Jerry and the Archimedean Lever

When I asked Jerry Brown why he’d worked so hard to become the mayor of Oakland, he replied: Because Oakland is the Archimedean lever that will shift America’s interest back to the cities.

I said, “What?”

He said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

Maybe he’s right, because guys like me are going to say hoo-boy, there he goes humming and zooming to the outer planets again and taking a whole city with him this time. Archimedean lever indeed.

One of the reasons I’ve always liked Oakland is that it pretended to be nothing more than a beer and burger kind of town and now it is going to be saddled with having to find out just who in the hell Archimedes is.

I asked my sister Emily, who still lives there, if she knew, and she thought he might have had a Greek restaurant once on East 14th Street. When I explained that he was an ancient mathematician, she said testily, “Big deal.”

I knew Archimedes was a mathematician because in one of the very few math classes I can remember, I had to write a paper on him. I remember Jerry Brown for a similar reason, because I had to write news stories about him.

For your information, the Archimedean Law of the Lever says, to quote Britannica, “Magnitudes balance at distances from the fulcrum in inverse ratio to their weights.”

What that means is that Jerry Brown is on the loose again, this time on the Planet Oakland.

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I have a proprietary interest in the Brown family. Before Jerry, I wrote about Pat and after Jerry, sort of, I wrote about Kathleen and now here comes Jerry again, riding his Archimedean pony into prominence.

I don’t know what his landslide election as the mayor of my hometown means to the world, but I have always believed that if anything bad is ever going to happen to humanity on a grand scale it will probably start in Oakland.

The Last Deadly Bacterial Epidemic that will wipe out the human race will fester in a bottle of Bud in a bar in Jack London Square and the comet that will devastate our species will plunge into Lake Merritt.

Atomic annihilation is also a serious concern. In Washington they worry not about nuclear proliferation in the Mideast, but what would happen if, shudder, Jerry Brown ever got the bomb. Probably the same thing that happened when Oakland got the Raiders. Nothing.

I asked Brown during a telephone conversation if his election as mayor meant he will be encouraged to once more seek the presidency? His answer was: (-------------). Right. Silence. I’m not sure what that means, but if he thinks I’m going to cross the country with him again in that damned VW bus with the psychedelic paint job, he’s out of his mind.

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A native San Franciscan who adopted L.A. as his new hometown, Brown moved to Oakland because, he said, the rent was cheaper. It was only later that he began to see the town as the city of the future.

“Oakland is small enough for the people to take control but big enough to make a difference,” he said. “On my mind is putting cities back on the national agenda.”

He intends to do that, Brown explained, by turning Oakland upside-down, which probably won’t make a lot of difference to a place that has always been slightly askew. Then he mentioned the Archimedean Lever as a way of accomplishing his aim. It has to do with theoretical mechanics and the equilibrium of rectilinear planes.

“He has dreams,” says Tom Quinn, who was the state’s smog czar under Brown. “He always has had. In ’76 he talked about the state launching its own satellite and everyone laughed. Now all the big companies want to do just that. He was 20 years ahead of his time.”

I remember Brown during a campaign appearance before a large group of wealthy Democrats in Maryland. Great words were anticipated that would ignite his bid to the White House. Instead he began talking about how his administration in Sacramento had lowered the amount of water required to flush a toilet.

A stunned silence followed, and then a matron standing next to me turned and said, “Is that young man serious?” I said, “Yes, ma’am, that young man is very serious.”

He still is. There’s just no Archimedean Theory to explain him.

Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com