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, and that the conviction that landed him in prison was questionable from the get. Arnold committed this passive murder because it was politically expedient... the same reason every one of these sack of shit governors sign death warrants. You can't win elections if you are portrayed as unmanly, as a wimp, as someone afraid to end lives. the irony, of course, is that Schwarzenegger is going to lose his next election anyway for his gross imcompetence, and this was his one chance to salvage any real respect among future historians. But his image was more important than the hard life of this one human being.
Tookie Williams had already redeemed himself from his own circumstances -- Black urban poverty, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and serial dispossessions, abandoning young people to the lumpen-life for sheer survival. I won't attempt to recount Tookie Williams' life here. That is available elsewhere. I want to talk about Arnold... who can never be redeemed now, his manicured hands unblooded, his straw headpiece unbothered, his opulent life unperturbed.
All I can say is, What a MAN!
