Marriot resort and everything about the place was classy. Our spacious condo overlooking a golf course, a beautiful soaring lobby, gondolas and caged parrots there for entertaining, and a staff attentive to every need. In fact, the place was the very definition of luxury, if by luxury you mean the entitled upper middle class versus dirty sopping rich luxury.

So if you love thirty dollar entrees, retiree shuttle van drivers, fifteen dollar poolside chargers, and an amusing mix of douchebags and their entourages -- in various sizes and ages, although not colors unless you differentiate between levels of tan -- then Palm Springs is the place for you. The very definition of classy yet trashy, Palm Springs was like a Vegas-lite. And you know how much I dislike Vegas. What's even worse about Palm Springs though is its absolute lack of minorities. At least in Vegas there are packs of minorities and mixed groups of people milling around. Lately I've been hyper conscious of spaces that are only filled with white people and Palm Springs was the definition of that. Sure there were a few European tourists, a gaggle of Asians there for a ballroom dancing competition, and the service staff had any number of Latinos and blacks, but the clientele was basically all the same. Semi-young adults transported from the worst areas of downtown San Diego or Pacific Beach, or families from Rancho Bernardo.

I may have to start a Tumblr about spaces with only white people in them. But I fear I'd have to do too much field research. Don't get me wrong, I love my white friend, but there are certain places that are overwhelmingly a particular type of white that makes me all sorts of uncomfortable. It's not the whiteness so much as the attitude. I'll try to explain it better in another post. And it's not whiteness per se, I mean, any spaces with a mono-ethnic crowd makes me weirded out lately.

The biggest problem I had with Palm Springs was how comfortable I felt. Intellectually I detested it for the utter lack of diversity, the overriding sense of economic entitlement, and a "these are people here to serve me so they better do it well" attitude, but this was the sort of place I grew up visiting. The accomodations, the marble floors, the delusions of grandeur settings, all of these were vastly familiar to me. I can easily imagine myself saying, "Hey, a gondola! Cool!" And that's the problem with Palm Springs. I went for research and found exactly what I expected, which just supported and heightened my hypocrisy.