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 Ice
Cube 
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he
wants is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous
in fact, but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure
in the grand eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle.
Pyongyang isn't even in the Bible!" "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to
our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with
explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be
upon him. "
 "'When
it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has
fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey, Jr.
A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey
business as usual on Wall Street."
 "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and
now they have to realize that they can actually create that
world and fight for the things that are worth fighting for
and not feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is
no point in holding anything back."
 "The
idea -- if we may use so flattering a term -- was that the
Pentagon would monitor the site and the betting, and thus
get a jump on terrorist acts to come. After all, as the theory
goes (and never mind the whole dot.com fiasco), if people
are willing to put money on something, they must have a pretty
good idea what they're doing."
 "There's
some thing in our psyche, this kind of right or privilege
to resolve our conflicts with violence. There's an arrogance
to that concept. To actually have to sit down and talk, to
listen, to compromise, that's hard work. To go for the gun,
that's the cowardly act."
 "The
music business is run by lawyers and accountants, and they
don't really care about the integrity of art."
 "Gregory
Peck, in what may have been divine justice died comfortably
in his sleep, old age finally having caught up with him.
His soul, like his formidable legacy, was one of peace,
so it is poetic that he left this world in such a manner.
But the times he has left behind for his unknown sons
and daughters resembles the dystopia of Boys From Brazil
more each day." |
by Ross Levine Well, the people have spoken. And depending on how much faith you have in humanity, that's either good or bad. Those white dudes in wigs and pointy shoes -- the Founding Fathers -- they weren't about to turn the corridors of power directly over to the rabble. They made sure to have electors picking the President and state legislatures picking Senators. It wasn't until a more recent era that the notion of "the people's choice" became, if not precisely the law of the land, at least the accepted idea. Perhaps that's why Florida 2000 was such a shock to our collective system. It had been awhile since the popular and the electoral votes did not line up. At least California 2003 was not a repeat of that mess -- voter support for Governor Davis was about 46%, with Schwarzenegger claiming his victory at approximately 48%. But of course, as always, mere numbers do not reveal the entire tale. Starting at the beginning, the recall provision itself was designed as a way for the people of the state to get rid of a governor who had disappointed them in some way. Not a bad idea on the face of it; why shouldn't the people have such a right? As for the replacement governor, well, if it only takes 50%+1 to boot the old one out, you have to get someone in power right away to fill the vacuum. To require more votes than a plurality for the replacement would lead to run-off elections and considerably more chaos, certainly bad medicine for a state already suffering the turmoil of a recall itself. So perhaps Hiram Johnson's progressive lifeboat was not so leaky after all. But then again, about 90 years later, reality sets in. Yes, recall supporters got a million or so Californians to sign their petition, but it took a wealthy Republican's money to make it happen. Without Darrell Issa bankrolling an army of signature gatherers, would the will of the people alone have been enough to force the recent cataclysm? Did certain influential Republicans, in demonizing Davis as the cause of all California's ills, basically engender the recall as if were any other political campaign (and not a check on an egregiously misbehaving governor?), thus lending credence to the notion that, with enough money and power, anything is truly possible? In other words, have the people indeed spoken, or has a certain group of well-funded ventriloquists simply put words in their mouths?
In a sense, the people were indeed led to the ballot box, but ultimately, it was up to them to decide which chad to let fall or which of the myriad names to leave a fingerprint on. As it turns out, most of them reached out and touched Arnold Schwarzenegger, despite eleventh hour reports that he'd done a lot of that himself, albeit outside the voting booth, a place he wasn't particularly wont to frequent. Clearly, the campaign by Republicans in general, and Schwarzenegger in particular, was an enormous success, and again, there are two points of view -- Davis as the arrogant and entrenched career politician toppled from his high horse by Arnold, the Volkshero, or Schwarzenegger the muscle-bound bully on the beach throwing as much sand as he could at the scrawny, charismatically challenged governor. There was a disturbing amount of demagoguery emanating from the Schwarzenegger camp -- defined as "impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace" -- an impression hardly assuaged by the candidate's Teutonic intonations. He promised to go to Sacramento to "kick butt" and end "puke politics" and more or less play his Terminator role in the real world, pledges that certainly appealed to the "throw the bums out" sentiments of a great many voters. As for the prejudice part, those messages were scarcely less overt -- he labeled the state's Indian tribes a "special interest," as if somehow they, not being newcomers to California, have no right to finally realize their own version of the "American dream"; and, as to the state's millions of illegal immigrants, he came out in clear opposition to granting them drivers licenses, while on related issues, remained ominously vague. It became quite