Looks like it’s official: California’s avuncular and sometimes controversial Jerry Brown (who was famously — and, I think it can be said, unfairly — skewered for pushing a form of “Zen fascism” in California Uber Alles, the classic song by Bay Area punk godfathers Dead Kennedys) will be running to be his state’s governor again, CNN reports today. He’d held the position from 1975 to 1983, and is currently the state’s attorney general.

This quote from a new ABC News post gives a sense of Brown’s Buddhist background and how it informs his work:

“I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve lived in Mexico for several months. I’ve lived all over South America. What else have I done? I took Linda Ronstadt to Africa once. I went to Calcutta and worked in an orphanage with Mother Theresa. I went to Japan and practiced zen meditation for six months.

“The essence of that is you meditate not on all of your achievements but on the essential emptiness,” Brown said. “That is pretty big for a politician. There are no politicians with a sense of their own personal emptiness — even though most of them are rather empty.”