12-29-05, 12:00 pm

I channel my cats. I really do. I know what they’re thinking and I simply translate these impressions into humanese. My three-year-old tabby, Atticus Bach, likes to watch television with me, suffers through my morbid CNN addiction, and forms his own opinions. Does he get his cues from me? Well, maybe. When Bush appears on screen, he “exclaims,” “That’s a chimpanzee!” Cheney? “That’s Satan!” I praise and reward him. As a former college professor, I know that the notion of left-wing indoctrination is a myth, despite what right-wing handwringers would have us believe. Hence I regard Atticus Bach as quite astute in his own right. Karl Rove is “Rumpelstiltskin,” Condi, the “Wicked Witch,” and Tom DeLay, “Porky Pig.” Good kitty! Smart kitty.

And then there’s Schwarzenegger.

I was so disheartened that this serial sexual batterer, this creatine-addled cretin, was elected governor of my home state that power failed my high fantasy – I mean, Atticus Bach’s – and I dubbed him simply, “Excrement.” It’s a rather too sophisticated epithet for the cat, so he calls him “Poo.” All “public scatology” (to use Bush’s inexplicable phrase in his correspondence with Harriet Miers) aside, I remain baffled by blue-state California’s initial embrace of Schwarzenegger, even now, when his approval ratings are even lower than those of the chimp-in-chief. What were my fellow Californians thinking? As a feminist and a pessimist, I suppose I am not surprised that the Los Angeles Times’ revelations of repeated sexual harassment and aggression did not strike the electorate at large as sufficiently damning. Boys will be boys, and ours is an era of retro “desperate housewives” where working women pine to be stay-at-home moms and abortion is a non-option for even reluctant mothers; where human Barbie dolls named Jessica and Paris and Britney move gazillions of tabloids; where bachelors and bachelorettes giddily vie for the holy grail of marriage on network TV. What’s a little sexual harassment or unwanted groping among friends? I was far more alarmed when such an august leftist as Tom Hayden suggested in The Nation that Schwarzenegger’s election had progressive potential given his Kennedy ties and supposed social liberalism.

“That’s Poo!” Atticus Bach opines, and I echo, “No shit.” Despite the hilarious if underreported pre-election gaffe of declaring that “gay marriage should be between a man and a woman,” Schwarzenegger represented himself as willing to let the political culture decide that particular issue. Some progressive friends of mine actually believed him. Similarly, his Kennedy ties convinced some on the left that he would be kind to the environment. And, of course, he was pro-choice, wasn’t he?

The rejoinder, as obvious then as now, is, why would anyone with even marginally progressive views be a Republican? Didn’t the idea of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism die with Nelson Rockefeller? The substantiated – and never refuted – charges of sexual harassment and battery (a term I prefer to the milder “groping”) should have revealed to the California electorate the bullying arrogance and indifference to fundamental social equity that have marked Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial as well as personal style.

Therefore it is no shock that the campaign gestures toward populism and social moderation have proven as fictitious as a Terminator script. Schwarzenegger’s hapless predecessor, Gray Davis, was recalled largely due to a combination of ineffectuality and widely perceived coziness with corporate donors, but in these regards, the current governor has far surpassed him. Unsurprising, too, the revelation of Schwarzenegger’s business relationship with a fitness magazine put out by American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, an arrangement predicated on the purchased silence of women peddling accounts of gross sexual encounters with Arnie. Then there’s the matter of Schwarzenegger’s figurative bedfellowship with an industry that promotes the performance-enhancing supplements for which some state legislators are seeking government regulation. Political pressure and abysmal ratings may have forced the governor to weasel his way out of his financial interest in these matters, but the last feeble vestige of his ostensible “social liberalism” fell away when Schwarzenegger vetoed California’s gay marriage bill. That a few liberal friends of mine were even surprised surprises me. Aside from the school-bullyish, homophobic digs at “girlie men,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, public servant, has consistently aped the dishonest “compassionate conservative” persona devised by Karl Rove – er, Rumplestiltskin – in 2000 for the empty-suit candidate George W. Bush. As for reproductive rights, the “pro-choice” Schwarzenegger brought in a Bush strategist to help secure a place on the November special election ballot for a proposition calling for parental notification in cases of minors seeking abortions. Like the antigay rights measures on state ballots in 2004, this explicitly Rovean strategy was designed to lure evangelicals to the voting booths, where they would presumably punch cards or Diebold machines in favor of Schwarzenegger’s union-busting and gerrymandering propositions. (As of this writing, the law of unintended consequences seems to be in play: the parental notification measure leads in polls although each of the governor’s propositions trails.)

So much for the “pro-choice Republican,” the social liberal. Those of us on the hard left know that no such paradoxical creature can survive in this millennium, can withstand the righteous protests of the Jesus bloc. It’s the same reason why Desperate Housewife Gaby does not so much as ponder abortion after her duplicitous husband tampers with her birth control pills in order to impregnate her. In Jesusland, abortion does not exist, not because network executives or dissembling right-wing politicians are really convinced that pregnancy termination – pardon the pun – is tantamount to murder, but because they dare not risk the righteous wrath of the tireless worker bees and boycott leaders on the religious right. Schwarzenegger and his advisors simply know on which side their bread is buttered. Given his dismal approval ratings, the Republican base is pretty much all that remains of the governor’s support and they must be pandered to at all costs. Mr. Hayden, I told you so.

But this is California, and I suppose hope springs eternal. Every so often, between our Nixons and Reagans and Pete Wilsons, we manage to elect a Jerry Brown. I wish Brown would run for governor next year instead of for attorney general; better still, I wish Ron Dellums would seek the state House instead of the mayorship of Oakland. Conventional wisdom seems to hold that Schwarzenegger will be a one-term governor, a failed experiment in novelty politics a la Jesse Ventura, although at least Jesse was maverick enough to have called religion a crutch and to have appeared as a man in black on The X-Files, a show I increasingly regard as less sci-fi than cinéma vérité.

I look at Atticus Bach and ask him, “What next?” Another stealth right-winger, milquetoast Democrat? What about a real grassroots progressive, a Peter Camejo or Donna Frye? No, check that. Our political system is so corrupted by big money that a grassroots candidate stands a chance only if citizens volunteer to forego television for the duration of the campaign season. Maybe the best we can hope for is a Gavin Newsom, the current mayor of San Francisco, who will at least sign legislation allowing gay women and men the same civil rights as straight people, and who certainly won’t push for laws restricting abortions. Yet, alas, didn’t some moderates use the same justifications in 2003 for voting for Schwarzenegger?

And so once again it is the politics of “at least,” and that leads back to a central conundrum for those of us on the radical left. Do we opt out of voting until it’s truly democratic and representative, or resign ourselves to the lesser evil, the evil that will not demand or instigate structural change but that will – we hope – protect abortion and gay/lesbian civil rights? The appeal – and danger – of liberalism is not just its pragmatic emphasis on incremental change but its amenability to cooptation by the machinery of the right, its easy transformation into window dressing for supposed nonideologues such as Schwarzenegger and, once upon a time, George W. Bush. Perhaps for now, my best option is to join Atticus Bach in viewing American political culture as a species of Grimm’s fairy tale peopled by witches and ogres and malevolent chimpanzees, and await a time when the electorate at last decides it has outgrown fairy tales and embraces the high realism of authentic social democracy.