Jerry Brown: The Mystic and the Machine
de.us ex ma. chi. na \dã-?-,sek-‘smak-?-n?,de¯\ n [NL, a god from a machine, trans. of Gk theos ek mechanes]: a person or thing that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty — Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
It is quiet in Laurel Canyon where the modern houses are tucked away amidst trees and knolls. But things are whirling in his mind. Jerry Brown glances over at the shotgun in the corner, rises out of bed, and enters the shower. Sitting on the toilet he skims a page of Wittgenstein which had been left out on the sink.
From the bedroom closet he pulls on an initialed white shirt, vest and suit. He decides on a striped tie over the usual dotted one. The suit is executive style, with an arc up the sides to sharp, almost pointed shoulders, creating an erect figure. He combs down the thinning hair, gray at the sideburns, a bit stringy over the back collar, and wonders if he shouldn’t have it cut.
He makes coffee, then paces out of the messy kitchen to the comfortable, open, sunlit rooms where he studies, meets and socializes. He is very proud of this house, his only possession. It is more dignified than the funky one where he lived in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake district, but not chic like the beach house in Malibu. Informal, but fine for entertaining contributors; in the city, but surrounded by woods.
He flips on a Gregorian chant, fingers a Brookings Institution study of the 1974 federal budget which he should read, then picks up a book on Sufism from the round wooden table. A cover note by Robert Graves reads: “The natural Sufi may be as common in the West as in the East, and may come dressed as a general, a merchant, a lawyer, a schoolmaster, a housewife, anything. To be ‘in the world but not of it,’ free from ambition, greed, intellectual pride, blind obedience to custom or awe of persons of higher rank: that is the Sufi’s ideal.”
He drops it back with the budgets, the land-use studies, the Krishnamurti. No time. He moves toward the phone while scanning the Los Angeles Times. They’ve got him again for a lack of specifics. Why aren’t they interested in ideas? What about the morning news: He turns on the television that has video-recording equipment attached. Brown by a narrow margin, it says, 50.2% to 47.3 for Houston I. Flournoy.
At the sound of the station wagon pulling up the gravel driveway, he moves quickly out of the open door. The day has begun for the new governor of California.
The final days of the campaign have been unexpectedly tense. After months of a ten to 15% lead in the polls, Brown has been slipping almost a point a day in the final week. Logic and the polls still dictate a certain victory but for the first time the campaign’s confidence is slipping. Is the narrowing gap simply a final, limited Republican consolidation? Or are the mysteries about Edmund G. Brown Jr. starting to work on the public nerve as the day of decision approaches?
Monday, November 4th “Jerry’s just ‘unsafe’ in a lot of people’s minds,” frets Tom Quinn, the 30-year-old campaign director. “You know, most people are conservative, scared, a lot more like Archie Bunker than you.” We are “somewhere over California,” a television reporter is telling his audience, in a two-engine rented plane carrying staff, friends and press through the final phase.
Starting in San Diego at eight in the morning, Brown has been popping out of the plane to address airport rallies at Burbank, San Francisco, Sacramento and Fresno. No minds will be changed at these airports but the media will pick up the motion and the excitement, and anyhow it’s a good way to release the burning energy of the final day.
If ambition could crack steel, this plane would crash. For almost five years an unlikely little circle of ex-nuns, media men, spiritual freaks, young lawyers and academics has been slaving to land a new force in the center of American politics. This is the turning point. Make it and move into the open field; blow it, and. . .don’t even think about it.
The candidate is a little more animated than usual, playfully excited, touched by the expectancy of today’s crowds, free associating in his last short speeches. Congressman John Moss, the mannered old dean of California’s House delegation, tells the crowd in Sacramento: “I’m glad to introduce a young man, because we need the young people to bring about changes. . .”
To which Jerry replies: “Thank you, Congressman, thank you. . .that’s a fine suit you’ve got on today, with a vest I see. I’m glad one of us is being respectable. I do have my pin-striped suit on, I’m wearing my Republican clothes today. . .” Then follows his standard, fingerjabbing call for a choice between “sending a new spirit to Sacramento” or “recycling Reaganism.” The speech is very polished now, from a man who could barely speak without notes one year ago.
He finishes amidst applause, shouts, waving balloons, then remembers he is to introduce also Bill Norris, candidate for attorney general, the one Democrat on the state ticket who is fated to lose. Norris tries to get rolling before the crowd fades away and is shouting something about “the dawn of a new age” when Brown interrupts and seizes the microphone to say, “Wait a minute about this new age, now, there are limits on what can be done, this is still the Age of Aquarius. . .”
Many in the crowds today are Chicanos, waving their Huelga flags, cheering this young ex-seminarian who once walked with Chavez, whose father, the former governor Pat Brown, they remember fondly, and whom they seem ready to accept as a son. Especially in Fresno, heart of the San Joaquin Valley, where the campaign comes to its end in the chilly afternoon. Many are old, with sad wrinkled faces of hope, throwing the candidate their fists and reaching for his hand. “This valley can feed the world. It has the resources, the workers, the capital, all it lacks is the political will, the spirit, the determination.” The scene recalls Bobby Kennedy.
Jerry Brown: The Mystic and the Machine, Page 1 of 9