The Definite Article: A friend of mine once gave me a valuable piece of advice concerning elections: “If you don’t know who to vote for, vote for the candidate who’ll cause the most chaos. Things won’t get any better, but at least the news will be interesting.” This year I know who’s getting my vote, but throughout the Bataan Death March that this election cycle has been, I’ve held out hope that the race would draw a spoiler, someone outspoken and decidedly off the beam to inject some true batshit craziness into the race. The closest we got this time around was Cynthia McKinney, in a truly baffling move by the Green Party, but she never made it onto the national stage, and her type of crazy was never grandiose enough anyway. What we needed was a Ross Perot, or better yet, a Bob Dornan.

Congressman Bob Dornan was a masterwork of inspired nuttiness - charismatic, living somewhere to the right of Bill O’Reilly, and given to the kind of megalomania one only finds in James Bond villains. He would regularly use his time on the House floor to grandstand on the burning issues of Madonna videos and apocalyptic visions of homosexuals taking over the country, and never missed an opportunity to remind America that his uncle Jack had been the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. He ran for president twice, forcing the entire Republican field toward the center by his ranting in debates. And when he was defeated twice for reelection by Latina candidate Loretta Sanchez, Dornan demanded a full investigation by Congress and the Justice Department into what could only have been rampant voter fraud.

The story of Bob Dornan - a wealthy white archconservative brought down unthinkably by one of the help - is the story in microcosm of his home district, Orange County, CA. Though for most of us Orange County is the glittering, manicured playground of the filthy rich Caucasian shown on “The O.C.” (and less flatteringly on the late great “Arrested Development”), it is also the county with the largest Latino population in the state. The land where Robert Schuller and Rick Warren built their megachurches and Walt Disney planted his flag is also where Proposition 187 and many other anti-immigration initiatives were born. Few places embody the farthest extremes of the American Dream quite like O. C. (nobody calls it the O. C., just so you know).

Gustavo Arellano, reporter for the alternative newspaper OC Weekly and author of the nationally syndicated “Ask a Mexican!” column, gives us the grand tour of the land where Nixon was born and Reagan said good Republicans go to die in his excellent new book Orange County: A Personal History (Simon & Schuster, 2008). Like the county itself, the book is a thing of many parts - part history, part travelogue, part wry observation, part autobiography. In alternating chapters Arellano takes the reader from the missionary days of Father Junipero Serra and the swallow-ridden Capistrano through the rise and fall of the citrus industry (damn hard to find an actual orange tree there nowadays), from the surfing heyday of Huntington Beach to the paved and processed landscape of the present day.

The book’s other running story is that of the Mexican community of Orange County, in particular the story of Arellano’s family from their origins in the Zapatecas towns of El Cargadero and Jomulquillo through the mass immigration of family and neighbors to the county. Today there are more cargaderenses in Anaheim than there are in Mexico, and Arellano follows four generations of his family as they attempt to eke out a living in La-la Land without losing sight of the patria. Arellano also tells his own story, that of a thoroughly assimilated American kid moving steadily away from his roots until he confronts institutional racism head-on and reclaims his Latino self.

There’s a little bit of everything in Arellano’s book, even restaurant recommendations, told from the unique and snarky perspective of a man in a perpetual love/hate affair with his hometown. Arellano manages the impressive feat of tripping one’s humor and outrage triggers at the same time and balancing his touching immigrant tale with a clear sense of the absurdity rampant in his corner of the nation. There will never be another Bob Dornan, to be sure, but as long as we have Orange County, someone like him will be along soon enough. Thanks, Gustavo.

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Seriously, Seriously White: Although we’re on the other side of the continent, Clarke County is no less a study in contradictions than Orange is. We may be the smallest county in one of the reddest states in the Union (and we use that last word grudgingly), but when the white liberal community here decides to rear its tree-hugging, latte-drinking, Free Trade-loving head, watch out. We are Very Serious People, what with our bike lanes and our historic preservation and our hippie socialist alternative newspaper. We’re maniacs high on patchouli and self-righteousness, so don’t mess with us. We’re not sure what to do if you do mess with us, being pacifists and all, but just don’t.

Christian Lander has been skewering us for awhile on his very funny blog Stuff White People Like (www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com), and now has a book, Stuff White People Like: A Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions (Random House, 2008), full of the best entries from that enterprise. In entry after entry, Lander holds up those obsessions, trends, and fads that contribute to our feelings of specialness for unforgiving ridicule, and the results are very entertaining.

If you feel that the narcissism and neglect of your parents left you with a feeling of emptiness and alienation that only you alone can know, welcome to the club. You can talk about it over obscure microbrews you discovered on your hostel tour of Europe where you encountered world music and became a rugby fan and forged a real kinship with the natives before going back to grad school where you became aware of the issues you now champion with your collection of rubber bracelets. If you can have this conversation in an ethnic restaurant unsullied by other white people, so much the better. Work in a few “Simpsons” references and a quote from David Sedaris you heard on NPR and you’re golden.

Lander’s approach is that of a guidebook for the wary outsider who wants to learn to blend in with the herds of white people seething with liberal guilt and the need to feel unique and vaguely superior, and it’s done comprehensively and very well. At the end of the book’s 150 entries, there’s a quiz that asks the reader to fess up to just how many of the book’s trends and traits he or she embraces. I scored 52. What can I say? I listen to public radio, love Portland, OR, contribute to the ACLU, and always wanted an Asian girlfriend. Fortunately, I can be ironic about it - we white liberals do that better than anyone.

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From the Mailbag (Wait, I Have a Mailbag?): To my surprise, I’ve been getting quite a lot of feedback on the column since it started. Two members of “Colorado’s #1 Widespread Panic tribute band” called me on the carpet, separately, for dissing their outfit in my review of Like a Rolling Stone, for example. Some people rankled at my calling David Gilmour of Pink Floyd “overrated.” And apparently many librarians read the column, for which I give a shout-out to everyone keepin’ it real in the stizzacks.

Seriously, though, someone pointed out to me recently that I cover more books by men than by women. To be honest I hadn’t noticed the disparity, but upon reflection I realize that the column does tend to showcase far more books by male authors than female. This may have to do with the fact that I’m drawn more to those subgenres that are dominated by males than to those traditionally dominated by females - hardboiled noir over drawing-room mysteries, for instance, or nuts-and-bolts sci-fi over heroic fantasy - but more likely it’s simply happenstance. As it happens, three of my favorite novels of the last few years are Susanna Clarke’s epic Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury, 2004), Marisha Pessl’s stunning Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Penguin, 2006), and Cintra Wilson’s truly unusual Colors Insulting to Nature (HarperCollins, 2004), and this year I’ve become a fan of Atlanta’s Caitlin R. Kiernan, a horror novelist with a Goth bent and a distinctive voice that cries out to be read.

And I heartily recommend Rebecca Miller’s debut novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008), a story that encompasses the endless tugs-of-war between youth and age, men and women, and especially mothers and daughters. At 50, Pippa is a devoted wife who has followed her husband, a powerful publisher 30 years her senior, into a retirement community. Faced with the realization of her man’s mortality and her growing estrangement from her daughter, Pippa reflects upon her own life and a youth that would shock anyone who thought of her as simply helpmate and hausfrau. Pippa’s teens and 20s, spent in youthful indiscretions, amateur porn, drug use, and a deeply strained relationship with her own mother, have shattering consequences for Pippa’s present-day self and everyone around her. The novel is often frustrating in its varied pacing and its tendency to gloss past events, but that only attests to the strength of Miller’s voice, which makes us want much more of the very three-dimensional Pippa.

John G. Nettles