[LEMONS] 10.14.2003
Here we are now. Entertain us.
My friend Rob, an otherwise sensible person who lives in Los Angeles, writes: I love that arnold's our governor. I think it's f--king great. maybe this feeling will wear off, but right now I'm excited ! ahhnold! ahhhnold!! You know, Rob, you've been one of my closest friends ever since high school, one of the greatest people I've ever known, and I love you like you were a giant slab of gooey, delicious marzipan. But you're a bonehead, my friend. Thank God you don't actually vote.Yet I know what you mean. I understand. I feel you, yo. I've got to admit, when I stood in the voting booth two days ago, glancing over the list of 1,350 or so candidates (and considering whether or not I should just go ahead and write in my own name), the thought crossed my mind. It did occur to me to vote for Arnold Schwartzenegger, just for the spectacle of it all.
Like most other effete Bay Area types, I dismissed Arnie out-of-hand. I would have sooner voted for Larry Flynt or Gary Coleman. But as a soon-to-be 31 year-old male, I fall right into the Governator's most supportive demographic. I see his appeal. I get it. And you know what? I can't wait to watch the Schwartzenegger show. It promises to be politics-as-spectacle like nothing we have ever seen before. Better than the movies, my dear.
We live in unfathomable times. The 2000 election, OJ on a freeway, September 11, footnote 210, the Governator: nothing is real anymore. It's all scripted, staged, made-for-television. It doesn't really exist. Does it? If the Cubs and the Sox both make it to The Series, what then? Who could write a better script than that?
This is particularly true here in California, the end of the land, the left coast, America's America, the big myth. When we speak of The West, there is nowhere on Earth that embodies it more, either physically or culturally. Big. Free. Rich. New York is The Empire State; the seat of American fashion, culture, and intellectual life. But California has The Cool. California is the eternal party, the endless summer in a daydream nation.
While The Empire State anxiously flips through the pages of fashion magazines thick with anorexia, and goes to see all the latest bands just to be the first to dis them, California smokes a bowl and paddles out past the break, floats on its board, and waits on a wave. We have patience. Time to kill. The music will come to us from all over the country with dreams of making it big. The music will indeed be about us, will celebrate us. California, no doubt about it.
We live in a state of perpetual unreality. Did you not get the brochure? Have you not heard the pitch? Seen the film? We took a left turn at Albuquerque and built a Utopian Republic. We would have you believe that it is Fonzie's fatherland. The setting for American Graffiti. It is whatever we made it to be. Not content to pave our streets with gold, we lined the screens with silver, too. We conquered the deserts and built Great Cities--cities whose names echo cool across the globe--in the dunes on the shores of the Pacific, piping our water in from hundreds of miles away. In the Central Valley we created a New Eden and we planted artichokes and arugula. This is a state where you could go skiing, surfing and skateboarding all in one day. Assuming you're a fast driver, and you are! We are the world. Our neighborhoods are populated by the entire planet. Two Irishmen, a Guatemalan, a Pakistani, a Thai, an Ethiopian, and a guy from Alabama walk into a
A friend joked that Jessie Ventura's election to the governorship of Minnesota indicated that the entire state had a drinking problem. I think you could make a similar argument about California. I mean, have you actually tried the bud from Northern California? Have you? I know you think you've got the Humboldt County dankity dank there, in your Ohio State dorm room. And maybe you really do. But you need to try it out here under this giant blue sky, fresh off of the vine and all around you. You need to walk around the streets of San Francisco or Santa Cruz and take a deep breath. That's not Patchouli you smell. No sir. You don't get a contact high from essential oils. In Oakland and other municipalities, you've got city governments themselves engaged in Marijuana production and distribution. You're damn right, the whole state really is stoned out of its skull. Between the Zinfandel, the Fair Trade Organic Dark Roast, and the Mendocino County Thunderfuck, we are all brainhammered.
There is a reason California wears its sunglasses all the time.
During the Davis administration, cracks began to show through the facade, and in crept reality in the form of unemployment, budget deficits, and power outages. We saw through to the unpleasant wall of reality. And the man himself, Gray, failed us utterly. He failed to be larger than life. Failed to make us forget that the money and the lights and the water aren't mere constructs, set pieces. Davis Part 1 was bad enough, but when the sequel looked like it would be an even bigger box-office bomb than the original, well... It was clearly time for a mid-season replacement. Everyone knows that when the Neilsons are that low, there's nothing left to do but fire all the actors and cancel the program.
So let's have it. Let's see it. I'm ready. Cut me a line of that Arnie, baby, I want to get high. I came here for the spectacle and now I've got it. It's going to be hella-whatever, yo.
Hella!
This would never happen in your state, after all. You would elect someone sensible. Someone with a plan, and most likely experience too. And that's why I left. Why we all did. Why I packed up my old Saturn and drove to California--with my cousin and my computer and my conviction that I would never again work a regular job--where I drove up Highway One and pulled off the side of the road between Big Sur and Santa Cruz and looked through the Redwoods to The Ocean and a guy walked up out of nowhere and offered me a bag of "nugs," or high-grade NorCal marijuana, right there on the side of the road like it was no big deal and there I was all uptight and nervous about getting busted and expecting helicopters to come sweeping out of the sky and I politely declined and slunk back to the car and drove off and only later realized it was just an ordinary day. It was just California. It really is like that. Go ahead and poke fun at our flakiness, we know you're just jealous. I drove thousands of miles for the freedom to flake.
My friends all did the same. Goodbye Oklahoma, goodbye Kansas and Kentucky and, er, Kalamazoo (phew!). We've all come here to be famous, in our own little ways. Even if its only in our minds, starring roles in The Story of How I Made a Better Life for Myself and Family. We have no desire to hear what East Coast critics--or studio bean-counters like Gray Davis--make of our performance.
This picture needs more action! Break out the titties and the drug-references! Get me a car chase and blow some shit up! I want explosions and full frontal nudity!
So okay, Arnie, you're in now. You've just won the Oscar for Best Performance in a Statewide Election, Coup, or Revolution. And despite my misgivings about your abilities to adequately govern, and my belief that the recall was a seriously bad idea for anyone who cares about, you know, like, reality and stuff, I sincerely hope you succeed. I hope you do restore the Golden State's luster. I love it here. You do too. We have that in common. And hit or flop, The Schwartzenegger Show promises to be the most entertaining reality show to come out of Hollywood since the Pam and Tommy Lee tape. You're directing now, Governor Schwartzenegger, and although the critics are predicting a flop, you're promising a popular favorite. But no matter what the result, be it Star Wars or Gigli, I'm damn glad I bought my ticket.
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