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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/14/2003 11:18 AM (GMT -6) |   | In the below article, it is revealed that Pat Robertson has endorsed Arnold Schwarzenegger. More evidence that the Religious Right has no autonomy from the Economic Conservative-dominated Republican Party whatsoever...
It is also more evidence of how much we voters are manipulated by the media by politicians from both parties.
dlw
Top Gun vs. Total Recall
September 14, 2003
Only in America could a guy who struts in an action-hero's
Hollywood costume and barks macho lines from a script pass
for a plausible political leader. But if George W. Bush can
get away with it, why should Arnold Schwarzenegger be
pilloried for the same antics?
At least Mr. Schwarzenegger is a show-biz pro. He never
would have signed on for a remake of <object.title
class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="114125;50435">"Top
Gun"</object.title> without first ensuring that it would
have the same happy ending as the original. He never would
have allowed himself to look as scared as the abandoned kid
in <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="22858">"Home Alone"</object.title> while begging the
nation for cash and patience last Sunday night. He would
have dismissed B-movie dialogue like "dead or alive" and
"bring 'em on" with a curt "hasta la vista, baby!"
And while both men have signed on to the same Hollywood
fantasy for fixing an economy spiraling into billions of
dollars of debt - cut taxes, spend more - the foreign-born
Mr. Schwarzenegger comes by his fiscal pipe dreams the
old-fashioned American way. He earned his multi-millions
himself rather than through sweetheart deals available
exclusively to the well-pedigreed.
This is why the hypocrisy attending the Arnold phenomenon
from all sides - Republicans, Democrats, the media - is an
entertainment in itself. Decades after John Kennedy
embraced the Rat Pack and Ronald Reagan conflated the
heroism of World War II movies with his actual (noncombat,
stateside) war experience, voters are inured to the reality
that show-business tricks are in the arsenal of every
would-be national politician. Only Washington remains
shocked, shocked that there could be a "circus" in which
our political culture becomes indistinguishable from
"Extra" (on which Rob Lowe came out for Arnold).
The fun in watching Mr. Schwarzenegger is that, unlike Mr.
Bush and most of his other political peers, he doesn't
pretend to be above Hollywood stunts; he flaunts his
showmanship and policy ignorance as flagrantly as those
gaudy rings he wears. Rather than wait a few weeks to trade
quips with a late-night TV comic, as Mr. Bush and Al Gore
did in the 2000 campaign, he just cut to the chase and
announced his candidacy to Jay Leno. The political press
then pooh-poohed his decision to give his first interview
to Pat O'Brien of "Access Hollywood" instead of, say, Tim
Russert. But Mr. O'Brien, who began his career working for
David Brinkley at NBC News in Washington, points out that
most of his supposedly more serious colleagues were
condescending to Mr. Schwarzenegger as a show-biz joke
anyway, with their dim wordplays on the titles of his
movies. "Everybody ought to take a deep breath and realize
the guy is a candidate now, not the Terminator," Mr.
O'Brien says. "There aren't enough of those metaphors to
last until the election."
When Ronald Reagan was asked to predict what kind of
governor of California he'd make, he famously answered: "I
don't know. I've never played a governor." As his
biographer, Lou Cannon, has written, Reagan ran for that
office not knowing how bills were passed or budgets were
prepared. In this sense, Mr. Schwarzenegger has admitted to
being somewhat Reaganesque. His ideology, though, is way to
the left of his party, despite all the lip service he pays
to being a fiscal conservative. (Howard Dean is a fiscal
conservative, too.) Mr. Schwarzenegger is pro-choice,
pro-gay rights, pro-gun control, pro-green. He has said
that the Clinton impeachment made him "ashamed" to call
himself a Republican.
It is hilarious to watch conservatives - the same
conservatives who often decry phony Hollywood liberals and
their followers - betray their own inviolate principles to
bask in Arnold's hulking movie-star aura so that they might
possibly gain a nominal Republican victory in the bargain.
Even the 1977 Oui magazine interview in which Mr.
Schwarzenegger bragged about participating in orgies - not
to mention his repeated admissions of drug use - can't
frighten them away.
Arnold may have ducked questions about affirmative action,
but that hasn't stopped Fox's star-struck Sean Hannity from
gushing that he's "as forthright as any politician I've
ever interviewed in my life." As for the Oui confessional,
Bill O'Reilly said: "So what? He's a new guy." Rush
Limbaugh at first questioned Mr. Schwarzenegger's
conservative bona fides, but of late has been hedging,
praising Arnold for "the charisma, the star power, the
stage presence . . . the likability, the personality" and
saying that he never meant to imply that he "is not
worthy." No less a religious conservative than Pat
Robertson came out for La-La-Land's pro-gay, pro-choice
Republican as well: "I'm a body-builder. . . . So I think
the weight lifters of the world need to unite."
