Photograph of the Day

Well, two of them actually. This for art's sake (via Magpie), and then This for the sake of art (via Chris Paul).

Happy Birthday, Mama.

Born this day, 13 September 1888, Minnie Ashworth Droddy, the first daughter of Amos Owen Ashworth and Mary Heard. She married Joseph William Droddy about 1905, I can't remember exactly. She had 8 children, 16 grandchildren, and after that I lose count. We buried her in 1986, but she never died. She lives in our hearts, our minds, our souls. She lives.

From Vietnam to Iraq

This is from Col. Mike Turner writing for Newsweek. Impeach Bush now. No, wait, that'll take too long. Let's just vote his ass out next year.

And from the Philadelphia Daily News, Twenty Questions about 9-11 to which I'd like to know the answers.

And to my friends and family that ignore the questions and continue to shill for our draft-dodging President, never mind me, but ask the questions aloud and answer them in your heart. If you acquiesce and refuse to even ask the questions, you become accomplices in this tragedy. Shame.

From Eric Alterman

It is posted here with a loud amen.

"It’s a solemn day. Everyone is a bit quieter today in New York. The sky is as crystal blue as it was two years ago, when al-Qaida blew a hole in my neighborhood and killed almost 3,000 of my neighbors. Since that time our unelected draft-dodging president has:

"1) Failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

"2) Failed to dismantle al-Qaida.

"3) Alienated the only countries that have had any success against al-Qaida.

"4) Ignored the connections between al-Qaida and Pakistan and al-Qaida and Saudi Arabia.

"5) Failed to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan.

"6) Failed to bring peace and security to Afghanistan.

"7) Failed to confront real security threats like vulnerable chemical and nuclear plants.

"8) Stretched our military so thin that we are once again unable to adequately react to emergencies.

"9) Occupied a country that offered no threat to the security of the United States.

"10) Passed the cost of that occupation on to my yet-to-be-conceived children.

"11) Absolved the richest Americans from financial responsibility for this hubris and folly.

"12) Made the poorest Americans once again pay the ultimate price for hubris and folly.

"13) Failed to support New York City and State when they needed the most help.

"14) Supported security efforts in Montana with more per-capita funding than either New York or California.

"15) Turned his back on the police officers and firefighters who saw their brothers and sisters run up the stairs of the Twin Towers as everyone else was running down.

"16) Lied repeatedly to the American people and the world about the state of risk and security."

Hey, Gray!
What did you learn today?

I missed the governor's part of the debate. The synopsis I heard and read sounded like an opera singer warming up: "me me me me me!" He's going to try to stay more in tune with us. What the fuck does that mean? What's he going to do about the fucking budget mess? A mess, I might ad, is his by virtue of the fact that he's the fucking governor. Yeah, Gray, remember that snide remark about the Legislature and the justices implementing your vision? Well, claim the budget as your own, asshole.

Can you tell I don't like Gray Davis? Okay, and as an additional disclaimer, Free Robert Rosencrantz, now!

What an asshole is our illustrious governor. Yet, reluctantly I am voting against the recall because those asshole Republicans cannot be allowed to win this fight. It's not that I want the Democrats to win, I just don't want the Republicans to win. They're dangerous.

Just in case the recall passes, I will vote for someone to complete Davis's term. Swartzenegger is a sad joke, swaggering around the state as a characature of himself, uttering movie lines as if he was Ronald Regan. Bustamante, taking money and opportunity as it presents itself, sees his opportunity for the big time. First thing he does is take $2 million from the casinos, just to send the message that everything will return to normal, only he'll be the one getting the big bucks. How cynical is that?

I liked Ueberroth the best. It's jobs! jobs! jobs! Fewer jobs, fewer taxes. It's going to take someone thinking outside the box. Sorry, Camejo, but you didn't tell me how you were going to convince the two political parties how to implement your revolution. Mrs. Huffington sounded a bit tinny, don't you think? McClintock didn't convince me that he wanted anything to succeed other than no new taxes. If every kid in this state went hungry and was thrown out of school, McClintock would call it natural selection. I find myself fundamentally opposed to that concept. It is in the interest of society to maximize the contribution of its citizenry by enabling them to better themselves, read education, healthcare, affordable housing. The list is longer, but you get my drift.

Vote no on the recall and then for your conscience. Right now, I'm voting for this guy.

