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years of cheerful pessimism, Marcuse took Adornos collapse of culture thesis a step further, positing a democratic totalitarianism undermining the very possibility of critical subjectivity. Undoubtedly he found plentiful confirmation for this claim in surrounding San Diego County, with its eerie landscape conjugation of seaside resorts and Marine Corps bases. But even in this one-dimensional society, Marcuse welcomed emergent forces of liberation: praising soul music and jazz (which Adorno excoriated), supporting Angela Davis and the Panthers, and urging his students to spread the gospel of classical Marxism across California.93 He was able to make the organic connection to indigenous radicalism that had eluded a majority of his exile comrades in the 1940s. Unfortunately the Last Dialectician in Lotusland fell afoul not only of rising Nixonian hysteria (every day brought fresh death threats from San Diegos fascist fringe), but, fatally, of the fickle attention of the Culture Industry. Unwonted media celebrity first gurufied Marcuse (Time magazines Pied Piper of Insurgent Youth), then stamped his thoughts with the killing censorship of a fad whose time has passed. Yet the spectre of Frankfurt Marxism (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse) still haunts Southern California, even if their once ironic observations have been reduced to guidepost clichs for the benefit of Postmodernisms Club Med. If the Weimar exiles appeared in Los Angeles as tragedy, then todays Fifth Republic tourists come strictly as farce. What was once anguish seems to have become fun. As a local critic has observed with regard to a recent visit o f the current Parisian philosopher king:
Baudrillard seems to enjoy himself. He loves to observe the liquidation of culture, to experience the delivery from depth. . . . He goes home to France and finds it a quaint, nineteenth-century country. He returns to Los Angeles and feels perverse exhilaration. There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. Only Hieronymous Boschs Hell can match the inferno effect.94

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If Southern California is to continue to meet the challenge of her environment .. . her supreme need . . . is for able, creative, highly endowed, highly trained men in science and its appplications. Robert Millikan95

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