Ann Coulter has a term for conservatives who wimp out like
this - "girly boys." But she's gone all girly herself over
Arnold, telling Larry King that "I'm impressed enough that
he's in Hollywood, he's married to a Kennedy and he still
calls himself a Republican - that's good enough for me."
Perhaps. Her friend, Bill Maher, has taken a somewhat
darker view of these unlikely political conversions. "If
his father wasn't a Nazi," he has said of Arnold, "he
wouldn't have any credibility with conservatives at all."
In the glitz arena, Mr. Schwarzenegger's opponents have a
deficit as large as the dollar shortfall in the state's
budget. Desperate bit players will do desperate things to
grab a spotlight. Cruz Bustamante, the Democratic
lieutenant governor, has had to liken himself to Danny
DeVito, Arnold's co-star in <object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="168537">"Twins."</object.title>
Arianna Huffington has lured extras to a rally by promising
them the chance to be on television - as if her nonstarting
campaign might be confused with <object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="267662">"American
Idol."</object.title> Tom McClintock, the conservative
Republican state senator, has compared himself to the
eponymous hero of "Seabiscuit." (This sad analogy has also
been trotted out in the fledgling 2004 presidential race,
by Dennis Kucinich.) Poor Governor Davis: the closest he's
come to Hollywood glamour is an interview Cybill Shepherd
gave to The San Francisco Chronicle testifying that he was
"a good kisser." Or at least he was 36 years ago, which she
pinpointed as the occasion of their last lip lock.
Serious politicians try to pretend that they won't go in
for contrived sets and props, but of course they do. Even
Dr. Dean, the least show-biz of presidential candidates (so
far), felt compelled to appear at a New York City rally in
front of a backdrop commissioned from a graffiti artist, as
if to plant the subliminal visual cue he had an urban
hip-hop following. (In fact, he has scant discernible black
support, hip-hop or otherwise.) John Kerry - after posing
in a wet suit in Vogue and on a Harley-Davidson in Time -
made the "official" announcement of his candidacy in front
of a retired aircraft carrier in South Carolina, about as
much a sweet spot on the map for him as Woody Allen's
Manhattan would have been for Strom Thurmond.
Washington commentators see through these theatrics when
the special effects are ham-fisted enough (as in Mr.
Kerry's case) or when they literally have Hollywood written
all over them (as in Mr. Schwarzenegger's). But since 9/11,
too many journalists have been all too willing to look the
other way when the Bush administration engages in Hollywood
showmanship to cover up its failings. Some have gone so far
as to help foment the fictions. Showtime, the cable
network, boasts that no fewer than three journalists,
including the Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer, were involved in assuring the accuracy and
balance of the docudrama "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," first
shown last Sunday while the actual George W. Bush was
addressing the nation. But this film, made with full Bush
administration cooperation (including that of the president
himself), is propaganda so untroubled by reality that it's
best viewed as a fitting memorial to Leni Riefenstahl. The
script vouched for by Mr. Krauthammer and a couple of other
Beltway boys presents Dick Cheney as a mere supplicant to
the all-knowing Mr. Bush and somehow lets the
administration (though not its predecessor) off the hook
for letting Osama bin Laden and his Saudi enablers slip
away.
New polls reveal that Americans increasingly realize that
they have been had. Reruns are not kind to this White
House's scripted costume drama of May 1; the seams show.
More and more viewers recognize that the banner reading
<object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="17166">"Mission Accomplished"</object.title> in the
"Top Gun" spectacle was idle set decoration, especially
given that the number of American casualties in that
mission has more than doubled since then. They know, too,
that the president's uniform was from stock, and perhaps by
now have heard how his speech was deliberately delayed
almost three hours after his tailhook landing so that it
would fall into that magical twilight hour that
cinematographers find most romantic. Some may even realize
that the president's breezy dialogue upon deplaning - "I
miss flying, I can tell you that" - was too ironic by half,
given that he had actually missed some of his required
flights during his stay-at-home stint for the Texas Air
National Guard while others fought the Vietnam War.
There was only one bit of unadorned realism in the White
House's slick "Top Gun." The servicemen and women on the
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln were not dress extras; they were
actual troops whose deployment at sea had been extended
from 6 months to nearly 10, the longest by a carrier in 30
years, to help fill the maw of an understaffed war.
According to the Navy's press office, members of the
Lincoln's crew photographed with the president on that day
may have already been redeployed on another carrier. It is
the real-life terminators on the prowl in Iraq, not the
sentimental White House screenwriters responsible for
"Mission Accomplished," who are poised to write the ending
for that crew and all their fellow troops now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/arts/14RICH.html?ex=1064573457&ei=1&en=bcb873062d963feb
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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