Heroes Fall Into The Ground

[In response to a piece Andrew Sullivan got published in the Sunday Times in the wake of my state's recent electoral unpleasantness, I wrote the following bit of commentary. Violet, in her best Julia Cameron, writing-is-therapy voice, and to whom I emailed the first draft, said my anger is a map. (She has the same "relationship" with Ann Coulter; both antipathies feel imaginary, as though neither writer is a real person, but I guess it's good to have a focus.)]

HEROES FALL INTO THE GROUND
Why can't I stop reading Andrew Sullivan? Maybe it's to clarify why I believe certain things - he presents his opinions just logically enough that I'm forced to spend time distilling how very, very wrong he is.

(He also wrote a weepy thing for the New York Times recently saying how deeply distressed he is that he can't go to Mass anymore because the Church hates gay people. Reminds me of the science fiction novel in which a whole planet of geniuses were controlled by having obsessive-compulsive disorder encoded in their genes. At least one of them wailed and gnashed her teeth when the OCD was removed, but the genius was left intact. Made me think about what mental illnesses I'm holding on to myself and why...)

Just for exercise, my rebuttal to his Schwarzenegger BS:

1. "There was nothing unique or 'fascistic' or celebrity-driven about his sudden emergence." In the VERY NEXT SENTENCE writes "He's not the first actor to become governor of California, where entertainment is a huge and major industry." First of all, it wasn't sudden. Arnie's name's been bandied about for several years as a gubernatorial candidate. I understand his main point to be that, just as we may naturally expect, alas, an oilman to become governor of Texas, in California, an entertainment industry figure may be expected to cross over to similar political success. But let's notice WHO that entertainment industry figure is: you don't see a relatively unknown, concerned L.A. activist-attorney who has had contacts in the industry becoming Guv; you see the celebrity who for several years was the top-paid, most well-known movie star in the world pull it off. It was so, so celebrity-driven. So, come to think of it, was G.W.'s governorship - he wasn't even a SUCCESSFUL oilman.

2. "California, for the past two decades, has spawned voter revolt after voter revolt." Oh, please. Most "voter revolts" in this state have been the people with property finding yet another way to screw those without. It's not like the real poor benefited one bit from Prop. 13, while term limits were part of a national trend which has hurt government a lot more than Gray Davis's "pay-to-play" style. Most of the time, Californians elect dull, albeit harmful, Republicans to the governor's mansion, and the initiative process creates mostly harmless laws that the legislative process is too slow or cumbersome to enact. That's why, unlike a lot of people, I don't mind the initiative and the recall, but I think both need to be tightened up a bit. Sullivan makes "Californians" (a simplistic concept for such a huge, diverse mass of people) sound like the fiery residents of Boston in 1775. (Side note: Anyone doubt that the Boston Tea Party would be considered an act of terrorism if carried out today?)

3. "And there's a case to be made that California in 2003 was ripe for revolution, whoever managed to become the standard-bearer. The state is in fiscal crisis." Unlike most of the rest of the fifty, which are doing just dandy. California's fiscal crisis just looks more impressive to a size queen like Sullivan because the damned state is so much bigger than any other. As to why there's a fiscal crisis, look to the dot-com crash, look to Washington, look to set-asides like the ballot initiative Arnold sponsored a couple of elections ago, look to lots of complicated factors, some of which Davis may have exacerbated. For the most part, the fiscal crisis is not Davis's fault, and he and the Legislature took hard, necessary steps this year to partially ameliorate it.

(What "revolution," by the way? Sure, the Governor will now not be a Democrat; however, both houses of the Legislature still overwhelmingly remain with the donkey, as do all the other Constitutional officers, notwithstanding Our Own Attorney General's interesting recent declaration. Compared, say, to the Federal Cabinet, they have a remarkable degree of autonomy in how they conduct their chunk of the state's business. "We Californians" didn't elect a dictator, did we?)

4. "Even when 45 percent of California's voters didn't pick a replacement candidate (because they voted "no" on the recall) (italics added), Arnold Schwarzenegger's votes this time were 3.7 million from the remaining 55 percent, compared to Davis' 3.5 million from 100 percent of the electorate last year." I think this means Sullivan believes that if you voted no on the recall, you couldn't vote on the replacement. If this is what he thinks, he really has no business commenting on this election at all, since one of the major plot points of this drama was the fact that anyone who voted "no" also had the option to choose a successor.

5. "This wasn't the failure of some kind of anarchic political system. It was a success for democratic government, with a vote higher than the last election. The French, who looked down their noses at this exercise, should be so lucky." (Yawn, yet another dig aux francais; did Laura Bush's recent visit have no effect?) It was however, a failure of small-r republican government, which the big-R Republicans are supposed to be for. (Anyone remember "We live in a Republic, not a Democracy"?) Just goes to show, as with states' rights and judicial activism, the GOP will use cite any red-herring, simple-Simon poli-sci principle on offer to grab and keep power, and discard it when the wind changes.

6. "That politics - the missing element in American life right now - is a blend of fiscal conservatism, social liberalism and foreign policy hawkishness." Ah, the same old libertarian claptrap. I'm becoming convinced that of there's anything that will drive me into absurdist political apathy, it will be the impossibility of convincing anyone that there's no such thing as benign neglect. It is impossible to be actually socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

7. "...the classic movie Pumping Iron." These two paragraphs are so obnoxiously Camille Paglia they give me the creeps. The earnest pursuit of cool is so pathetic - either you're cool, or you're not (I happen to know I'm not, and most of the time, I'm, uh, cool with that), and no complicated dissertation containing lots of postmodern buzzwords will make you cool.

8. "It's no exaggeration to say he single-handedly helped change the shape and look of American men." How does one "single-handedly help" to do anything? To me, the verb "help" implies teamwork, community, and the exact opposite of the slavering, picaresque hero-worship embarrassingly spewed here. And throughout the essay. And always! (A gay man, like him ought at least to acknowledge queerdom's influence on the small percentage of American men for whom a muscular frame is a part of the overall fashion statement, and maybe mention that, on average, we're actually a lot fatter than we used to be.)

Why don't I get to write meandering political columns for the Sunday Times? Why, why, why?!

End rebuttal.

[Why: because I haven't focused, as the gentleman here has done, on getting published. I know, I know, I'm working on it...]

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