Pain

I was surfing through the blogosphere this afternoon, and decided to stop by and see what Holden Caulfield's Lover was up to. After the first paragraph I felt as though I had been hit in the chest, and the air knocked from my body. Earlier in the summer, Holden treated us to a candid account of a love affair with a young man whom he called "Hero." It became clear early on in the relationship that there was no place for it to go. Hero came from a place of need. There is never enough to fill that void. Given time, the person with the need can make it go away, but it's not easy, and this time, there wasn't enough time.

I feel bad for Holden, but he'll be okay. He has friends who care for him, and that's the best medicene I can think of right now.

Bay Area Rapid Transit

I depend on BART to get me to work daily, and occasionally I use it to get to other places in the San Francisco Bay Area for personal reasons. It works amazingly well. I live about a mile and a half from the MacArthur BART station which is walking distance. I have resented the way MacArthur station has been maintained from the beginning of my experience with it.

This is what it looks like.

Seen Mars yet?

You do know that it's going to be so close that you can almost reach out and touch it? That close. You do have to stay up till midnight, but it's a once in a 60,000 year sight, so plan on staying up on Thursday and finding some dark sky. Here's a list of places to see the Angry Red Planet.

There's this guy over on a blog called Ross Judson: Sprial Dive. He's a good read. He wrote this today and I happen to agree with him.

"The Right Hates America"

"They hate the prospect that gay people might get married. They hate dissent. They hate any form of criticism of their ruling party. They hate the separation between church and state. They hate a woman's right to choose. They hate being forced to choose between a clean environment and corporate welfare. They hate the prospect of losing their guns. They hate being asked to sacrifice anything past racism has given them. They hate the idea that market forces might not be uber alles, because that invalidates a great deal. They hate people who demand some form of proof that their policies work, people who don't share their faith. They hate people who commit crimes but also hate people who don't commit them, by supporting the death penalty for innocent people. They hate people who are committed to principals, instead of probability-driven lives (as in, I probably won't get falsely arrested and, well, if someone does, they probably did something else wrong, or it's just their tough luck)." -Something to Think About ...

Remembering

My maternal grandmother, Minnie Ashworth Droddy, did not tell stories as much as she "remembered." Living with her all of her life was her eldest daughter, Elsie, who was simple. I want to remember Elsie also, but that's for another story. My grandmother and Elsie could remember the most incredible details of their lives. Because mostly what they remembered occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, I sometimes feel as though I have one foot in this century and the other foot in that one. Only now, I have a third century to factor into the analogy, and I'm out of feet, so I'm going to drop it for right now.

Mama and Elsie remembered life when it was simple. Poor, but simple. Between them they could recount the genealogy of individuals I considered total strangers at the time of meeting. They could remember the intricacies of kinship. They didn't always remember things in the same way, and they didn't always end the subsequent argument in agreement.

As a child, I sat through these regressions and discussions and arguments, sometimes paying attention, more often not. I cannot remember the details. I told my sister I was willing to be hypnotized so that someone could get me to channel either my grandmother or my aunt Elsie because you know in the recesses of my mind there are some delicious stories.

Even without channeling or hypnosis, I think the details of their remembering color my perception of life today, and do absolutely lend detail to my ability to imagine our stories. I don't remember as much as I tell stories, richly detailed with vague recollections of my grandmother and aunt fussing with each other about the specific details.

Passing


After the Civil War, the dominant White society lost its impetus to keep expanding the definition of Black. Since we had never identified ourselves with Blacks, we continued to identify ourselves as White. Another generation and the core was not quite as dark as the generation before it, and the edges were lighter still. By the time of the birth of my grandmother in 1888, the only place the core remained dark were in the tiny homelands: DeQuincy, Starks, Lunita, Singer, DeRidder; places like that. Those Ashworths and Perkins and Basses and Hoosiers and Clarks and Johnsons living on the perimeter, now thought of themselves as White without having to worry about fighting about it. By 1890 and 1900, they were no longer being listed as Mulatto on the census. When communities became wealthy enough to have schools, Redbones went to White schools. Race was no longer a legal issue. From now on, the game would be played by different rules.

The Civil War

Since almost all of my first 17 years of education were in the South, I was never taught anything that resembled reality regarding the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War of 1845, or the Civil War. Nothing. Nada. Zip. I was taught mythology as history. There was always a right and wrong side, and we were always right. There's something to be said for creating mythologies. Damn, sometimes I hate how reality has to devastate mythology. The way it happens is personal.

