Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt

by Gary Indiana

From the California recall circus, in which Gary Coleman, Larry Flynt, and Arianna Huffington vied with over one hundred other candidates to replace a supposedly inept governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger emerged triumphant. How did this onetime bodybuilding champion and gay pinup, with no political experience and a string of mediocre action movies to his name, come to take over the world's fifth-largest economy? In The Schwarzenegger Syndrome , celebrated...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565849515
• ISBN13: 9781565849518
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Honestly California - Sadly American

I have an anarchist friend who was born in Russia and grew up in an immigrant community in Chicago. He recently criticized me and another person for speaking too derisively of average Americans. I replied that I was born and raised in the Appalachians - in a small village once labeled "the quintessential American town" in a PBS series - where an unhealthy percentage (not all) of the people were vigorously proud of their own ignorance, spiteful toward outsiders, somewhat lazy and had a narcissistic sense of very personal entitlement. I was ready to admit that the economic system, media propaganda, as well as the garbage-entertainment these people were spoon fed from infancy, had all certainly helped mold them. But neither explanation nor history can change the fact of their malevolence. (To put it into American spiritual terms, until we decide to do something about it, we must all lay where Jesus flung us.) With pointed accuracy, Gary describes many of the characters and low-life reptiles that make up the political picture of California (and America). He apparently speaks as an intelligent observer rather than a recognized "expert" (and one must always ask who recognizes so-called experts and for what purpose), commenting on social and moral implications, carefully identifying some of the mutant freaks that are part and parcel of our toxic system, from the members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, to Schwarzenegger himself, to many others. Picking up this book in 2007 (only a few short years after the events it describes) is to read nearly lost history. Simple facts thrillingly puncture the amnesia of media culture. The experience is similar to watching Norman Solomon's collection of video clips from TV "news" (sneer quotes not strong enough) cheering the US invasion of Iraq. Add Gary's appropriately vulgar metaphors and intelligent language and you have a fine piece of work. The times and the evidence demand more, not less, emotionally charged imagery, in addition to critical analysis. I would go so far as to say that apollonian disengagement by the very people who ought to be raving mad plays directly into the hands of those who would continue to sell out all vestiges of constructive social cooperation to the violent abuses of top-down power government. Like anyone writing about social issues should, Gary Indiana allows himself to take some moments to examine his own personal morality, apart from the dictates and approved systems of church, state, and the philosophies that support those structures (and presumably invites the reader to do the same). I think that Gary does seem to occasionally expect too much of the truth. That is, he may discern some things clearly, and I'm grateful he's passed those observations along, however their effect on outcomes is questionable. He searches for specific reasons why exposure of Schwarzenegger's past actions apparently did not affect the election, and while those reas

The Last of the Tall Timber

Gary Indiana's incisive anatomy of California politics and the celebrity culture in which our state operates should be required reading for everyone in the USA. But that won't happen, because of "democracy," in which people "like" Arnold Schwarzenegger the same way they are said to "like" Bush, for once we like someone, there's no point in trying to change our mind, we're vapid. The book explores the rise of Arnold from movie star to governor, and the disingenuousness with which the populace has perceived this change. You get everything in this volume, from Wendy Leigh, to the famous PREMIERE article, to the concerted attempts by the LA Times to ruin Arnold's candidacy in the final days of his campaign. The Florida anthrax story is worthy of a book all by itself, and it is still puzzling, one of the few authentic mysteries of modern times. The book is comprehensive and written beautifully. I don't think Indiana gives enough allowance to the way that Arnold's gubernatorial victory was a comeback for him over the crumbling of the box office beneath his feet. Once the greatest star in Hollywood, his career had become a disaster area you couldn't look away from--BATMAN AND ROBIN, anyone? Indiana gives sensible, and prescient analyses of several of Arnold's movies, both hits and flops, but I don't think exegesis of END OF DAYS and THE RUNNING MAN goes very far past the most obvious places, the way people used to watch Don Siegel's THE KILLERS to watch Reagan whomp Angie Dickinson across the kisser. In this regard Indiana, one of America's greatest critics and thinkers, pinpoints Arnold's appearance in August 2003 to announce his candidacy as emblematic, for it occurred during a taping of THE JAY LENO SHOW. He further cites Richard Hawkins, the LA artist who has a vast appreciation of Arnold as a, well, as a force to be reckoned with; as part of Hawkins' conceptual art project he got Arnold to sign autographs on copies of Plato's SYMPOSIUM and Arthur Symons' LOVE'S CRUELTY. That Arnold obliged Hawkins is a sign (as in END OF DAYS) of a sort of identification slipperiness that has facilitated his rise in politics. Liberals were slow to pick up on his true nature because, well, not only are we vapid but he did pose nude for PLAYGIRL or whatever. If you enjoyed reading the social satire, combined with a novelistic appreciation for textures and shadings, of something like Joan Didion's WHITE ALBUM, I expect you'll enjoy this short book very much indeed. While Indiana is pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, he has set several of his lively, penetrating novels in California, and obviously the state fascinates him, the way that Medusa is said to have exerted a hypnotic, horrified pull over all those who gazed naked on her face. With such an enthralled gaze, he has seen things invisible to those of us who live among its rarefied airs, who walk blindly and blithely in its fogs. Occasionally the breadth of his thought pushes too far across

You must read this brilliant and important book.

It's a mystery that Gary Indiana is not spoken of as easily as any living man or woman of letters, not a comforting writer, he does not fill his pages with nostalgia for comic book heroes or suffering wise children, but perhaps this book will finally win him his deserved attention. The book helps point the way to the direction of political history, openly biased and fastidiously attentive to research. This is a primer in California politics, media mendacity, entertainment biography, and is also obituary for America, without giving up on a remote chance for resurrection. After reading this book, go back and read his novels.