When Arnold came to Town

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger came to town yesterday, ostensibly for a “town hall” meeting, held, strangely or perhaps appropriately enough, in a huge garbage processing facility. The peculiarity about this “town hall” gig was that you had to be “invited” to attend -- invited and presumably screened for ideological purity. In my imagination I see a humorless man in a black suit asking questions like, “Do you hate unions and think they should be banished from the face of Kahlifornia?” “Do you like Governor Schwarzenegger’s style?” “How about his tan?” “Do you think Arnold should run for President, if the Constitution can be amended to allow it?” And so on down the line.

Like George W. Bush, and perhaps more so given his background, Arnold specializes in these staged, controlled events. Heaven forbid that he engage in an honest back-and-forth with real workaday folk, members of the lower classes, the great unwashed; much better to see the adoring white faces of well-to-do Chamber of Commerce types, not an apparent freak among them; no risk of citizen outrage or brash acts of civil disobedience inside the cavernous garbage facility.

And all that noise outside, the whistling, the chants, the drums, pounded by college kids and off-duty firefighters, union members, students, a few elderly souls, well, according to Arnold, that’s just the braying of the status quo that is strangling the Golden State.

Shades of the surreal, shades of George Orwell, shades of make-believe.

Arnold blames “union bosses” for California’s ills. Union bosses? What do these men or women look like, Jimmy Hoffa? The character Kathy Bates played in Misery? Who is Arnold talking about, exactly? He makes it sound as if union members have absolutely no say-so in how their dues are used; that’s a fabrication. Or maybe it’s just politics, twenty-first century style, the age where unfortunate truths are ignored or twisted until they no longer resemble a truth at all.

We made noise the day Arnold came to town. The man and his people figured they could take on all the state’s caretakers at one time and succeed. They misjudged, then they mismanaged, and now they’ve got Arnold running east and west to sell a skeptical public on his pet initiatives.

Arnold is running hard and hoping an apathetic public will stay home on November 8th.