For me, I discovered that I probably wasn't descended from plantation folks, but rather from folks that the plantation folks would just as soon have turned into Black slaves. Damn, but that makes it personal.

Then once you start looking at the details, you notice other aberations. For instance, my great-grandfather (mother's father) and his brother were both charged with desertion from the Confederate forces. The ggguncle, was also charged with being a "copperhead." After becoming aware of that fact, I read where they were not alone in their reactions and behavior from the other "crackers" of central Louisiana.

Not all of the Ashworths that could serve in the war, did. Quite a few managed to avoid it. Quite a few others did serve. Whether they were drafted or volunteered is one of those details still hidden to history. In the mythology of Southern history, there isn't even a mention of a draft, except in reference to the North, where it was always coupled with a footnote remembering the fact that one could buy their way out. Well, let me tell you, friends and neighbors, just like the marines drafted boys from our families during Vietnam, the South drafted our boys to fight for slavery.

If I sound bitter about this, it's because I am. In the bloody South, if you owned, or your family owned, more than 100 slaves, you were exempt from service because it just wouldn't be prudent to leave all those women folk alone with all those slaves. Since my families, for the most part, never owned slaves, they had to go be cannon fodder for the rich kids. Sort of like George W. Bush, our beloved president, did in Vietnam. He stayed home out of harms way. Hasn't stopped him from sending other boys to harms way, has it.

But I digress. I can only imagine how the Ashworth cousins dealt with the Civil War. Don Marler, in his recently published book, The Louisiana Redbones, says that we are a violent culture. Violent rather than warlike. Individuals are violent, cultures are warlike. I believe that we were a group of outcasts as opposed to a culturally defined group, or as my grandpa mght have said, "just because we're all outlaws doesn't mean we belong to the same gang." Given another hundred years, we might have become a more distinct subculture, but since we never thought of ourselves as anything but White, we kept assimilating. Our core might have been dark, but our edges kept getting Whiter and Whiter.

To the extended Ashworth families, the darker core seemed to have avoided the war, and those along the edges were more likely to have participated.

Fair and Balanced

Fox News is suing Al Franken for appropriating the words "fair and balanced" which Fox says they own. How the fuck does one own words of common usage? And of all of the news organizations, Fox is the least fair and the least balanced. They shill for the Bush administration. They are offensive to everyone with any taste.

They are not the first. The widow of one of the men killed while mythologicalling slaying the dragon and saving the kingdom wanted to trademark the phrase "Let's Roll."

McDonalds owns the phrase "Mc." Pity the small restauranteur whose name is McDonald.

The Left side of the blogosphere is taking up this cause. Probably for the wrong reasons, but it matters not to me why you hate my enemy as long as you hate my enemy. Today we are friends because we have the same enemy.

Redbones

I'm going to start refering to the different generations of Ashworths and their cousins simply using the word "cousins" instead of the Ashworths, their cousins, and their friends. There are some who would call this group of cousins and friends "Redbones." I prefer the word cousins because I'm not sure when people started calling us Redbones. And since even to this day it is considered an offense for someone not a Redbone or not your cousin to call you one. I'm pretty sure we just called ourselves White. There is no record of being racially limited while Texas was a Mexican state. They were accepted by their neighbors in Texas as equals. It was only after the Southerners formed a government of anglos did the racial issue arise, and then almost immediately. Cousins were not allowed to join the Texian militia. This was the beginning.

Sam Ashworth

In the summer of 1856, tensions between the Ashworths and those Whites who felt the Ashworths should be eliminated came to a head when an Ashworth was accused of stealing hogs by a White man. The young man's cousin, Sam Ashworth, when getting the young man out of jail, had an exchange of words with a White man. Family tradition says the man, by the name of Deputy, called Sam a "hog stealin' nigger." Sam called him out, probably promising to whip his sorry ass right there on the spot in front of God and neighbor. Deputy declined, but went to the justice of the peace and swore a warrant out for Sam for "talking sass to a White man." Sam had to appear in court on the charge. First it had to be proved that Sam was indeed a non-White. The evidence consisted of White people getting on the stand and saying they knew Sam to have some Black blood in him somewhere in his distant genealogy. That was it. Sam was found guilty and sentenced to be publicly whipped.

Sam was allowed to escape from jail by the sheriff who himself was allied more with the Ashworths than the White parties. Sam went off down the swamp and stayed with relatives. Well, story goes, a bunch of the boys, first cousins for the most part, got drunk and Sam decided he was going to have a little instant justice for himself. He and his first cousin, Jack Bunch, took their guns and put out in a pirogue on Cow Bayou looking for the man who started the whole ruckus, Deputy.

