San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Legacy of two governors Brown
upon the state that I lived in, buying land in Anaheim to construct a real imaginary kingdom that he would call “the Happiest Place on Earth.”
Nowadays, many Californians incline toward pessimism, remembering that Disney’s dream entailed the destruction of miles of orange groves. We notice that traffic on Interstate 5 has slowed miles before the turnoff to Tomorrowland. Disney’s cartoonish signature now signifies a monstrous corporation that swallows every rival competing for the imagination of children.
Pat Brown was as infatuated with movement as any boy in my high school. His freeways raced for miles north and south, then cloverleafed east and west. He even proposed extending the dark Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco from the Ferry Building, circling the northern edge of the city, continuing over Marina Green, finally connecting to the Golden Gate Bridge. He thought it a wonderful prospect to look out at the bay as one drove to the suburbs.
During his tenure, Pat Brown presided over marvels. He channeled water from the Central Valley uphill into Southern California. He developed a three-tiered master plan for higher education — enlisting community colleges, state colleges, and the University of California into a single vision of possibility.
By the time Ronald Reagan defeated Pat Brown for governor in 1966, the music on the car radio was changing from “California Dreamin’ ” to acid rock. Reagan would later run for president as an affable optimist, invoking “morning in America.” As governor of California, he called out the National Guard against the children of the suburbs, who were rioting on Sproul Plaza against war in Southeast Asia, racism, and a “multiversity” that the students complained reduced them to numbers.
We might imagine that, in the manner of a Shakespearean history play, when Jerry Brown succeeded Reagan as governor in 1975, the son was reclaiming his father’s fiefdom. In truth, Jerry Brown was more like Reagan in his fiscal conservatism than he was like his father.
And the image that Brown wanted to project from the start was of a man not
given to materialism and the giantism of postwar California. Young Brown announced himself an enthusiast of the British economist E.F. Schumacher and his book, “Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered.”
Jerry Brown, having been educated in a Jesuit seminary, was acquainted with the spiritual value of physical deprivations. We read in the newspaper that young Gov. Brown slept on a mattress in an apartment building across from the Capitol. He drove himself around the state in a Plymouth compact. Mike Royko, the Chicago columnist, dubbed him “Governor Moonbeam” — and the name stuck.
For several weeks, after he was defeated in a run for the U.S. Senate, Brown worked with Mother Teresa in Kolkata, India. He was also, we heard or read, a student of Zen Buddhism. Indeed, one of Brown’s “memorable quotes” as governor — remembered by Google if not by me — deserves a Zen gong: “Inaction may be the biggest form of action.”
In the interim (between Brown’s early tenure as governor, from 1975 to 1983 and his re-election in 2011 to the present) another Zen Buddhist became the most influential Californian in the world. Steve Jobs drove a silver Mercedes SL55 AMG between the two fantasy factories of his life — Pixar in Emeryville and Apple in Cupertino.
As a young man, Jobs had been dissuaded from becoming a monk by the Zen monastery to which he applied. In the famous late years of his life, he proceeded to clothe himself in a monkish habit of mixed metaphor — an expensive black Miyake turtleneck and worn jeans. He presented himself as a prophet of possibility. Thus, to my mind, Jobs belongs to the optimistic California of Pat Brown, as does the fascinating Elon Musk.
Even as Teslas burst into flame on freeway shoulders, Musk launched a red convertible into the stratosphere, mocking eternity. He also bored a tunnel under Los Angeles, to rescue commuters from gridlock.
By contrast to Musk’s tunnel, Jerry Brown’s legacy to the future of California is the dream of a high-speed train between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The high-speed train is as epic an ambition as anything his father conceived. But as he leaves office, Brown’s high-speed train is grossly over budget. The built portion stands on the landscape near Fresno like a remnant Roman aqueduct.
What makes Jerry run? I don’t know. I don’t think it was Zen Buddhism or the “Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.” He was elected governor for two terms. Then twice he was defeated for the U.S. Senate. Then he sought his party’s nomination for the presidency, three times. He was the mayor of Oakland.
Then California attorney general. Then governor for another two terms.
He grew old as I grew old. I saw him once on Fillmore Street; I saw him once at a party in one of the canyons of L.A.
What do I think of Brown’s progress? I think he was solid. I think he was a worker. But for many years, I didn’t think of him at all because the California of flamboyant optimism had opened up a vein in Silicon Valley. Frat boys became billionaires selling the world games or apps or platforms or the promise of connection in exchange for privacy.
Under the guise of Silicon Valley, California is colonizing other parts of America, lately Austin, Texas, and New York. And governors are thrilled by their election to the dream. Many Californians, however, increasingly sound like Jerry Brown. We know that the new tech “campus” will raise our rents and slow traffic and otherwise render our lives as less than we remember.
After Jerry Brown, the argument will continue in California, between optimism and pessimism, gold and fool’s gold. Brown predicts that, after his departure, the Democrats in Sacramento will again run up budgets that they can’t pay for.
Brown says he is retiring to a ranch, as befits a long life in public service. Now and for the future, Brown’s theme is climate change. He has positioned himself stoutly against the devastation wreaked by the orange-crested Tweety Bird in Washington. We will doubtless see Brown in coming years at international conferences that consider melting snow.
As Brown departs, crowds of Central American peasants gather in Tijuana at the gates to California. They believe the state of drought, perched on the edge of a rising sea, remains a state of desire. Many Californians want nothing to do with the illegal dreams, expecting they will only bring more taxes — welfare costs, overcrowded schools, traffic.
I am cheered, therefore, that Gavin Newsom has been talking about the California “dream” in recent interviews. I remember Newsom fondly as the mayor of San Francisco, the man who looked like Disney’s Prince Charming, the man who sponsored same-sex marriage years before the U.S. Supreme Court approved. Couples lined up for blocks. I watched on television as Newsom officiated at the marriage of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who had been together for 51 years. In 2004, they were the first same-sex couple legally married in San Francisco.
I think of the boy that I was in Sacramento, with my queer sexual secret. And I think, if that boy could have foreseen the happiness of those old women, he would have been able to imagine California as a band of gold.
San Francisco essayist Richard Rodriguez is the author of numerous books on religion, ethnicity and education, including his book on California and Mexico, “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” (Penguin, 1993). To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.