Take a peek at California’s underwear

THERE ARE three public libraries open in this town. One of them is named for the man who was born here, who put the Central Valley on the world’s literary map and a Nobel Prize around his neck -- John Steinbeck.

“Open,” however, is a term of art. Salinas is so hurting for money that for three or four days out of seven, each library must shut off the lights and hang out the “Closed” sign.

By the time you read this, the statewide ballot propositions will have flown or flopped. In Salinas, the struggling little city at the core of California’s Salad Bowl, they will have counted the votes on their own measure: a half-cent sales tax increase to rescue the libraries and other city services. If it failed, then come December, the public libraries in John Steinbeck’s hometown will close for good, 24/7.

It is here in Salinas, in all the Salinases throughout California -- towns whose services have been sucked dry and left to blow away, towns inhabited by the Joad generations, white and brown -- where this election should have been grounded.

Instead, Arnold Schwarzenegger dragged the news crews to the human ATMs in Washington and New York and force-marched us through a preposterous special election campaign on mostly ginned-up issues. A record quarter-billion dollars was collected furiously on both sides to outspend and outshout the other guy, dollars burned up in big wads, 30 seconds at a time, in the cold glow of the TV screen. Imagine the Salinas librarians, forlornly watching television last week as the political ads butted one up against the next, all the while knowing that the mere loose change from this campaign could have spared their libraries.

If Schwarzenegger’s pet ballot measures laid a collective egg, he should come here in sackcloth and ashes to repent for fiddling while libraries go into lockdown, and then he should ask for a clean slate and a fresh start. And if his measures won, all the more reason for him to do a mea culpa -- for frittering away voters’ short civic attention spans on grudge matches posing as ballot measures. He should be embarrassed to be the governor of a state where a city library named after John Steinbeck has to power down its computers and refer its patrons to the Kinko’s downtown.

If Schwarzenegger truly wants to be reelected -- and there are many signs that he does, including his evidently new, more serious hair color, which I call “statesman brown” -- he has to give up the screenplay speechifying and spend his time at a desk, not on a stage.

There’s a word that would never appear in one of his films, a word so big that if they print it on a campaign bumper sticker, it’d only fit on one of Schwarzenegger’s Hummers: infrastructure.

If he wants a second term, he had better model it on Pat Brown’s first term. Those miraculous months put highways and waterways and universities onto the California map like it was a Monopoly board. Even Republicans now tug their forelocks in homage to the Great Builder. A few years ago, the Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Orange County-based Traditional Values Coalition, spelled it out: “The issue in California is infrastructure.”

But we’re living on Pat Brown’s leftovers, squeaking by with duct tape and crossed fingers.

Phil Angelides, the Democratic state treasurer who wants to take on Schwarzenegger, began using the word months ago. The governor’s coterie took it out for a spin after Hurricane Katrina -- fix the levees, the bridges, the dams.

Infra. Structure. What kind of crusade is that? It’s just not sexy. We paid for it once already, didn’t we -- all those big construction projects 40 years ago? Politicians hate having to campaign about spending money on things that don’t really show, like upkeep.

It’s the underwear paradox. I hate being forced to spend good dough on underwear, and I don’t mean special- occasion lingerie. I mean plain white-cotton underwear. Infrastructure is the state’s underwear. The stuff that doesn’t show, but that your mother is always telling you that you need to keep in tip-top condition all the time.

I expect Schwarzenegger’s mother told him that too. Anyway, everyone’s terminally tired of movie metaphors. We don’t need an actor candidate -- we need a good BVD salesman. Boxers or briefs?

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PATT MORRISON’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.