…nor shall I ever.
As a yute, I was a political junkie of the highest water. When that Cable TV came to our town I clicked right past MTV and Madonna to C-SPAN and stayed there, with occasional digressions. I was a Joe Biden supporter in 1987, before anybody on the West Coast knew who he was.
Then, after years of volunteering on political campaigns, I interned in Sacramento two decades ago and saw what the reality of holding office was like. You think the revelations of the Leland Yee indictment (which you really should read) are movie-script-worthy? Child, that mode of operation is near-universal in California politics behind closed doors. Not gunrunning necessarily, but general casual disregard of the law, ethics, morals, etc. in the pursuit of funds is de rigueur. Cured me of thoughts of running for office myself, or being remotely involved in that world, forever.
[Of course, lawbreaking is near-universal in much of the Cali business world, too, but that’s more along the lines of what Og rather naively claims ain’t here yet. Sorry pal, it is.]
The whole Chinese-Gangs and Gun-running murder-for-hire thing is just absolutely over-the-top spectacular! My legs are weak from doing the Happy Dance.
Around 1990-ish, I actually started paying attention to California politics, as opposed to what one faction or another told me about California politics.
I quickly came to the conclusion that the Democratic Party was irredeemably corrupt, and the Republican Party was plain useless (being happy to accept a token number of seats in the legislature and play the role of designated scapegoat). The Libertarian Party had no prospects of accomplishing anything, and the other little parties were just various flavors of special-interest radical authoritarians.
Now that we have total one-party rule, and changes to the election system that inexplicably have the effect of reinforcing this… and the city where I’ve lived the past 20-some years is being rapidly transformed into a dense-pack metropolis… well, it’s past time to unwind my affairs here and emigrate to America in search of greener pastures.