Art and About – Archive

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor, I was incensed by the media coverage. Schwarzenegger’s name and “the actor” were interchangeable when reporters and broadcasters gave us the news of his campaign. So the man has made boatloads of cash through a career in the arts. Why do we have to pigeonhole him based on only one aspect of his life? He’s decided to try something different. Why don’t we give him a clean slate and look at the whole Schwarzenegger package?

Of course, in the last twenty years, Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono and Ronald Reagan have had to sit in the same pigeonhole. Reagan went as far as he could go in his second career, and he is still referred to as the actor-gone-politician.

While the recall election dragged on, I routinely got to the breakfast table, saw the headlines, and pulled my soapbox out of a nearby closet. With rolled eyes and half-open ears, my husband was the lucky guy who got to hear lecture upon rant about how ridiculous it was to limit our perceptions of a person, and then perpetuate it with finite monikers. It’s not uncommon to refer to a next-door-neighbor as “the doctor,” completely overlooking the fact that she plays trombone on nights and weekends. In New York, you might have a high percentage of actors bringing you your burger and fries, but that doesn’t mean they’re not talented in, and highly stimulated by, food service as well. Folks are multi-faceted, which makes the world an interesting place to live.

And when an accountant runs for office, we don’t see headlines replacing Joe Blow’s name with “Accountant Says California Needs to Stop Spending.” Accountants-turned-politician don’t get big play. Although every time I read the professions underneath the names on my ballot, I notice quite a few accountants moonlighting in politics.

I think I always saw and heard Bustamante referred to by his proper name. I read in his bio that he studied to be a butcher. I bet the man still has more talent in that area than most of us. Even a career politician has facets.

“Can’t you just write a column about this, or something?” my husband would plead. I wanted to write a column, but the timeliness of current events and my column deadlines never quite synced up right for a column to be appropriate.

Now I’ve had several weeks to watch Governor Schwarzenegger and I realize that had I filed a column, it would have been the dumbest bit of prose I’ve ever submitted. Arnold doesn’t want to drop the actor thing. It is a part of him, and he is using it in his political career, just like a multi-faceted person should. Duh. I was packaging him into boxes, and putting some in storage while unpacking the others in the living room. That’s not how it works. Everything about us is theoretically accessible and available at all times, and that makes us who we are. And that’s what made Arnold interesting to the media, and the world, as a political candidate.

I so deeply believe that everyone can claim an artistic facet that I feel foolish for expecting the media to downplay Arnold’s. In fact, in a perfect world the media would up-play every candidate’s creative bent. Don’t they surmise that Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing on “Arsenio Hall” won him the younger voters? Gavin Newsom’s very public commitment to the arts is supposedly one of his facets that got him elected. Maybe if public figures who aren’t more obviously creative find something artistic to share about themselves, we may not have such a communication gap between politicians and their constituencies. We could connect viscerally through a common artistic language.