As California's economy continues to languish and as its political dysfunction becomes more obvious — and more intolerable — one reaction has been nostalgia.
If only another Ronald Reagan would appear, those on the right sigh, California would once again be golden.
No, those on the left insist, what we really need is another Pat Brown, the last governor to make government work.
The latter lament has now taken cinematic form, a documentary titled "California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown," which is making the rounds of film festivals and special showings.
But is it history or merely propaganda?
The filmmakers, Hilary Armstrong and Sascha Rice, are Brown's granddaughters, the offspring of Kathleen Brown, who served briefly as California's state treasurer in the 1990s and ran unsuccessfully for governor, and nieces of the once and current governor, Jerry Brown.
"So if you're looking for a traditional objective documentary … this is not it," one of the sisters says in a voice-over for the film's trailer.
The trailer and accounts of the film's contents underscore that caveat. It is celebration of the man — and perhaps the myth that always surrounds a political figure — not an arms-length appraisal that tells us the bad as well as the good. And that's all right, as long as a viewer doesn't assume it's the latter.
Ironically, however, the "legacy" that the film recounts, especially Brown's abiding interest in building highways, water systems, college campuses and other forms of "infrastructure," as we now call it, has largely fallen out of favor in his own California Democratic Party.
The environmentalists who, along with unions, dominate the party see highways, dams and canals as growth- inducing, harmful to nature and belching cataclysmic greenhouse gases.
Son Jerry ran into that when he attempted to complete Pat Brown's beloved State Water Project three decades ago. He gained legislative passage of a major water conveyance, only to see it defeated at the polls by an odd-bedfellows alliance of farmers and environmental groups, and the latter remain largely opposed to his new push for water development.
Were Pat Brown governor today, he'd face the same hurdles. The changes within his own party merely symbolize the vast sociopolitical evolution in California that makes effective governance so difficult, and perhaps impossible.
Pat Brown's California, or even Ronald Reagan's, was a much less complex, much more cohesive society. And, one suspects, neither would be any more successful than their often hapless successors in navigating through the conflicting demands of voters and myriad cultural and economic factions in a governmental structure that rewards obstructionism.
There's nothing wrong with nostalgia, as long as we don't confuse it with reality.
THE SACRAMENTO BEE
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