He came along soon enough and Sam and Jack intercepted him. I imagine Sam told the s.o.b. to get right with God, and then shot him. The other man in the boat escaped and went back to town with a story about being ambushed by Sam Ashworth and Jack Bunch. A mob formed demanding the sheriff arrest the two and bring them back to town for hanging. The sheriff dutifully went out looking for Sam and Jack, staying out several days before coming back in saying he couldn't find hide nor hair of them, and that they must of fled the state back over to the Neutral territory which was now a part of Louisiana, but still another jurisdiction.

The mob decided to go out on their own and look for Sam and Jack. They went to the homes of other Ashworths and their cousins and proceeded to burn their homes and barns. The Ashworths and their cousins formed their own posse and burned a few barns of their own. After a few weeks of this, the state sent in its authority whether by Rangers or militia is uncertain, but the State's authority came down against the Ashworths who were forced to flee Texas.

Jack and Sam had taken refuge, not in the Neutral Territory, but San Antonio where Jack was recognized and arrested. He was brought back to Beaumont where he was tried and hanged. Sam was never captured. He later died serving in the Army of the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. (I can't remember right now. I'll come back later and fill in the blanks.)

About Race

Someone once said to me when I protested being considered African-American that it was no shame being Black. I quickly responded, "It's no honor either, especially if you're not."

I don't mind that history says I descend from Texas' most famous Black family. What I object to was that all it took to convict us of being Black in the early 1800s was an accusation. Not that we were afforded the opportunity to defend against the accusation, but how does one disprove something as nefarious as the race of your great-grandparents? That was then and this is now, right? Wrong. Now, 150 to 200 years later, contemporary historians are validating the racist, kangaroo courts of the early 19th century by saying yes, indeed, we were Black, without the addition of a single piece of evidence. That's what bugs me the most about this argument.

Texas, continued

Colored Outside the Lines

When Texas was a part of Mexico, the Ashworths were no different from their American neighbors. They obtained land, managed herds of cattle and hogs, and lived in relative peace with their neighbors. Some of their neighbors may have considered them "Not White," but few mentioned it to their face. Racism as a state institution may have been coming into being, but its enforcement required one to be able to shoot and fight, and few challenged the manpower of the Ashworths and their allied families or their willingness to fight to protect what was theirs. My point being, no one called us "niggers" to our face.

But racism in the South was more than just personal animosity, it was enforced by the state. In the 25 years between independence from Mexico and the start of the Civil War, the Ashworths and their allied families fought the attempts by the state to marginalize them. When William Ashworth and Diedre Gallier were charged with cohabitating (their marriage not recognized by the state of Texas), they took their case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, only to lose. There were 15 indictments returned against the Ashworth family for various offences involving their marriage to Whites. Often they just paid the fines and went on with their lives. More often, they looked to their cousins for spouses. I'm not sure where the line was with cousins, historically, but growing up in East Texas, marriage between first cousins and their offspring were off limits, and between second cousins it was discouraged. My aunt married a second cousin and she and her husband were shunned for the first several years. On the other hand, third cousins were fair game.

When wronged by neighbors, the Ashworths sued; and their neighbors sued them. They were in all respects like their neighbors, just darker. By the laws of the Republic of Texas and subsequently by the State of Texas, people considered non-White were not allowed to own property. The Ashworths owned property; owned slaves, too. We have no record of any of the Ashworths or their allied families voting or running for office. I'm not even sure they could read. They did form churches, White churches.

My point here is not to claim that we didn't have Black blood. Probably we did. Don't know for sure. My question to present day historians, is why do you paint us today with the same racist brush you used 150 years ago?

Here's a group of people, white identified, having few or none of the racial markers characteristic of Blacks, but marginalized by the dominant society with only the accusation of being mixed blood.



MORE TO COME

Hillbillyisms

My blog cousin, Sara, over at Hillbilly Sophisticate is collecting a list of words which are pronounced uniquely by our hillbilly cultures. (And if you don't think East Texas is populated by hillbillies, just go visit and listen to 'em sometimes.) Here are some East Texas, Westen Louisiana specialties:

Hisn. His
Hern. Hers
Pert near. Close
Batry. Battery
Clum. climbed
Cyore. To cure
Puore. Pure
Pizzen. Poison

We got a bunch more, but this this is Sara's project. I'm jist tossin' in a few of iron.

