Jerry Brown’s California

After watching Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed over the weekend on the “Tom
Sullivan Show,” I’ve given up the long-held delusion that Arnold would ride the
white horse to the White House. He could well do that, even in President
Obama’s administration. But he will bring to that now only a charismatic
novelty. And the White House already has one: President Obama.

As Arnold ends his term in November, a strange symmetry is occurring in California.
When he first ran for governor, Arnold even got support from the most deeply
conservative of the religious right in the heartland because he was a Hollywood
hottie and suggested Ronald Reagan, the California governor who was also a
Hollywood star. Reagan was followed by Jerry Brown as governor. What is odd
this time around is that Arnold could well be followed by the same Jerry Brown,
who is running again.

Arnold is a great pitchman and poster boy for California, but is not now and
never was Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s California, like John Wayne’s, was more Texas
than California as we know California to be today. That is, Reagan’s was the
sagebrush “Hey, Cisco”-“Hey, Pancho” ’50s TV California that spread west and
north from the Hollywood desert before Janis Joplin, before the Summer of Love,
before the vast and worldwide cultural awakening in the mid-’60s to which even
Woodstock was a lawyer’s impoverished imitation.

Reagan was governor of California during this awakening, from 1967 to 1975. He
was the traditionalist’s hedge against it. He soon brought the hedge to
Washington, D.C. But in that time California as we know it today was born,
possibly at the Fillmore with the crying, howling heart and animal chords of “four
gentlemen and one great, great broad,” as Janis and her band was introduced to
the big world in the summer of 1967.

This was the California that Reagan rose in opposition to, but this is a door
that would not be closed. It is the California that Jerry Brown inherited when
he went to the California governorship in 1975. This was always Jerry Brown’s
California, and it is today.

Janis’s cry from the heart was a birth pain, but it is a birth that has not
completely gone full term. It is a strange fate indeed that Brown follows
Arnold — Arnold, the Reagan knockoff — as he followed Reagan himself.
California may be down now, but it is not out. Possibly it is about to finally
be born.

In the masterful “Mad Men,” set in 1963, California is described as “new and
shining” while New York is a “city in decline.” Those who worked on Madison
Avenue, as I did decades ago, know how the story ends: The talent moves to
California. This is the new America in the center of the new world rising
between East and West, superseding the old paradigm of North vs. South (and
Texas). It is revealed in living arrangements. A former soap opera actress (Jon
Hamm’s landlady) has a house in L.A. but keeps an apartment in New York. While
celebrity President Bill Clinton owns a house in Westchester County in New York,
but keeps an apartment in LA.

One is light, one is shadow, but the light has shifted: California is now in
the light while New York, like Clinton, falls to rust and shadow. America’s
edge today facing the world rising is California and it is not Schwarzenegger’s
California or Reagan’s California, but Jerry Brown’s.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.