Arnie flexing political muscle

Date: 25-01-2003 Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamNew Zealand

When Ronald Reagan decided to run for the governorship of California, politics-watchers all over the United States chuckled. They even had a joke that was guaranteed to make everyone crack up - imagine if Reagan, that dumb, right-wing schmuck, who had only "acted" in a series of lame action movies and comedies, became President! Oh, how they laughed.

We all know what happened next.

Well, get your Valium out if you don't want to panic: Arnold Schwarzenegger is thinking of running for Governor of California.

Earlier this year, Arnie called Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton and said: "I saw in the last 10 years that I'm getting much more pleasure out of [helping people] than making money and making movies. It could lead - and will lead probably - to some political office."

Don't believe that he would be a joke candidate who could never win. Jesse Ventura, the WWF wrestler, starred alongside Arnie in the film Predator. Four years ago he ran for Governor of Minnesota - and won, becoming one of the most high-profile politicians in the US.

To understand Arnie's political roots you need to go back more than 50 years, to a remote Austrian village called Thal, and to a tyrannical, rule-breaking little Nazi called Gustav Schwarzenegger. Gustav was Thal's only police officer, and like the sheriff in those old westerns, he was the only source of authority in town. He enforced the laws erratically, and when it came to his own sons, Meinhardt and weedy little Arnold, he barely enforced them at all.

Not that he was a soft parent. Far from it. He would terrorise his sons, setting them against each other in tight contests - who can run faster, that sort of thing - and he would tell whichever son lost that he was a worthless nothing.

Most often, Meinhardt, the Aryan looker, was the golden boy, and dumb Arnold was the embarrassment. He had sticky-out ears and big, thick-rimmed glasses - and they could spot a geek, even in Austria, even then.

Gustav would sometimes go into violent fits and accuse his wife of cheating on him, because he believed the freaky Arnold couldn't possibly be his son.

In 1938, Gustav joined the Nazi Party. It's not as if everyone was doing it - he was among only 11 per cent of the Austrian population who had chosen to join up by then.

The world Arnold grew up in was a far-right, racist hellhole. Styria, the region where you can find Thal, welcomed Hitler with open arms.

Arnold was a pretty pitiful kid. Some of the locals dubbed him "Cinderella" because he was always trailing after Meinhardt.

The geeky kid decided to get out of this godforsaken town and make himself a star any way he could. Arnold ploughed his violent ambition into his own body by working out constantly. By the time he was 15, the glasses had been chucked, and he was on his way to being the youngest Mr Universe ever.

A key truth about California's possible next Governor is that he has always been prepared to do anything to achieve his goals. Early in his career he used steroids, as he later admitted. His friend Helmut Cerncic says that Arnold told him: "If you told me that if I ate a kilo of shit I would put on a pound of muscles, I would do it."

Arnie's motives in bodybuilding were odd. He was quoted in the 1980s, when asked why he'd entered a contest, as saying that his aim was to surprise rivals and "to see them freak out and have diarrhoea, you know? And be confused and upset about it, and have a career that they had planned for themselves go down the tube in two seconds".

Friends of Arnie always comment on his "hilarious" and "brilliant" sense of humour. Well, yes.

Arnold's approach to women has apparently sometimes been rather strange. In May 2001, Premiere magazine went to town on his reputation. One of his producers recounted a tale of how Arnie approached a fortyish female crew member out of the blue, put his hands into her blouse and pulled her breasts out of her bra.

The reaction of Arnie's former colleagues to the article made the explosions in Terminator 2 look low-budget. Rae Sanchini, the president of director James Cameron's company and a colleague of Schwarzenegger, wrote in a letter to Premiere: "I have never once witnessed any of the incidents described in your article or any other conduct consistent with the very slanted picture you paint of Schwarzenegger." Arnold's wife, Maria Shriver, works as a leading television presenter. She is also JFK's niece, and as a member of the Kennedy family, part of the US' liberal elite.

Many people were astonished when she chose to marry a right-wing Republican, but perhaps part of the explanation is that Maria shares Arnie's relentless ambition.

Marrying a Kennedy gave Schwarzenegger a sheen of social respectability and greater bipartisan appeal. Malicious rumours have circulated from time to time, claiming that Arnie had expressed admiration for Hitler, and belittled black people.

His political philosophy is undoubtedly informed by an elitist view of the world. His early political philosophy, according to Wendy Leigh's Arnold: The Unauthorised Biography, was informed by him seeming to see himself as a superman standing contemptuously above the stupid, dull herd that make up the majority of the population.

Similarly, the films that established Arnie as a movie star, the Conan the Barbarian series, have a strong resemblance to the fascist myths of a heroic Nordic pre-civilisation, when strapping Aryans would fight against vicious hordes of savages. The Waffen SS could have used Conan's philosophy: "I burn with life, I love, I slay and am content".

Arnie publicly backed a former Nazi in the 1980s. Kurt Waldheim was the Austrian President who was revealed to be a former SS member. Arnie not only publicly supported him, he also said in his own wedding speech (just after Waldheim's past became public): "My friends don't want me to mention Kurt's name because of the recent Nazi stuff - but I love him."

However, he told Playboy magazine in 1989: "I am so against that [Nazi] time period. I despise it." He attacked Jorg Haider, the Austrian far-right politician who joined the coalition government there in 1999 to a background of international condemnation. And he has done so much to combat anti-Semitism and to promote Holocaust remembrance that he was honoured with the National Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Clearly, these achievements spring from conviction - but alongside this, Schwarzenegger's thirst for power is well documented. When asked why he liked Reagan, he said: "He's done the impossible - he's never been beaten in any election."

Schwarzenegger has a few more movies to make before he quits Hollywood altogether. He is the last of the 1980s troika of action-movie stars (Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone were the others) who is still peddling his wares in the same old style. How long will audiences keep buying this stuff from a man who has already had a heart bypass operation and is only a decade away from his pension?

But when Arnie comments on political issues, the effect is surreal. He said recently about the war on terror: "Mullah Omar and Bin Laden are somewhere, obviously in hiding. I believe very strongly that they are in Pakistan." It was hard not to picture him donning a backpack and machine gun and heading out to some Pakistani caves to hunt them down himself.

And from the California Governor's mansion, the White House seems only a small step - one already taken by Reagan. Admittedly, it would take a small constitutional amendment in order to allow an immigrant to become US President, but that reform has been widely considered before.

President Schwarzenegger? Stay calm. Breathe. Breathe.