Texas

The widow of my father's oldest brother lives on the Sabine River where Nichols Creek empties into it. Her name is Winnie Harden Bridges and she is now 81 years old. I call her Aunt Melvin and have since I was 4. I have no idea why, but I must have been persistent enough for it to stick, and now my siblings and my mother also call her Melvin.

Aunt Melvin is a Roman Catholic. It's an important part of how she sees herself, the world, and everything in between. I think my father was infatuated with her from the first time he met her, shortly before World War II. When he got back from the war, he lived with his oldest brother, Cliff and his new wife, Winnie.

Prior to his being killed in December 1952, my father converted to Catholicism and had all of us children baptised Catholic as well. I can't remember if my mother converted at this time, and neither can she. I've asked. After the death of my father, I lived with my maternal grandmother in East Texas who was a Pentecostal. I cannot bring myself to use the term "holy roller" because it fails to reflect the dignity my grandmother brought to her simple faith.

My grandmother was appalled at the idea that any of her family could embrace Catholicism. Thus began the competition between my Aunt Melvin and my grandmother for my soul which resulted in my being very conflicted about religion from the time I knew there were different churches until I became a Zen Buddhist Jewish Pentecostal Episcopalian several years ago. Suddenly, it all made sense, but that's another story saved for another time.


Anyways, I was talking to my Aunt Melvin and she asks in her simple Bayou drawl, "Raymond, are you going to move back here after you retire?"

"Sugah," says I, "it's hot as hell there most of the time, except when it's freezing. You have every variety of poisonous snake found in North America: rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes and water mocassins. You have not only black widow spiders in abundance, but you also have the deadly brown recluse, and while not deadly, the tarantula is also plentiful. In late summer you have what we called "fuck bugs" that turn the sky black and ruin the finish on your car. Now the are mosquitos, always fierce and abundant, are spreading the West Nile virus. I don't know about you, but I find it disconcerting to see birds dropping dead around you, y'know? Oh, and the fire ants. Deadly fuckers. And wasps. And probably killer bees. And the worsest of them all, the state is populated in large part by redneck assholes. Who else but Texans could be taken in by an upper class, Connecticutt yankee pretending to be a Texan pretending to give a fuck about common people?

But my story is about Texas. The first record of any of my ancestors getting to Texas was a census taken by a Spanish commandante at a camp near what is now Liberty, Texas in 1807. The ancestors from my mother's mother's family, John Aaron Drake, his wife Chastity, and several of their children were among the first American settlers to make it into Texas. They had been in Louisiana for 20 years prior to the excursion into Texas. They went back to Louisiana the following year.

In the early 1830s, the next two branches of my family would enter Texas. One to the north to San Augustine, the other to southeast Texas, to what is now Jefferson and Orange counties.

The part that always amazes me is that they came, they liked the place and they stayed. Well, I don't know how much they liked the place, but they did stay. They made history, in that their story is the story of Texas. They were players, all of them.

My great-great-great-grandmother's brother, Alexander Horton, was Aide-de-Camp to General Sam Houston. His brother-in-law, my ggggrandfather, Colonel James Whitis Bulloch, a veteran of the war of 1812, led Texian volunteers who attacked and liberated Nacogdoches 4 years before the fall of the Alamo. This is my father's mother's mother's family.

My mother's mother's people, the Ashworths, fled South Carolina around 1803 to Louisiana. Fled being the operative word here. If I were to speculate as to their reason for abandoning South Carolina where my gggggrandfather, James Ashworth, had received a land grant from the English Crown in 1774, I'd probably guess it had something to do with James showing up in the record books as a Tory serving under British command during the American Revolution. Did you know there were over 100,000 Tory refugees who fled the Southern colonies alone following the American Revolution. That was by boat. Probably a lot more, like my family, just moved West. The new nation was not very forgiving to those who had opposed its quest for independence. There was a lot of revenge taking.

James Ashworth's problem was further complicated by the fact that he was a mixed blood, probably Indian and White, although family lore always claimed our swarthiness came from our "Portygee" roots and our Indian grandmother on the Perkins side of the family. I think the Indian Grandmother of our family mythology was Esther Perkins. In the stories of several of my kindred families, the Indian Grandmother is obviously one single character. In Richard Maxwell Brown's book, The South Carolina Regulators, James Ashwroth is described as dark and swarthy with black hair. It also goes on to say that he had a "t" branded in his hand for "breaking out of jail." Odd choice of letters, but I bet he preferred a simple "t" to "BOOJ."

