Ah, Willie Brown. In the words of the great country standard, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?
I suppose it’s kind of petty of me to complain. I live in one of the great magic places on the planet, and if we have to suffer the intrusive presence of the sort of public personage who makes Donald Trump look dignified, that’s a rather small price to pay.
Plus, I can always stop reading the newspaper and watching television, and given the fare available with each of these I’m likely to be better off. Still...
I remember Willie from a long time back, the early sixties, in fact, when he and the notorious Burton brothers ran the statewide Young Democrats out of San Francisco and my friends and I tagged along as the Marin County contingent. We learned plenty, watching those guys operate, and it was a pleasure. They were good.
I once saw Willie raise cash from a large audience of party faithful by calling on people by name and turning them upside down until all the money fell out. It was the most impressive fund-raising evening I’ve ever witnessed.
In the early eighties, I’d just opened a law office when the phone rang from Willie’s chief of staff: the Speaker wanted me to run for the Assembly again and could send a quarter of a million smackers my way to smooth the road to Sacramento. I had to turn him down for a variety of sound reasons, but I retain a fondness for the generous offer.
I do not have a great ideological beef here. There are, as many have noted, lots worse guys running around. True, Willie’s great causes have morphed over time from the poor and dispossessed to the rich and possessed, but he’s got expensive tastes in clothes, cars, and female companions and its takes a whopping bank account for that sort of frivolity.
I’d prang the sucker for peddling his talent to the highest bidders except that these days even that doesn’t raise anybody’s hackles. Jesse Colin Young’s recording of Chet Powers’ “Get Together” is being used to sell disposable diapers, John Lennon’s work is promoting telephones and PDAs, and Bob Dylan has turned his catalogue over to, well, evidently every commercial enterprise he once made fun of. I suppose I’d sell out, too, but nobody’s offered me enough.
No, Willie’s become unbearable because he cannot permit his public persona to fade away. He’s doing sports commentary for Comcast, God help us. He shows up everywhere, invited or not. And he writes a Chronicle column called, swear to God, “Willie’s World.”
In “Willie’s World” everything is, naturally, about Willie. In Sunday’s column, he led with the observation that Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Prize for one thing only: being black. Then he wrote:
“I expect an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer will all follow, and all will be equally deserved. The Nobel is great news for Obama and for America, but bad news for the Rev. Al (Sharpton), Jesse (Jackson), and me, as the prize committees have now met their quota.”
Whew. Willie, I can smell it from here.
When somebody gets famous, especially over a long journey, there is the risk that he or she will begin to leak resentment. Note that Sharpton and Jackson, both black, both ministers, ran for President. Brown never ran, but he was Assembly Speaker of California and Mayor of San Francisco. The presidency certainly ran through his mind once or twice.
Willie is still running for something, for the confirmation that he is important. How sad that a man this talented and carrying undoubted past accomplishments now so publicly bemoans his falling status and so reflexively grasps at whatever flies by. The world is in some sense no longer Willie’s, and he is afraid he will disappear.
Hey, Willie, I share your pain. We’re hitting the last decades, you and I, too old to be king no matter how deserving and increasingly aware of our own mortality. We had aspirations, and then shit happened. Someone in your circumstance, you might wonder whether anyone really loved you or it was only the power and your ability to command it. That’s a bad thought at three a.m., no matter how much your wardrobe cost.
Recently, Bay Area Democrats held a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in the City. If you live out here, or are onto the politics of Governor Schwarzenegger, you know there are extreme tensions in state government. California, as most others, is facing budgetary holes it can’t fill without either increasing taxes or gutting programs.
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has refused to sign any legislation whatever –– on any subject –– until Democrats give him what he wants on a water bill. Really. If you want to know why a governor would freeze the entire state government over water, see “Chinatown” again. He ‘unfroze’ himself only today, but hadn’t at the time of the gathering at the Fairmont, and anyway extortion doesn’t sit well with some people.
Into the Democratic dinner, the aforementioned Willie Brown ‘introduced’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was and is the equivalent of bringing Dick Cheney to a meeting of the ACLU steering committee. You can imagine what then transpired.
But in “Willie’s World,” the discourtesy with which the Governor was received (there was considerable booing, and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano invited him to “kiss my gay ass”) was equivalent to the interruption of President Obama’s State of the Union address by whacko Joe Wilson. Seriously.
Then he writes, “After the dinner I went to the bar and got a tap on the shoulder. It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed... The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, ‘Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?’”
A better question would be, what are all those crazies doing with Willie Brown?
My guess is that Willie never developed any healthy hobbies. This has left him bored now that the power has passed, and desperate to keep his dick swinging. That he has been thereby rendered easy pickings for a marginally-clever manipulator like Arnold Schwarzenegger has not dawned on him.
Of course, in the grander scheme of things, we ought to share the responsibility for this parody of Willie Brown. For reasons likely discovered by opening up the... uh... darker psychology of the modern American, we shower ridiculous praise on celebrities; and the celebrities nearly always thereupon turn into false gods, worthy only in delusion, and in the approval of total strangers.