clear that, despite his repeated insistence that he is the people's candidate, his conception of "the people" is more a reflection of the mostly white faces behind him at his victory gala than the multiple hues of California's population as a whole. The Hollywood factor only complicates -- or simplifies -- the issue. When Reagan was elected governor, he was hardly an A-list star -- acting for him was more his profession than persona. But Schwarzenegger, thanks to the Terminator franchise, is intimately connected to the famous character he portrayed. Up until the time he entered the recall fray, the electorate's exposure to Arnold the human was not very extensive, and the campaign itself was so short that there was hardly time to get a sense of the man behind the movie star. There is no question that Schwarzenegger used this to his advantage, as he has done in his other incarnations -- as actor, and as bodybuilder before that -- in this case presenting himself as a savior with the power to rescue the suffering citizenry from the (political) machines. It's hard to divorce a celebrity from his image, and it's even harder when, either because of astute advice from his handlers or by dint of his own sketchy grasp on the realties of government, the candidate skirts substantive answers and offers terse media sound bytes instead. It was a strategy that served him well, but would surely not have been as effective had he not already been a familiar face to millions of moviegoers in California and beyond. Schwarzenegger avoided all the debates save one, brilliantly letting his opponents squabble while he remained aloof from it all. When he did finally enter one, his star power got him through -- he was poised and rehearsed, and Bustamante's inane "tough love" mantra (remember "social security in a lockbox"?) and Huffington's strident needling helped him get more than a passing grade. And then came the lurid tales of hand-to-breast and buttock combat on his movie sets, which, given their timing, only seemed to turn him into a victim and make him more popular (I know I'm not the first to say it, but can't help myself -- when it comes to morality, the right exhibits a double standard so blatant that even the term "puke politics" hardly does it justice).
And then there's poor lame duck Davis. It seems nobody can even mention his name, not even his supporters, without first qualifying their remarks with: "Well, it's not that I really liked him anyway..." For the past several nights I've been lying awake in bed wondering what it must be like to be a governor thrown out of office by a tsunami of public disaffection. Although much of his undoing was his own doing, of course, the nail in his political coffin was supplied years ago under Republican governor Pete Wilson, one of Schwarzenegger's current "right"-hand men. Although the car tax has been a staple of support for California city and county governments since 1935, the 1998 law gave the legislature the power to change the rate at certain times. When the budget cup was runnething over, Californians saw that rate go down, but as lawmakers noticed the approaching clouds of today's fiscal hurricane, they voted to raise the rate effective -- lucky Arnold -- October 1, 2003, just 6 days before the recall election. It was a gun, pre-cocked, that went off right at Davis' temple. Now the governor elect is ready to cancel this car tax increase while promising to raise no revenues elsewhere, and somehow balance the budget without hurting "the people" whose governor he claims he will be. As I said, which people these are we have yet to find out; in fact, there are so many unknowns at present that it's hard to be sure of anything except the fact that, in politics, uncertainty is not a comfort. It's going to take quite a magician to maintain the state's current (and already inadequate) level of social and educational services during this economic downtime, especially given that this particular magician has already precluded any monetary help from the audience. Instead, he's going to cover the empty budget box with a magic audit, and when he pulls it away, there will be billions of available dollars inside of it. Or so he says. But this is all part of a local morass; there is a bigger issue here that goes beyond Schwarzenegger, Davis and the quirks of California's constitution. The issue is the nature of elections themselves. It has become abundantly clear that, at least in America, elections are, more than ever, only a side show to what actually happens under the big top. Incumbents temporarily give up their ringmaster status and join their challengers as barkers, trying to persuade the hordes to buy tickets to their particular show. Once a show is chosen, those who bought tickets to it -- and even those who didn't -- rarely, if ever, get to see the feats they were promised. How long they stick around and watch is subject to a great many factors (especially in California now), but when a show is finally over, you'd think the spectators would be a bit wiser about believing the next barker's claims.
They're not. All the next ringmaster hopeful has to do is promise a spectacle different from the one that came before. And, as campaign finance reformers will tell you, the sinister side to the whole process is that, in order to sell the most tickets, it takes money, the kind of funding -- yes, Arnold, "special interest" money -- that Abe Lincoln in his wooden abode could never have imagined. In American politics, what happens inside the tent has very little connection to what is promised outside of it, and the more money that a candidate acquires to put behind his claims, the more likely he will become the next ringmaster, manipulating events and performers until once again it's time to step down to the people's level and promise them the greatest show on Earth. In California, for the time being, the promises are over; it's time to take our seats and wait for the festivities to begin. Each of us can only hope that, whatever death-defying acts are presented, they put someone other than ourselves in jeopardy. 10 October 03 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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