Hey, Arnold! This Is Serious Stuff

By Garrison Keillor Monday, Aug. 18, 2003
    • So here comes the Terminator on a mission to sweep out the dastardly Democrats and restore truth and justice in California, and here in Minnesota we watch the show with a delicious vicarious pleasure. We invented the action-hero Governor. We wrote that particular comic book. And now California, so often on the cutting edge, is following in our footsteps. Us, a little dairy and turkey-raising state on the upper Mississippi. This is great. It's like the townsfolk in Huckleberry Finn who attended the Duke and Dauphin's theatrical show and then told their neighbors how great it was, so they could go and be snookered too.

    Of course, the Terminator is no Jesse (the Body) Ventura. The Body was a troubled soul who, we discovered in the course of four years that got longer and longer, truly despised politics and the limelight and growled and ranted and threw snits and went and sulked in his tent. He was like the turkeys that are bred for white meat and grow enormous chests and are unable to walk around on their little ankles and have to be kept in hammocks and fed through a tube. He was something of an embarrassment. The Terminator is a charming man with a geezer brain trust of Warren Buffett and George Shultz, and the three of them may give Gray Davis, who was too clever for his own good, his comeuppance. But I doubt the Terminator would win if he were running in Minnesota. We've seen that movie already, and we wanted to leave after the first 20 minutes.


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    After four years of an action-hero Governor, it's a relief to go back to politics as usual, where soft-spoken people with ordinary chest sizes sit down and do the work. Mr. Ventura was replaced by a cheerful, well-spoken, nonfamous Republican, and everyone felt a sense of relief. An action hero works well within a simple story structure, but politics isn't a story; it's a process. It's not about confrontation and threat and revenge and triumph. It's mostly about civility, starting with the driver's license bureau of the Commissariat of Motor Vehicles and on up to the folks in the black robes. Most men and women in politics are there because they genuinely like people and want to do good things on their behalf. It's hard work, and fury isn't the best motivation. You have to sit through the meetings, listen to other people and say your piece and be civil about it. Anger and loathing are losing hands in politics. George McGovern was a decorated war hero who got hit by more political garbage than anybody, but he is today the same good and thoughtful man he always was, and that's victory.

    You don't hear this from AM radio, which is packed with angry men with chain-saw voices chewing into liberals 24/7, or from Ann Coulter, who is selling the old Stalinist line that dissent equals disloyalty. Or from the aging adolescents at Fox News, who enjoy peeing in the political swimming pool. But when you get among the real people who are actually engaged in public life, they tend to be well-mannered and respectful of the process and the humanity of those who take part. That's the difference between entertainment and politics. Of course, the Terminator could choose to go this route, and if he did, he could be a good Governor and make up for all the god-awful movies. There is always that hope.

    You go for a walk on a summer night and notice the little ramps carved into curbs at street corners. People sat through a lot of meetings to get that accomplished. It was a boon to the wheelchair crowd and also to parents pushing strollers and kids riding bikes. It made life slightly more civil and friendly. Government works through small, incremental changes, and action heroes are much too high and mighty to take notice of these or other small details, but the changes are real, and in the end, we prefer government to heroism. My 5-year-old daughter can look forward to opportunities larger than those her grandmothers enjoyed, in a world in which men and women move freely as equals. No hero strode upon the scene and brought that about; it happened through politics. It wasn't based on anger toward men but on the love of liberty. You will never hear about it on Fox, but that's the truth, baby.