Columnist Jim Boren boldly calls for anarchy.

The only thing the 52-day budget stalemate proved is how irrelevant the California Legislature has become. Change a few laws and we wouldn’t need them at all.

State Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata wants to reform the state budget process. I say reform the whole bunch out of business. Nothing the legislators have done over the past two months — maybe the past several decades — has made life better for Californians.

This guy’s the editor of the editorial page, and a crank, so he doesn’t appear to examine the reasons WHY the legislative process is stalled.  This is classic “a pox on both your houses” editorializing, the likes of which you’d typically find in the back of a bar.  And I would guess this pretty much molds political opinion for many in the Central Valley, where independence is no doubt prized.

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Scratch about an inch beneath the surface and you see how shallow this line of thinking is.  I’ve perused a lot of Boren’s editorials, and they all fall along these lines, begging for some favored political structure in the hazy, Vasoline-smeared lens of the distant past.  There are never any solutions put forth other than bromides like “let the people decide!” (yeah, direct democracy’s worked out amazing so far).  And there’s never any analysis of the specifics of how we’ve gotten to this point, like the rare 2/3 requirement for budget passage.  It’s just a lament, a laundry list of problems without the courage to offer a solution.  And this line of thinking is as debilitating to progress as the problems themselves.  It sets up a  learned helplessness where everyone assumes that City Hall can’t be fought, that the structural issues in government are immutable.  In a word, it’s lazy, and it has no place in serious discourse.  And yet it often stands in for that discourse.  I wish these editorializers wouldn’t see being a crank as the ultimate seriousness and would have the courage to take a stand.