FRIENDS, ROMANS, COUNTRYMEN... A RERUN OF THE IDES OF MARCH IN CALIFORNIA POLITICS.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I think of politics as the most expensive form of public theater in America. And yet all of the thousands of political melodramas played each year from Alaska to Florida borrow their plot lines from one play: ``Julius Caesar.''

Somebody always wants to be king and somebody is always plotting to stab the would-be king in the back. It is a timeless story played out with infinite variations. Four hundred years ago William Shakespeare had Brutus ask, ``How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er. In States yet unborn and accents yet unknown!''

Obviously, Will never heard of Cal-ee-fornia and yet he clearly anticipated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Once a year we look back at last year's productions and dream of next year's curtain-raisers. And tomorrow is that day, the ides of March, the political holiday, when any politician can dream of playing a lean and hungry Cassius, a noble Brutus or a handsome avenging Anthony. We have celebrated this holiday since 44 B.C., when members of the Roman Senate recalled Julius Caesar because of his opposition to term limits.

It's time once again to celebrate back-stabbing, inflated egos, smear campaigns, conspiracies, power-grabs and grand speeches. So throw another spin-doctor on the fire, break out your Shakespeare and sing a song of political pundits half-baked in a pie - it's the ides of March! Last year ended with the infamous Gray Davis production of Julius Caesar at the State Theatre. His performance was leaden, the show over budget, and, thankfully, it closed early. But it wasn't a complete disaster. In Act III Scene I, the producers successfully experimented with audience participation. Everybody who voted got to slip Davis the knife. Et tu, everybody?

Davis was succeeded, as is Caesar in the play, by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Marc Anthony, who absolutely ``came to bury Caesar, not to praise him.'' The only criticism of Arnold's performance so far is that when the audience lends him their ears it tends to cause the audience some discomfort. Arnold has a little trouble with iambic pentameter, as in he can't pronounce iambic.

But if the voters can be lulled into forgetting that whole Cleopatra sexual harassment suit (she claimed he grabbed her asp), Arnold may have a greater career in front of him playing Caesar on the national stage. Technically that is not allowed by the script, but, heck, if Hollywood can rewrite Shakespeare, why not the Founding Fathers too?

Meanwhile Mayor James Hahn is starring in the title role in the long running City Hall production. But Hahn's Caesar is far from being ``... as constant as the Northern Star,'' as Shakespeare has Caesar describe himself. In fact it sometimes seems as if Hahn envisions Caesar more as a sort of Roman Lamont Cranston - The Shadow. You can hear him but you can't see him.

Hahn's Caesar opposed municipal dumps (all still operating) and the Orange Line Bus Way (now under construction across the Valley). He also battled Pompey the Great on the fields of Philippi - or were those just press releases that said he did all those things? He conquered Gaul and hired more cops, or were those just some photo ops?

This guy has been all things to all men for so long that by the time the conspirators get around to stabbing him they may no longer recognize him. Hahn appears to have decided that while ``the valiant never taste of death but once,'' the politically nebulous have much longer careers.

The L.A. City Council, playing the Roman Senate, has been as quarrelsome and dysfunctional as their first century B.C. counterparts, the only difference being the Romans only bankrupted an empire while the council is wasting real money.

In the last two lean years these bit players, along with His Honor the mayor, have increased their staff payrolls by an average of 13 percent - ``the most unkindest cut of all.'' These noble Romans smelled the smoke of recession and immediately hired more fiddle players to drown out the sound of the infrastructure collapsing around them.

The good news is that the council continues to perform in modern dress, saving us all from the sight of Council members Dennis Zine and Tom LaBonge wearing togas.

Oddly enough the most dramatic moment in the council's recent productions may have come last month when members were kvetching over a proposal to combine three senior citizen support programs into one, for a modest savings of 3 percent of the total original budgets, when Cindy Miscikowski, senator from the rich part of the empire, ad-libbed her own ``Beware the ides of March.''

Her speech didn't rhyme, but it was poetry nonetheless. Cindy reminded her fellow council members that the responsibility of government is to provide public safety (police and fire, road repair) and public sanitation. All the other good stuff that government does, she pointed out, like senior and after-school programs, is stuff you do only if you can afford to do it.

Cindy's brief yet stern sonnet stilled the bureaucratic angst only for a moment, but it did prove that during all her years as an uberliberal, Cindy knew better. Still I don't think the other council members enjoyed being reminded of reality, even by one of their own.

No wonder then that it was a politician outside the council, City Controller Laura Chick, who took the role of Cassius, the instigator of the conspiracy and described by Caesar as ``dangerous--looking through the deeds of men.'' The deeds which Ms. Chick looked through were questionable contract negotiations at the L.A. Airport Commission, headed by Caesar ally and fund raiser Ted Stein.

Chick's report inspired County District Attorney Steve Cooley - playing Casca, who would strike the first blow against Caesar - to open an investigation of Stein's political fund raising at the Harbor commission as well. And now the Justice Department has convened a federal grand jury to investigate all the large city contracts Stein has had contact with. ``O, that a man might know the end of this day's business, ere it come.''

OK, a grand jury may not be as dramatic as a knife in the back on the portico of the Roman Senate, but then being trapped in the latitudinal crawl of the California courts could make you wish somebody would stab you to death and put you out of your misery.

Even the wounding of Caesar before 2005's Ides of March election could help ex-police chief and current Councilman Bernard Parks, who many suspect wants to play the role of Brutus, the leader of the conspiracy.

I say suspect because so far Parks has refused to audition for the role. Maybe he's waiting in the wings until Caesar has three or four knife wounds before making a bold entrance. If so Parks may find the plum role has been snapped up instead by Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa or Council President Alex Padilla, both of whom are ambitious and have grudges to settle with Hahn.

Parks may find himself regulated to playing Cicero, who was left out of the conspiracy and the spoils (and the play) because, ``he will not follow any thing that other men begin.''

But the election for mayor is still almost a year away. In the meantime, who will star as Caesar in the national production to be staged this November seems to hinge at present on the answer to a single question:

Which do the voters hate more, outsourcing jobs or married gays? And if that seems like a silly plot twist to base our preference for the next Caesar upon, I'm afraid we can't blame the politicians for this one, or even the playwright.

We are the producers who pay for these shows year after year. If we want better scripts, we have only to demand them. ``The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. That we are underlings.''

CAPTION(S):

drawing

Drawing:

(color) no caption (Politician production of ``Julius Caesar'')

Patrick O'Connor/Staff Artist