Getting cosmic with Jerry Brown

This is a good interview with Oakland mayor and candidate for state attorney general:  The reincarnation of Jerry Brown: State's former governor just keeps on evolving San Francisco Chronicle 07/04/04 by Chronicle reporter Jonathan Curiel.

Curiel seems to have done some homework on Brown.  But he also seems to have missed a lot.  Despite Brown's well-known opposition to the death penalty as governor, he always had a reputation - and deservedly so - for giving a lot of attention to crime problems, which Curiel clearly missed.

Encountering Brown in person, though, he discovered that he can be quite a surprising guy. The final paragraphs give us a classic Jerry Brown moment:

If nothing else, Brown has learned that voters prefer candidates without obvious contradictions, even if real life is full of contradictions that test our assumptions. As governor in the 1970s, Brown said, "I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms."

Yet in 2004, upon hearing those words again from a San Francisco visitor, Brown says, "Those are the kind of things that get me in trouble if I say things like that. I don't speak like that anymore. Even though, going back to mystic philosophy, people talked about 'the coincidence of opposites.' 'Coincidentia opposintorum' in Latin. This goes back 800 years. Seeing contradiction is nothing unusual for anyone with more than a modicum of education."

As he finishes, Brown stares at the visitor who brought up Brown's '70s self. There is fire in Brown's eyes. It's hard to know whether he is angry, contemptuous or simply eager to correct the record.

It doesn't matter, really. What matters is that at age 66, Brown has lost none of the nerve or verve that marked his earlier incarnations. He's quick to speak his mind, and he'll interrupt if he has to get his point across. That's the only way Brown seems able to operate. In this way, he hasn't changed at all.

That expression in his eyes was probably a new inspiration striking him.  And I'm sure the "800 years" part wasn't just a number Jerry pulled out of the air.  If Curiel had asked the right questions, he might have gotten a description of how Western civilization in the 13th century entered a crisis in the relationship between individuals and the community which has not been resolved to this day.

Maybe in the next interview.