California Uber Alles Over Again

"I am governor Jerry Brown,
My aura smiles
and never frowns,"
- So spake the prophet Jello way back in the late twentieth century. How could he have known, so many years ago, that we would be under the hippie thumb of the Moonbeam? Perhaps he lived through Brown 1.0. Is the Golden State ready to return to the past? The past that includes our most recent chief executive who swept into office on a wave of Twisted Sister and Jay Leno. Why not return to the kinder, gentler ways of that bygone era?
Governor Schwarzenegger, whose very name and title sound like a punch-line to a joke that was made back in 1980, is preparing to leave office after seven years of a ride that has been every bit as bumpy as Big Thunder Mountain. After he threw Gray Davis under the bus, he announced upon assuming the office that he would not simply think outside the box, but he would "blow the boxes up." This was met with cheers oddly reminiscent of those heard in darkened theaters when Conan the Barbarian is asked what is best in life.
It turns out that Arnold was secretly a Greenie. While the rest of his party were hiding their heads under the global warming bushel, he was pushing for more regulation and tougher restrictions on greenhouse gasses. Not exactly what one might expect from a futuristic killing machine, but he's never been one to be type-cast. As it turns out, he would have made a very good Democrat, unable in his seven years to stem the tide of the recession that saw him trying to reform health care and a deficit that is expected to balloon to twenty-eight billion dollars over the next eighteen months. It turns out to be pretty expensive to blow up those boxes.
And now we await the magic that former and future Governor Brown will bring to the condo just a few blocks from the Capitol in Sacramento. If age becomes a factor and he's looking for some of that free-thinking idealism, that young punk Gavin Newsom is just down the hall. I wonder why Jello Biafra didn't warn us about him.