James married Keziah Dial also of South Carolina. Family tradition says that Keziah was an Indian, but I discount this. That she was part Indian I'm pretty certain, but subtle evidence suggests that Keziah's family (who came to Louisiana with the Ashworths) were White identified. For example, Keziah's mother, Elizabeth Hill Dial, sued her sons for failing to support her after the death of their father. That was the action of someone who considered themselves White.

When the Ashworths left South Carolina, they were all White. By the time of the next census, 1810, over half had become "colored." In another 10 years, they were all "colored." My sister says they all just got darker from working in the fields. Good point, but there was something else going on as well.

In 1803, the South was beginning a downward spiral under the weight of racism and slavery. Slavery was not as heavily a race based system in the 18th century as it became in the 19th century. Despite the fact that its not taught in American history, there was a lot of enslavement of American Indians by the colonists. By 1800, this resulted in a lot of mixed blood populations. Indian and White. White and Black. Indian and Black. Indian and White and Black. The United States has the peculiar history of being about the only former European colony without a significant population of mestizos. You see, as slavery became more and more a Black thing, Southerners became busier and busier making all mixed bloods eligible for slavery by classifying anyone suspected of having Black blood, Black.

James Ashworth, having taken refuge in a Cherokee village in the northwestern part of the state, gathered his family up and moved to Louisiana. In total, about a dozen families joined James in the migration to Louisiana. They settled in Louisiana in an area called "the Neutral Zone." The Americans claimed Louisiana went as far as the Sabine. The Spanish who had just given Louisiana back to the French, claimed the Calcasieu River about 70 miles to the East of the Sabine as the border. The American and Spanish generals facing each other off decided between themselves to avoid war and just let the outlaws have the land between the rivers until it was worked out. The area quickly filled up with mixed-bloods and outlaws. I'm proud to count both amongst my ancestors.

By the early 1830s, these mixed bloods had coalesced into an identifiable subculture in the remote bayous of Louisiana. They had a reputation of being fierce and violent. Don Marler says this was to make them unattractive as candidates for slavery. They were also part of a larger western migration of small, isolated Indian groups and mixed blood groups moving west towards Texas. Word had gotten out that they were welcome in Texas. The Mexicans supposedly wanted a buffer to the Americans.

They were a formidable people: White identified, but not accepted as such by the dominant White culture. An Army of almost 200 men could be made up of first and second cousins. Probably for that reason, no one ever called the Ashworths or their cousins anything but White to their faces, in Texas and Louisiana, until after the Texas Revolution.

After Texas won its independence, it became a Southern nation and eventually state. Our old enemies from South Carolina were not in charge of the government. They immediately started their war against us, calling us "Niggers" and classifying us as Free Blacks. They denied us the bounty lands given to other Texans for their support in the Revolution, saying Blacks couldn't own property. We fought them in courts, we fought them with force. We could form a "posse" of 200 heavily armed first and second cousins in a relative short time.

In February 1839, Texas passed a law which gave mixed bloods now being called Free Blacks, two years to leave the republic, or risk being sold into slavery. By December, after petitions from the leading citizens of Jefferson County, the legislature passed the Ashworth Act, naming my family specifically as excepted from the harsh provisions of the act.

MORE TO COME.

Let the Circus Begin!

Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined the race for Replacement Governor in the event of the success of the recall against Gray Davis. He joins about one to two hundred others who think they have as good a shot as anyone else. I'm not writing Davis off just yet. As of right now, he gets to run against chaos, and that does give him an edge.

Schwarzenegger hasn't impressed me with an ability to run the state. Maybe if he'd stop being a caricature of himself I'd take him more seriously. He even ended his press conference with a movie line, "I'll be back." The last time we had a governor who thought being governor amounted to delivering old movie lines was Ronald Reagan who is generally considered to have been a disaster as governor. Maybe he was jealous of his actor-buddy, Jesse Ventura who gets to be called Governor Ventura for the rest of his life. I think he'll get bored too easily.

To all of my fellow Californians, let me remind you that you can have it both ways. Vote against the recall and then for whichever clown you like the most. After the election, Gray will go back to work, a little humbler for the experience, the Republicans will cower down for awhile, and stay out of our face while we try to fix our economy and budget woes.