The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'arnold schwarzenegger'
2006/8/1
Whilst visiting California, Tony Blair has have signed signed a pact to tackle climate change with the state's governor, Hummer-driving environmentalist Arnold Schwarzenegger. The pact, whilst careful to avoid anything binding or concrete, calls on both states to think positive thoughts about the environment, "find new solutions", "work together" and, in a very Californian fashion, "share experiences". The UK, spinning its hardest, has specifically denied that this pact sidesteps the Whitehouse.
2005/12/9
A group of Republican Party activists in California, disenchanted with Arnold Schwarzenegger for being too left-wing, are planning to recruit Mel Gibson to run for Governor:
"He's shown himself to be both fiscally and socially conservative," said Mr Spence, "and the success of The Passion of the Christ shows that he has the ability to reach out to people".
Should they succeed, it raises the bizarre prospect of Californian voters being faced with a choice between Warren Beatty and Mel Gibson for governor.Did California pass a law requiring Governors to be celebrities or something?
2005/1/22
Kinky Friedman, arguably the world's most famous Jewish cowboy detective novelist and author of songs like Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns Into Bed and They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus No More, has announced that he will follow in the footsteps of Jesse Ventura and run for Governor of Texas.
Friedman is the latest representative of an American trend known to detractors as anti-politics and to the more charitable (including me) as narrative politics. The former argue that voters are demonstrating their contempt for democracy by choosing jokes; the latter that, for an electorate increasingly shaped by the grammar of movies and television, the most attractive candidate will be the one whose bid most closely resembles a Hollywood pitch. This makes non-politicians attractive because their very improbability becomes their compelling storyline.
Of course, the powers that be are cluing into this trend and running politically naïve but photogenic celebrity candidates whose platforms consist of vague motherhood statements about being against bad things and for good things, knowing that the real decisions the voters don't want to worry their pretty heads over will be delegated to faceless administrators and, some would say, unelected representatives of vested interests who will benefit from them; thus the causal chain between the popular election of politicians and the appointment of decision-makers is broken. (According to investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first actions as Governor of California was to basically let the managers of Enron off the hook for screwing Californians with rigged electricity prices.) Americans, however, seem to be eating it up; enough so that now there's a campaign to amend the Constitution to allow foreign-born Schwarzenegger to run for President in 2008.
Of course, which is not to say that the Kinkster is necessarily the pawn of powerful interests. Given his lack of a serious platform (or, for that matter, of his spouting of comfortingly "sincere" homilies), he's probably more like the American Screaming Lord Sutch than anything else.
2004/2/22
California's governor Arnold Schwarzenegger moves against gay marriages, which have been taking place in San Francisco. Make your own Terminator reference here.
2003/10/8
In other news: accused serial sexual harrasser and alleged Enron kleptocracy accomplice Arnold Schwarzenegger has been elected as governor of California. It looks like the incumbent's sucking up to Big Copyright with promises of tougher DRM mandates didn't help him in the end.
2001/2/7
I'm not making this up: Esteemed Hollywood thespian Arnold Schwarzenegger says he may take a break from blowing shit up and run for governor of California.