Flat Earth
By Lynn Rapoport

Good news!

IN THE TWO weeks leading up to the California gubernatorial recall election, I received phone calls at home from Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman, Bill Clinton, and Martin Sheen, who isn't a U.S. senator, former vice president, former presidential running mate, or former president but played one on TV while his character's daughter was being held captive by terrorists. The night after Arnold Schwarzenegger was voted in by an electrified but perhaps not very farsighted electorate, I stayed up until 3 a.m. watching Pumping Iron.

I told myself it was a fact-facing mission, that, like the infamous Oui interview, the bodybuilding documentary was a very important artifact in the life of a man with virtually no political record – unless a professed admiration for Hitler's public-speaking skills counts – who has just received a mandate to lead California to safety through these lean and troubled times. Good friends accused me of wallowing. Given that I spent election night watching Joe Schmoe, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and a West Wing rerun instead of the political coverage, it seems likelier I was practicing more avoidance, immersing myself in the cultural detritus of what I look back on as a simpler time, because I was in preschool flipping through picture books about Greek mythology and didn't give a flying fuck whether Arnold won or lost the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest.

I fell asleep – lulled, perhaps, by the rhythmic rise and fall of free weights. Bodybuilding really isn't my thing. So, while I caught the scene in which Arnold draws parallels between the sensations of orgasm and "getting pumped," I missed the parts where he smokes pot and intimidates competitors with what I keep hearing people refer to as his relatively keen wit, something I realized I was starting to want to believe in – along with his GOP-spooking pro-choice stance and support for gay rights – in case it might help us out someday.

Is that a weird reaction? Possibly no weirder than Move On's e-mails proposing the long-shot concept that the recall is actually good news for progressives because it's bad news for Bush – no weirder, though possibly more pathetic.

It's not that I'd come around to the nauseating prospect of Governor Schwarzenegger. All day Wednesday I'd found myself eyeing people, suspecting them of having forgotten to vote. But the real problem must be that California, just like the whole damn country, is full of terrifying, appalling people, of whom Schwarzenegger is only one. Which is terrifying and appalling but was no truer Oct. 7 than it had been the day before. It makes the whole thing seem inevitable, like all the Newsom posters in the Castro. Maybe I'm so depressed I'll look anywhere for a sign of light, even if it's nothing more than a sign of intelligence. Maybe I'm a victim of Stockholm syndrome.

It might not be worth the effort of trying to figure out the answer to that one. A friend I ran into told me that, according to Hindu mythology, we may have entered the fourth and final age of the world, characterized by utter decadence and doomed to obliteration once Shiva opens his third eye and gets a look at the mess we've made. Maybe voting in Schwarzenegger was the last step, and when the results are certified, that will be our final hour.

We stood there and laughed and shook our heads and talked about how unreal the whole thing was, and it all sounded eerily familiar. Then I remembered I'd found it equally unreal that Bush the Second was my president, that we were at war, that there was a large hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica and we still wouldn't sign the Kyoto Protocol, that Clinton was going to be impeached over a blow job. We kept waiting for these things to seem like they were actually happening – and in the meantime made jokes about the apocalypse. I'm guessing reality lag doesn't just happen to disappointed progressives. Something, at any rate, is making it really hard for people to realize how much worse things can get.

It's normal to want reassurance, but I feel like I've been waiting since birth, or at least college, for someone to stand there and tell the country how bad it really is – not someone from the Sierra Club or the Green Party or even a nice Democrat but someone the whole horrible, appalling country would believe. A few months ago I would have suggested Bush, since he is the president of the United States and might be able to get people to gather around the tele-hearth for a special State of the Union address, but since his ratings have sunk so low, maybe the answer is Arnold. He can bring it up on Jay Leno.

I realize this is utter fantasy, fueled by a whopping dose of willful naïveté, fear, anger, and way too many Capra films and reruns of The West Wing (a show my housemate rightly referred to the other night as porn). It's just that everything's such a mess I'm losing it. After the election it seemed comical that the politicians leaving instructions on my fellow Californians' answering machines thought they could make a difference to people whose vote for the Terminator would mark the first time they'd ever bothered to show up at the polls. From what I've seen, the American public's desire is to be led by the nose by some tough-talking cowboy-cop figure pretending to shoot straight. Now we just need someone to stop pretending, shoot, and put us out of our misery.

 

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