Think of the cars that define particular eras and places in California. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hummer and Elon Musk’s Tesla. The Kustom Kulture streamlined babies famously written about by Tom Wolfe and the lowriders of East Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Mission district. The virtue-signaling Priuses of the aughts and the beat-up Model Ts that carried the Okies to the Central Valley during the Great Depression.
All speak of different Golden States. Yet none of them unite our multiple tribes like Volkswagen’s Type II, better known as the VW Bus, which Governor Gavin Newsom