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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Millions chose Arnold Schwarzenegger in the hopes of finding a happy ending for California's woes. But I won't be sleeping any better.
Oct 8, 2003 | Californians, robbed by Enron, rebuked by Bush, rocked by downturn and now filled with passionate confusion between the needs of their state and the needs of their psyches, have elected as governor not a man but a symbol, a symbol of strength perfected by the will into a kind of triumphal capitalist beauty.
Beauty? Arnold? It's a syllogism, silly: Strength is beautiful; the beautiful is true; and truth, as any child who knows the story of George Washington and the apple tree can tell you, is what America is all about. Thus, Arnold Schwarzenegger, native of Graz, Austria, equals beauty equals truth equals America. Welcome to California.
I have been thinking for some time now about the appeal of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the appeal of an avenging hero from a foreign land who rescues us from our indolence and despair. I have been thinking about the visceral appeal of a terminator, the man of violence and certainty who will end things as they are and bring about a new world that looks as fresh and bright as the world of childhood. I have been thinking about Schwarzenegger as a man with the appeal of a violent Christ into whom all our sins of weakness and equivocation are poured in the form of punch cards: A Christ with special sticker options, a V8 Christ, a Hummer Christ who does not turn the other cheek but fires his weapon with the vehemence of Jehovah and the casual coolness of a gangster, who slaps around the whimpering, duplicitous and heartless -- actionless! -- gray father Davis who has unforgivably let the roof collapse on California, who has let Easterners and Southerners trick us and take our stuff, who in his pasty, wimpish impotence has failed to register even one pure, simple, masculine note of outrage at what he has allowed to happen, whose gestures are as cold and empty as the gestures of a department store mannequin, whose face is as unmarred as the face of a virgin, whose tactics seem the tactics not of a lion but of a lowly, cunning reptile, a snake or poisonous insect.
And so I understand why an aggrieved people might call upon Arnie to exact revenge on Gray Davis for his sins of omission. Still, it's so nutty, there must be more to it -- not simply the reasons the pollsters tell us but the reasons Lear's fool might tell us, the reasons a soothsayer might conjure, or, for that matter, maybe the reasons I, as an advice columnist, might tell a letter writer who is pained, as I am, by this outcome. So I tell a bedtime story to make it all make sense: I tell myself that we have simply confused the needs of our psyches with the needs of our state. But it makes going to sleep at night no better, because I'm afraid I'll be drifting off to sleep like I was last week and I'll see Arnie on the television again, looking like a hood, a strongman, a fascist ruler, commanding me to give him my vote in a voice that sounds like, "Give me your wallet." I thought to myself, He is not asking. He is demanding. We must be in trouble. I'd better start doing push-ups. In the same way that I understand how Californians are exacting revenge because of things that they think were done to them, I understand how the mugger who takes my wallet was formed by social forces. Understanding doesn't get me my wallet back. Nor does it get me my state back.
What I'm saying is: It's not the wish for such a figure that is surprising or frightening. Dark wishes are food for creation; anyone who makes art traffics in darkness like stockbrokers traffic in dollars. Blood keeps us alive; darkness lets us sleep. I've got no problem with my murderous wishes and my dark, confounding desires. It's just that I think the place for our craziness is in the arts, books, movies, television, comedy; I think I know the difference between politics and movies, between dream and reality, and I would like to assume that the other people in California know the difference, too.
As hundreds of thousands of Californians work through their anger on the political stage like participants in a Fritz Perls encounter session, I must say, being an advice columnist, they could have just written to me. I could have told them: It's the psyche, stupid. It's not about Gray Davis, it's not about Arnold, it's about that insupportable belief in capitalism you have that things are supposed to only get perpetually better and never get worse.
