The Palo Alto suicides started in 2002, when Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto High School class of 2007 and author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, must have been in middle school.
I, a year ahead in the class of 2006, was adjusting to the awkward realities of the freshman PE locker room when the news began to circulate that one of our classmates had, instead of coming to school that morning, stepped in front of the Caltrain line just a block away and ended his life.
Harris vows in the introduction to Palo Alto not to write yet another personal account giving an unsatisfying answer as to why one student after another in our leafy suburban hometown, even then a global epicenter of wealth and academic achievement, chose to die like Anna Karenina in what the CDC calls a “suicide cluster.” He prefers, in the spirit of his hero Karl Marx (no HUAC investigation is required to find evidence of Harris’s communist affiliations) to delineate the great impersonal forces that have shaped Palo Alto’s history.
Nevertheless, he can’t seem to avoid focusing on those gaps in our ranks, and he chooses to frame his seven-hundred-page history, which begins long before the town’s incorporation or indeed the existence of the state of California, by describing the town as haunted. Harris has produced what he imagines is the People’s History of Palo Alto, and the reader cannot escape the feeling that he wants to write it from the perspective of those whom the “Palo Alto System” burned out, especially the dead.
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When Harris closes in on histories and subjects closer to my knowledge and experience, it’s clear how far from reality his ideological priors can take his tale. Laughably, he imagines Palo Alto to be a major hub of conservatism, and the heavily left-wing town is transmuted into the Reagan-and-Bush brain trust. Anyone at all familiar with the history of the conservative movement in the U.S. since the 1950s would not recognize Harris’s description of the Bay Area as its beating heart. The Heritage Foundation, which really could be described as the Reagan administration’s policy brain trust, and whose dossier of recommendations Reagan gave to each of his cabinet members upon assuming office, goes unmentioned. Instead, the (very fine) Hoover Institution on Stanford’s campus is magnified into a colossus, on the thin evidential basis of its public support of basic free-market policy prescriptions agreed upon by most right-of-center organizations and voters in America.
I love the Hoover Institute, but alas, they’re not the “colossus” that Harris makes them out to be, sad to say.