Bad Arnold is bad

What a scoundrel! What giant brass balls.

What a cool piece of artwork I made and what a transparent excuse this is for posting it. It is a treatment I did tonight of a photo I took myself, back in the early days of Arnold’s governancy. This is not so much a post accompanied by a piece of art, as it is a piece of art with an exceptionally long-winded caption.

Back when Arnold was new in office, I worked for a Sacramento-area newspaper and occasionally had the opportunity to shoot the new governor in action, at budget announcements, ribbon cuttings, etc. After a while, his security detail got real butch with me and I sort of lost my desire to photograph the B-movie actor turned governor.

So I can’t say it breaks my heart he’s in hot water now. But I do feel bad for his wife. Kennedy dames are bred to compromise where it comes to their husband’s wandering wieners, but knocking up the nanny then covering it up for a decade while continuing to employ her to raise their children—that’s bad even on the sliding Kennedy-Men scale of infidelity. That’s reteaming with Ivan Reitman and Danny DeVito bad. I can see it now. Arnold finds himself in this predicament, and the undivorced husband of the nanny—played by DeVito—gets wind of it and decides to blackmail the governor… Oh, the hilarity that would ensue.

That’s something else. He ran for governor twice while sitting on this whopper of a scandal. [Massive, Liberty-Bell-sized balls on this fucking guy.] But more practically, who knows who might have found out about this secret love-child situation, and what favors might the governor have been pressed into using the powers of his office to do for anyone possessing this information?

There are going to be investigations up the ass. People with axes to grind are going to make all kinds of hay out of this, and Arnold’s indiscretion is so cartoonishly monstrous, I’m not even sure they’re wrong to go after him with everything they’ve got.

It’s cool to come to America, exploit the American Dream (that is what it’s there for, after all) and rise to the top of the heap completely on your own terms. I mean, it’s really pretty fucking cool. But it’s not cool to live a secret life that involves a second family, and it’s way not cool to integrate that family on the sly with your legitimate one. It’s the stuff of dimestore-novel villainy.

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for Hollywood to forgive him. Maybe if Mel Gibson gets his box office mojo back in the meantime, he could take him under his wing and make a Mad Max Meets Terminator movie together.

I could definitely forgive them both for a couple of hours if they did that, especially if Jim Cameron or Chris Nolan were attached to direct.