[lbo-talk] A California Rant

dredmond at efn.org dredmond at efn.org
Fri Oct 10 13:58:27 PDT 2003


Those of us who've just been jailed in the new open-air supermax prison called the Terminatorium (former name: California) were treated a wonderful photo on the cover of the San Jose Mercury News. A frontal closeup showed Schwarzenegger staring into the distance, with robocop jaw, messianic expression and beady cybernetic eyes.

It's a perfect denunciation of the "Arnie" ideology: a phantasm of total spectacle concealing the nightmare of total control, videoshock one-liners in a landscape of budgetary destruction.

Arnie is already saying things like, if the legislature doesn't do what he says, he'll "go to the people of California". They're bringing in Jeb Bush's former budget director -- I swear, on the beard of Karl Marx, I am NOT making this up -- to do a state audit, i.e. rip the heart out of the education budget. The suicide of Bananamerica's last semi-functional accumulation regime begins. I fear Mike Davis is right. I fear this really is the triumph of the oil-orcs in their Warg-like SUVs: they've selected the symbol of a mass-murdering killing machine, the predator they would like to be, a kindergarten-aged cop with the requisite Kennedy trophy wife.

To think that California has gone from Governor Moonbeam to Governor Skynet in a single generation.

-- DRR



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