Arnold Finally Gets His Bones

Story of the Day
Arnold Finally Gets His Bones
by Stan Goff



Arnold Schwarznegger had never killed anyone, but he played plenty of people who killed. He has been in many respects the masculine epitome of the killer… the killing machine… the facist ideal of the agonal man, the warrior… all on the screen. He was an image, as he has always been an image, even to himself. He sees himself reversed, so long as he preened in front of mirrors. Arnold is an image, an icon, something that only stands for something that has never really been real. During his campaign for governor of California, all he had to do was duck questions and smile into cameras until his face fatigued — no different really than what he’s always done, work his ass off building an image then parading it around in front of an audience more comfortable with appearances than substance.

As another well-known conservative once said, “a hollow man, a stuffed man, heapiece filled with straw…”

But Arnold is not straw any more. Arnold has killed. It was as vicarious as his audience’s participation in his feigned killings of filmdom, except for one thing. This time, a man who was a man’s man once, albeit without Arnold’s white privilege and class privilege, and a man who recanted that violent masculinity… died. Stanley “Tookie” Williams was put to death by lethal injection last night by the State of California, under the signature of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So Arnold got his first kill. Arnold got his bones. But it wasn’t in ‘manly’ combat against a simplified nemisis like his cardboard characters on the big screen. It was done in the most cowardly and bureaucratic and banal way, with the victim taken carefully out of a cage, handled by nameless, faceless people, who strapped Tookie to a gurney and poured poison into his body through an 18-guage intravenous catheter.

The great Austrian ubermensch got his first kill thus, and he got himself a Black man, and it’s Arnold’s to own, because he alone had the power to stop this execution, knowing goddamn well that this man was no threat to society... (full story)

Headlines for December 13, 2005 (English - Español)
- California Executes Stanley Tookie Williams
- Protests Mark Start of WTO in Hong Kong
- Australia Prepares For Third Night of Racial Violence
- Bush: 30,000 Iraqis Dead So Far in War
- Bush Blames Arabic Media For The Deteriorating Image of U.S.
- Poll: More Than 2/3 of Iraqis Oppose U.S. Troops
- Supreme Court to Hear Texas Redistricting Case
- U.S. Activists Hold Vigil Outside Guantanmo