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Posted on 10/11/2003 3:29:57 PM PDT by John Jorsett
Other than thinking the first Terminator movie is much better than the second one, I have no strong views about Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As for the recall that brought him to power, I can't make up my mind whether it's vigorous democracy in action or populism run amok. I have nothing to say on the subject of Gray Davis, about whom, I suspect, nothing interesting can be said anyway. And what this election means for California, I haven't a clue.
But I like what it says about America. "Some men see things as they are and ask, Why?" said Bobby Kennedy in 1968. "I dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?" If ever there was an instance of Whynotness in American politics, surely this recall was it. Arnold announces he'll run on the Jay Leno show – Why not? A 22-year-old porn star, a 4 foot 8 inch former child actor, and a Greek newspaper columnist jump in the race – Why not? A past history of steroid use, group sex, and serial groping – What's so wrong with that?
And then Arnold ousts the sitting governor in a landslide. As Austrian president Thomas Klestil gushed in his moment of national pride, "It just proves that everything is possible in America."
INDEED, EVERYTHING is possible. The week Arnold became governor-elect was the week the Chicago Cubs and the Red Sox both reached their league's championship series. It was the week when Americans – two of them foreign-born – took six out of the nine Nobel Prizes awarded this year in the sciences. It was the week when allegations emerged that Rush Limbaugh not only has a drug habit but is possibly a dealer, too. It was the week Quentin Tarantino finally released a new film.
It was, in short, yet another week in which every conceivable piece of junk, every exotic trinket and every crown jewel blew right out of the American maw. As to the precise ratios of each, no one can say. Did Arnold's election represent the triumph of entertainment over politics, as Germany's S ddeutsche Zeitung sniffed on Wednesday? Was the recall, in Jefferson's phrase, the "natural manure" in which the tree of liberty is periodically refreshed? Or is Arnold a political original who can save Sacramento from its corrupt establishment and perhaps reshape the ideological contours of the Republican Party?
What is clear is that, as the world looks at the California spectacle – and so much else that America produces – and asks, "Why?" a healthy plurality of Californians, and probably most Americans too, have shrugged a huge "Why not?" The difference here explains America. In Italy, one does not drink cappuccino in the afternoon. In Germany, one never points at other people. In Holland, one does not put curtains in the window. In America, you do as you please; absent other indications, consider the light green.
Not that this is always a good thing. "Why not" gave America nik nik shirts, wide ties, big hair, acid-washed jeans, shoulder pads. "Why not" elected Jimmy Carter and Jesse Ventura. "Why not" inspired whole learning and new math, and sparked a succession of social epidemics, from vandalism to drug addiction to teen pregnancy.
About 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial called "No Guardrails," the gist of which was that the absence of social norms had devastated the people who needed them most – kids who's daddies were not going to bail them out of jail, or foot the tuition for private school, or pay for psychiatry or rehab. It was a powerful argument.
But the argument was also incomplete. "Why not" may mean bad hairdos, bad clothes, bad politicians, bad pedagogy and bad habits. But to an extent many US social conservatives do not acknowledge, it is also of a piece with the best sides of American life: experimentation, pluralism a forgiving attitude toward error, a gigantic zest for new things.
In Europe, by contrast, one does not begin a computer industry from one's garage. One usually only elects politicians with appropriate educational credentials. Immigration is carefully regulated lest undesirable people be let in. The ideal career is in civil service, not business. The possibilities for political experimentation are radically circumscribed by the drive to "harmonize" legislation. The idea that an actor, much less a brawny and mediocre one, could assume command of one of the world's largest economies stretches the limits of the Continent's cultural and moral imagination.
Europe is a place with guardrails. This isn't a bad thing: It tends to create people who, in the famous Stoic image, never feel the yank of the chains around their necks. But the chains are there. "Despite our pride over Mr. Schwarzenegger's election," wrote Austrian journalist Anneiliese Rohrer in the New York Times, "there is open agreement, and relief, that it would have been impossible here."
Schwarzenegger's adventurous career path, she writes, may not be what most Austrians would choose for themselves, but it is envied all the same; it recalls the days when Austrians were a nation to be reckoned with.
What Europe now has, then, is something like this: contentment tinged with melancholy. America has something closer to the opposite: dissatisfaction touched with exuberance – what Alexis de Tocqueville called "that bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him."
"In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.
If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness." In other words, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"TO ACCEPT civilization as it is," wrote George Orwell in his essay "Inside the Whale," "practically means accepting decay."
It is very far from certain that what California did this week was wise. In the run-up to the recall, everyone from George Will on the Right to Barbra Streisand on the Left raised their voices against it. In the narrower sense, they may yet be proved right.
In a wider sense, however, what Californians did was refuse to accept things as they were. They would not bide their time until the next election. They found recourse in a well-established law (not a loophole), united behind a plausible candidate who spoke to the broad center, and elected him. As political insurgencies go, it was successful, bloodless and more or less civilized.
As for the freak-show candidates – Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, Mary Carey and so on – they garnered none of the vote. That's a far cry from the 18 percent Le Pen captured in France in 2002, or the 27% Haider's Freedom party captured in Austria in 2000. The comparison is instructive: In Europe, quasi-fascist parties have made a comeback in large part because mainstream parties offer voters so little to choose between. In the more raucous political environment of America, where supposedly anything goes, a Le Pen-type candidate is unthinkable.
I won't cheer for Arnie – at least not yet. But from the distance of Israel, I raise a glass to all Californians who had the hutzpa to ask, Why not?
"Like, for example, why is my niece married to a Republican governor........& why did my sister campaign for him?"
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