Forget Denmark; Things Are Rotten Closer to Home

June gloom again.

Perfect.

The morning after an election that was glum and grim and a touch toxic, the weather should suit the moment.

Today you have the advantage of me. The vagaries of paper and ink and presses required that I write this column even before the polls closed last night. So if you’ve gotten this far into the paper, you’ve already seen the headlines and you’re one up on me; you know where matters stand, perhaps even who won.

Who won--that’s some phrase, when you think about it. Election as sport. Democracy clocked at the finish line. George Will in a checked suit, handicapping the race. If the morning after means not having to retrieve tri-fold propaganda of venom and marshmallow from my mailbox for another couple of years, maybe I won.

The red, white and blue oval sticker I got on Tuesday as my gold star for voting in Los Angeles’ election assures me “one vote counts.”

A noble sentiment, that. I’d like to share it with the black voters of Florida, where the U.S. Civil Rights Commission has just concluded after six months of investigation that “injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency” stole the power of the vote from one in five African Americans, as certainly as if their ballots had been boxed up and trucked off into the Everglades.

Every election season, much volunteer labor and goodwill and good citizenship goes into nudging eligible voters to become registered voters and registered voters to become actual voters. The language of persuasion is stirringly Jeffersonian, high-flown and high-minded.

But then come the candidates, and the forced-march, last-man-standing campaigns, and some lowered center of gravity keeps dragging them to ground, to the mud. And the mailers and the TV spots and the radio bites are a black hole, sucking in an unconscionable 13 million dollars spent between the two mayoral candidates alone--a buck and some pennies for every child in day care in the entire country.

And then, when the money and the adrenaline and the gripping-and-grinning are all spent, we awake on a morning like this, after we’ve see-sawed between the Santa Claus promises and the boogeyman threats. And nothing is different, or is likely to be. The potholes have not been magically filled, nor has the city come to an ominous stop. The traffic lights still pulse green-yellow-red, and the trash trucks still grind along, gathering up the campaign mailers that are now only so many cubic yards in the landfill that was so lately the topic of politicians’ dispute.

What else did politicians do on Tuesday, while we were voting on politicians?

The L.A. City Council swapped one eyesore of a deal for another, voting tentatively to end a half-century ban on freeway billboards to get rid of 15 billboards on city streets for every one raised up along the freeway.

The U.S. Senate made mollifying noises as control of what its members like to call “the greatest deliberative body in the world” passed from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, a demigod to environmentalists, is taking the paycheck of wannabe builders of 3,050 houses on the serene and rural land of the Ahmanson Ranch in Ventura County.

The state Senate legalized pet ferrets and ordered warnings put on condoms.

How odd that a politician wages war to the knife to get elected into government, with the fire and vehemence of a revolutionary, and when he wins, he runs it with the ti-

midity of an insurance underwriter.

We--human beings--tell stories. We like stories. In the absence of them, we make them up.

This mayor’s race was about stories, Antonio Villaraigosa’s story against Jim Hahn’s story, the street-scrapping kid against the boy who learned politics from the cradle.

There were other stories spun in this election, fathers’ stories: the drug-dealer’s father who asked politicians to help his son get out of prison, and in doing so they soiled their reputations with the drug-dealer’s dirt . . . a father who governed for 40 years and brought up his son to follow, a son who at times seemed to exist only as his father’s reflection.

If Shakespeare had told the story of this election, he could have used the prince’s last speech from “Romeo and Juliet”:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,

The sun for sorrow will not show his head . . .

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Jim and Antonio.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.