The French Way Partie Deux

Not only do the French have a different way of holding elections, but their attitude toward marital dalliances is a little looser than what one might expect from what has been a primarily Catholic country. Consider a pair of French films I watched while sipping Cote du Rhone vin rouge flying on Air France.

‘Antoinette’ is about a young teacher who is having an affair with an older colleague at the school where she works. She is very much in love and looking forward to her paramour sending his wife and children off to the seaside for vacation while he stays home for some unfettered dalliances. Unfortunately at the last minute the man’s wife books a trip hiking with a donkey in the Cevennes instead and the husband is forced to cancel his stay-at-home plan and go along. Young Antoinette decides to follow. and rents the requisite donkey to hike the Stevenson trail. Hilarity ensues, until Antoinette discovers her paramour has no plans to leave his wife, and her fantasies of them living happily ever after are just that, fantasies. We even learn that the wife, while not exactly sanguine with the situation, wants to stay married, as does he. The affair is not a deal breaker, unlike on Brumby Road, where we mate for monogamous life.

‘5 to 7’ is a little different. Here we have a rich and powerful older man who takes a young model as his wife. She wants for nothing, except perhaps for love. She meets an younger man and they start meeting from 5 pm to 7 pm. Apparently there is a kind of agreement between the model and her husband that between those hours anything goes, as long as they do not publicly embarrass each other. So they do anything, clothed or not. We learn that the husband is playing this game too.

The young man, however, falls in love and wants her to leave her loveless marriage and cleave to him only. She turns him down, explaining her marriage with its flexibility works for both her and her husband. He is crushed and learns a hard lesson about love. Again, the French way is not the Brumby Road way.

So with all this as back round, let us consider the most powerful man in California from 1980 until 1995, Speaker of the Assembly William Lewis Brown. It took term limits to force him from the post, or else he would still be running the State at age 90. He was so powerful he could say anything and get away with it. A couple of examples:

“Any politician that can’t take people’s money and then turn around and screw them doesn’t belong in the business.”

And something to consider for all those DEI proponents suggesting that the deck is impossibly stacked against people of color: look what Speaker Brown was able to accomplish:

When I lived in Mineola, Texas,” he once boasted, “I couldn’t have a glimmer that one of these days I would be handling $30 billion of mostly white peoples’ money”

Willie would have made a terrific French politician. He is the sharpest of sharp dressers. One chapter of his autobiography was titled “The Power of Clothes: Don’t Pull a Dukakis”. He wrote that

Men should have a navy blazer for each season: one with “a hint of green” for springtime, another with more autumnal threading for the fall. He adds, “You really shouldn’t try to get through a public day wearing just one thing. … Sometimes, I change clothes four times a day.”

Even Macron could take style lessons from Willie. And since French politicos seem to think that a younger concubine is de rigueur (Macron possibly is an exception), Willie would have fit right in.

Though Brown was legally married at the time, he and Harris openly had an affair between 1994 and 1995 when she was 29 years old and he was 60 years old, according to Reuters. Brown and his now ex-wife had reportedly been separated for several years.

Since this is not a political blog, I’m going to let you guess which surnamed ‘Harris’ that was. But really Willie, a 29 year old when you are only 5 years away from Medicare? How very French of you. And patronage was involved too…

The affair ended in 1995, but not until after then-state House Speaker Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (a job paying $97,088 a year),  and the Medical Assistance Commission (a job paying $72,000 a year) according to the LA Times.

That was good money in 1995, especially when you consider that all these jobs required was going to a few meetings and pretending to read a few staff reports. Getting appointed to them could be considered a consideration for services rendered from a grateful recipient. A sip from the fountain of youth…