One Guru’s Interpretation: Hot and Cold Running Government : Election ‘94: Think of it as a course correction before the boat tipped portward.

After the Republican landslide Nov. 8, I climbed Mt. Wilson to visit my guru, hoping to find out what it all means. My guru calls himself Avie (pronounced like A/V, as in audio/visual), and he lives like a monk in an unmarked control booth up there where all the Los Angeles television stations have their broadcast antennas.

“Avie,” I gasped (a little winded by the climb), “What’s it all mean?”

The bearded little man turned his large dark eyes upon me, a trifle annoyed, it seemed to me, to be interrupted in his meditation over what looked like a rerun of “Gilligan’s Island” on the KTLA monitor on the wall.

“What does what mean?”

“The election results,” I said. “The country’s sudden lurch to the Republican side of the aisle.”

“Left foot, right foot,” uttered my guru. “Left foot, right foot.

“All cultures advance by swinging from side to side off their center of gravity, just the way a two-legged creature walks.”

“But,” I pursued, “isn’t there any hope of sticking with a single path of wisdom?”

“Look at your brain,” said Avie, doing the typical guru thing by asking the impossible. “Your brain has two hemispheres, and from them you look at the world from two different sides. Every system that humans make re-creates that same two-sided pattern.”

“It does?”

“Yes. How many political parties do you have?”

“Well, two, basically but . . . “

Avie cut me off. “How many chambers in Congress?”

“Two, but I don’t see . . . “

“How many teams compete in a football or basketball or baseball game, or how many opponents in a tennis match?”

“Two, but I still don’t see what all that has to do with why the voters abandoned the Democratic Party and gave the Republicans a majority in both houses for the first time in half a century.”

“Because you can’t hop as far on one foot as you can stride by swinging from one foot to the other,” said Avie, cloaking himself in that guru-speak again.

“Look,” I said, “my feet are tired. Could we try another metaphor?”

“OK,” he said. “How many different kinds of water come into your sink?”

“Well, two, hot and cold.”

“Yes! But how many kinds of water come into your house?”

This took a second’s thought. “Just the cold water. The hot water gets made by the heater in the garage.”

“These are the two ways. The two ways of your brain, the two ways of the political system everywhere: the individual and the group. The cold water and the hot.

“To use your language,” Avie went on, “the Democrats believe in the cold water system: a centralized system that delivers to everybody. The Republicans believe in the hot water system: everyone should heat his or her own water.”

“But which one is right?” I demanded.

“Don’t you see?” said my guru. “They’re both right. It makes sense to have a centralized cold-water system, because you can’t have a well under every house in every town. And it makes sense to have decentralized water heating, so you don’t lose all that heat moving the hot water from place to place.”

I was starting to get it, but something was still bothering me. “So you’re saying the Democrats are right for some things, because some things, like cold water, make sense as a collective activity. And the Republicans are right for other things, meaning the ones that make more sense if they’re handled by the individual. So when they’re arguing about health care, say, or gun control or even taxes, it’s really an argument about whether the individual’s rights or the society’s interests should come first. OK, OK, I see that.”

“So what’s bothering you?”

“Then why did we vote out nearly all the Democrats who were running, and vote in nearly all the Republicans? Shouldn’t we have tried to keep a balance, so that we’d get a proper mix of policies?” I was tempted to say something about needing to avoid the bathtub extremes of scalding or chilling ourselves, but I didn’t want to overdo Avie’s own metaphor.

“There are different ways to fill a tub,” he said. “You don’t have to run the hot and cold simultaneously,” he explained. “You can run the hot for a while, and then the cold, and then some more hot. That’s what’s going on now. And that’s why I said, ‘Left foot, right foot.’ You can’t go very far or very fast if you’re picking up both feet and putting them down at the same time. That’s called a potato sack race.” Here he started chuckling.

“Besides,” Avie said, “your President is still on the left even though you’ll have a Congress on the right. Remember how under Reagan and Bush, you had a Congress that balanced the right-wing White House policies with a left-wing correction? The system knows how to steer itself,” he said, turning back to his TVs. “Even a sailboat has to tack from side to side to get where it wants to go.”

Great. Another watery metaphor to ponder as I zigzagged my way down the mountain, back toward the hot tubs of the Los Angeles Basin.