Actress Jane Seymour now says The Terminator has fathered two more illegitimate children other than the one he has admitted to. The big problem I have with Arnold (Please Tell Me That Bump in Your Tummy is a Tumor) Schwarzenegger is not so much what he did to impregnate various women, although I think it’s despicable, it’s that he did the same thing to California for seven years as governor. Depressingly, only in our celebrity-obsessed culture could someone who had as much business being a governor as you or I be elected as chief executive of the most populous state in the union. Had he, instead of being Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor been Arnold Schwarzenegger, insurance agent, or held any other job, his candidacy would have been a joke. As it turned out, that’s what his time in office was.
This is a man whose first campaign consisted largely of firing T-shirts into adoring crowds, who deigned to appear in only one of several debates and whose main claim to the governor’s office was that he was famous. His speeches were along the lines of “Blah, blah, blah, fantastic.” Everything in California was fantastic to Arnold, even as people and businesses were fleeing the state in droves and the economy was going on life support. The man brought beefcake to the job but when it came to “Where’s the beef?” we never found it because it wasn’t there.
It turned my stomach that Schwarzenegger was sometimes compared to Ronald Reagan, a man who led the Screen Actors Guild during one of its most tumultuous periods and who immersed himself in politics and public policy through writings and speeches decades before running for governor of California. Beyond that, Reagan was a Republican while Schwarzenegger is the RINO poster boy, about as conservative as MSNBC, a Democrat in Republican loincloth. And by the way, Reagan was an actor. Schwarzenegger on screen is self-parody.
But so mesmerizing is celebrity to the masses, apparently, that a movement was actually begun to have the Constitution amended so that this clown could run for president. Turns out it wasn’t necessary. John Edwards did it for him.
The recent revelations about Schwarzenegger’s behavior, no surprise to all the women who spoke of being groped and fondled by him on movie sets over the years, help to complete the picture of a man already known as a misogynist, a bully and an ego-maniac. It was his ego that led him into politics. With his movie career on the wane he needed a way to get back into the spotlight, back before starstruck throngs.
His estranged wife, Maria Shriver, has handled the discovery that Schwarzenegger is the father of at least one other woman’s child with dignity and class. How could she so long have supported a spouse who has neither?
While his movie career is said to be on hold, it’s just a matter of time before, like Eliot Spitzer, Tiger Woods and others of their ilk, he’s back before us. That’s the nature of our debased culture. But there was a time, back in the days when character mattered and embarrassment existed, when he would do what I wish he’d do now. Just fade, fade away. But no, he’ll probably return in a reality show, something along the lines of, “Adultery With the Stars.”
Meanwhile, he has apologized for what he has done to Maria. How about an apology for what he did to the once great state of California.
Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here
