Send in the California clowns

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have guessed that California’s recall campaign was financed not by Darrell Issa but by Jay Leno and David Letterman, with contributions from Dennis Miller and Bill Maher. They feed on this stuff.

The lineup of candidates who want to replace Gray Davis is food for laughter across the land, even in cultural outposts like Jasper, Ind., where they consider California a kind of nuthouse to begin with. Now we are busily proving that’s true by allowing the outpatients an opportunity to take over the state.

I tried to explain our situation logically to visiting acquaintances from Jasper, a town of 11,000 somber souls on the Patoka River, just south of Hayville. I am told it’s a no-nonsense kind of place populated mostly by German Catholics, and that one of their favorite foods is fried pickles, which gives you some idea of what we’re dealing with.

David and Jolee Moffett were the Jasper visitors and, naturally, wanted to talk about the recall election. It’s all that anyone wants to talk about. Out-of-state acquaintances, choking with laughter, call to offer small change to help offset the $66 million the election will cost the Alloy State, formerly the Golden State. Friends from Oregon want to know if Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt will be furnishing naked dancers at the polling booths Oct. 7 to encourage voting. My sister Emily telephoned from Oakland to say she was praying for California, but I think it’s too late.

I met the Moffetts when they began e-mailing me some time ago and wondered if they could meet me when they came to L.A. for a visit. I chose a deli as the meeting place on the off chance that it would be noisy enough to mask any raucous laughter on their part when we began discussing the election. They were politely skirting the subject, the way courteous people avoid staring at a pimple on your nose, when a guy walked by wearing a T-shirt that said “Free Davis,” and off we went.

Both David and Jolee began by wondering aloud why so many nuts seem to come from L.A. I have been asked that many times. I say that it’s the effect of too much sun on bare heads and cite a fictional article in the New England Journal of Medicine about gamma rays and brain cells. I can lie like a politician if I have to. “It’s all kind of creepy if you ask me,” Jolee said.

She explained that while the Jasper Herald has carried stories on California’s travails, most of the people in town don’t care much about what’s making us shrink with humiliation and mortification and all the other ations in the Alloy State. They’re too busy eating fried pickles.

I took notes on a napkin and then spilled coffee on it, so I can’t quote anyone directly anymore, but I think it was David who brought up the fact that none of the major candidates speaks good English. He was talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arianna Huffington and Cruz Bustamante, all of whom have accents. I explained that there was never any good reason before now to understand what they were saying since one was a monosyllabic action hero, one a newspaper columnist who writes without an accent and one a lieutenant governor, whom no one listens to anyhow.

One of the Moffetts, whose name is smeared under a coffee stain that looks exactly like a Rorschach blot (and faintly like my mother, come to think of it), said, “You mean what they say doesn’t matter?” I said, “Exactly. Only among people in certain vocations, like waiters and professional hit men, is clarity required. Those who dabble in politics don’t have to be understood, since they don’t mean what they say anyhow.”

At one point Jolee asked, almost rhetorically, “Why not Arnold?” Other than the fact that’s he’s a right-wing, body-obsessed, intellectually limited actor, I couldn’t give her a good reason. I mean, we elected Ronald Reagan and George Murphy, so why not Schwarzenegger? “What a circus,” one of the Moffetts remarked from under the coffee stain.

While it may not be the greatest show on Earth, we do have the mental equivalent of monkeys, elephants, horses (certain parts of them, anyhow), donkeys and clowns in the race for the Sacramento statehouse. Unfortunately, though, while it may be a lot of fun now, we’re the ones who are eventually going to have to clean up after the elephants.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.