August Kleinzahler

A few years ago a masseur I visited from time to time, a very able, very gay old German hippie said to me as I made ready to leave: ‘Don’t vait so long unless next time you come Schwarzenegger will be president and there’ll be tanks in zuh streets.’ Wolf, the masseur, has since retired and, as of the other day, so has Schwarzenegger, at least in his role as governor of California. I’m of at least two minds about his going, but I suspect I’ll miss him. He brought a particular glamour to the drab corridors of Sacramento, the sleepy capitol he commuted to by jet from Los Angeles as seldom as possible. I don’t blame him, really. Sacramento is a bit of a dump and the former governor is very LA: swept-back ’do, swept-back face, with that peculiar sheen the flesh gets when tugged in that direction; the big cigars and the shiny suits with the shoulders bloused out to accommodate his outsized pecs and lats and assorted ’ceps; the fleet of Humvees; the A-list social set, the Sunday Harley runs up the coast with James Cameron and the lads... Have you ever been to Sacramento?

The Australian Labor Party, and Australia itself, scored an own goal recently with an inconclusive general election and the imminent threat of a hung Parliament. Or so one might reasonably surmise, but the locals don't seem too terribly agitated about it, at least the Aussies I run across. The country is prospering, in a way that Britain and the US clearly are not: building cranes sweep across the skylines, shops and restaurants are jumping. The most recent economic forecast is bright. This could all change in a hurry should Chinese real estate go bust and/or there's a double-dip recession in the West, but at the moment the situation is looking ripper.

There are too many people on the planet, and that is why we are out there drilling at 5000 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. There are too many people, and it is not at all an acceptable thing to say so. The Left doesn’t like it, neither does the Right, in so far as those quaint terms are relevant in this context. And the Catholic Church really, really doesn’t like it. There are too many of them, to be sure, spitting betel juice and flipping tortillas all the live long day; but there are also too many of us, fussing with our handheld whatevers as we jostle one another amid the stalls of Camden Town or pour off the N-Judah streetcar at day’s end, down the block from me here in San Francisco, where a great deal of tortilla flipping goes on and, doubtless, the more than occasional instance of betel juice expectoration.