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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (12060)	10/13/2003 9:21:30 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 793647

Celebrity culture taking over Stanley Crouch Monday, October 13th, 2003 The new governor of California is a former weightlifter and Hollywood muscleman who may well have racked up more kills in his film career than have gang bangers on the streets of L.A. He is a Republican who married into a Democratic family of millionaires ranging from bootleggers to Presidents to manslaughter-ducking senators and accused rapists. The attention that his declaring himself a candidate brought to the race made it an event of the size that a gubernatorial contest in California would not otherwise have attained. The reason is the celebrity culture that so many people have made mention of. What exactly is it? Simple: Far too many Americans now get almost all evaluations of the external world from the media and are only able to recall those people they know from films, television shows, sporting events, product endorsements and the news. So name recognition is power. In the governor-elect's case, we have a man who has never been much of an actor and whose Austrian accent has been ignored so that he can play any character around which a cartoon world of violence can be created. He is not supposed to be a real person in his films, he is only supposed to be himself. That prepares him well for certain kinds of politics in which the creation of a persona is more important than a platform or integrity or the ability to compromise with high-minded shrewdness. What makes the new governor unique is that he does not line up with the lock-step left-liberal opinions we expect of those in Hollywood, which is filled with middle-aged leftover '60s revolutionaries who believe that Kathy Boudin should have been paroled. Or who pretend, for the record, that the Black Panther Party was a civil rights organization. Another thing that makes the governor-elect unique is that he has been seen in public on more than one occasion with people who are not white, which is quite an achievement for a Republican who is not either George or Laura Bush. Perhaps because the governor-elect is from a foreign country, he does not know the Republican rules of engagement when it comes to ethnicity, which are, with a few recent exceptions, to keep the Republicrats happy by making black Americans seem no more than an afterthought. Long before he decided to shoot for the crown of California, the actor had given inspirational speeches to black and Latino kids, urging them to push against their obstacles as hard as they could. Does that mean that he will be a good governor? Of course not. Could he be a good governor? He might be, especially if he refuses to submit to special interests and seeks out fresh ways to handle the problems of his state. If the governor-elect can become Atlas and lift California, we will surely be watching an American miracle who started years ago in script conferences but eventually took a real position in the real world. nydailynews.com