Last of De' Mo-Hee-Kins (Part III)

WHO'S YOUR DAH-DY

"If I'm not controlling my image, then who is? People always push things in the press; they want to be seen as a serious studio executive, as a smart businessman or as a sensitive artist. Politicians do it all the time; everyone tries to create an image of themselves."


Compared to flapjacks and hotcombs, selling Schwarzenegger (a.k.a. Black Plowman) was a breeze.

Hailed as the latest exemplar of the American Wet Dream, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer and his blitzkrieg on castle of Oz was a marketing campaign worthy of William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Goebbels or Ruport Murdoch. Hucksters, propagandists and spinmeisters framed the would-be governor gilded rectangles highlighting an "up by his bootstraps" sort of Regular Joe ("just a celebrity") grudgingly willing to lead a "voter revolt" of "kooky Californians" to "beat the politicians."

The second son of a Nazi -- and an ardent admirer of Adolph Hitler -- he was birthed in an Austrian log cabin. A sickly child, he was often the brunt of cruel jokes, even enduring muscular bullies kicking sand in his face. Yet he always dreamed "of very powerful people, dictators and things like that...I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, for thousands of years."

While in grammar school, Herr Gr?pen-Fuhrer "had this incredible desire to be recognized. Whenever I watched television or film I always put myself up there on the screen and said, 'How would it be if people looked at me?' "

One has to admire a Terminator who knows his limits.

Like Steve Reeves, the 1950s television star who played Superman, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer slammed a few steroids and pressed himself up against the weightroom in an epic effort at supersizing. With messianic zeal, he cleaned and jerked fistfuls of Mr. Universe, Mr. World and Mr. Olympia titles before mounting a now-forgotten steed and heading for Paradise. Making short work of barbarians, aliens and androids, he turned to charitable causes, despite a distaste for the untermensch, "you know, the low class."

Meanwhile, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer slashed and burned his way to a capitalist empire conservatively estimated at $200 million. His battled tactics included taking evening business courses at UCLA and acquiring a correspondence course bachelor's degree, leasing jets, buying into a mutual fund investment company , and gobbling up shopping malls and other Santa Monica real estate. "He's not a Terminator when it comes to how he handles complex situations. He's more an analyzer than a Terminator," noted one Los Angeles real estate attorney.


Along the way, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer married into America's plausibly deniable aristocracy, sweeping off her feet princess Maria Shriver, progeny of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargeant Shriver, blood kin to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, short-lived president, ghostly lord and master of Continental Camelot. With social and corporate pedigrees complete, he turned his attention to righting the listing cruise-ship of state, sacrificing short-term personal profit for long-term community benefit, explaining, "I would rather be Governor of California than own Austria."


Initially billed as immaculate misconception, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer's used late-night television to pry apart the legs of the governor's mansion. As Jay Leno rubbed his crotch and waited for sloppy seconds, Ah-nald mounted a punchdrunk Calee-fouhnee-ya aching for anybody but Grey Davis. Completing the circle-jerk, Republican aparatchiks hooted and howled, ultimately acknowledging a political campaign designed to never meet the press, but instead to pander to entertainment media "with vague messages and movie style- sound bites" tailored to focus group concerns."


Vacuum-pumped by talk-radio, Ah-nald's virility swelled to mythical dimensions as he manned the walls of freedom to beat back the undeserving hordes. From Sacramento to San Diego, grid-locked SUV pilots cheered on cries for equal protection against the shadowy vagaries of modern civilization. Swinging the rhetoric of bruised populism like Excalibur, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer severed the grasping limbs of union bullies, welfare cheats, Indian gamblers and ungrateful immigrants.


Rejuvenated by his Herculean struggle, Ah-hald then strode like Colossus into the boudoir of girl-talk television. As his loving spouse (golden cross fixed conspicuously beneath her thin neck) languished at his side, talk-show's Grandest Madame offered up her supplicant audience to Herr Gropen-Fuhrer's favor. Never one to shrink from an occasion, he plunged into an oh-so-willing ocean of flabby hearts and minds.

Sure as shootin', Ah-nald gave the ladies what they wanted. Edging them away from the feckless ideal of an free and open press , he kissed away decades of misogynist braggadocio about drugs and group sex, whispering comforts about the bombastic blathering of youth.

Yes...yes...here was a time when he considered working out better than sex, but that was no longer true. As for those nasty rumors about sexual assaults....well, the subject was simply not worthy of discussion. What mattered was how he felt. What mattered was that he cared. What mattered was that it was them -- those giggling, adoring enablers that Oprah enthusiastically proffered -- whom he truly loved.

As Herr Gropen-Fuhrer stroked his way through his electronic harem, Shriver occasionally lifted an Armani scarf to dab the sweat from his brow. If, in the throes of passion, his manly roars became to loud, she reached over and covered his mouth, saying, "My mother is watching this show. My mother is watching this show. My God." Dutifully taking note, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer paused in mid-stroke to leer into the camera lens and address his absent mother-in-law: "I understand. Wherever Eunice is, don't pay any attention."

The morning after, help-mate and spent platitudes in hand, Herr Gropen-Fuhrer tip-toed over the strewn garments of democratic conceit, punctiliously avoiding unseemly issues of crumbling schoolhouses, deregulated energy, state-of-the art prisons, "off-shored" jobs, and invisible healthcare. Such untidiness was best left to the help.

Lord knows, if Oprah's anything, she's helpful.

IN THE BIG HOUSE


To work the Big House of Corporate Capitalism, servants must have impeccable manners and unrivaled discretion. Besides knowing the proper placement of forks, knives and spoons, an intimate understanding of the tastes and predilections of masters and mistresses must also be cultivated.

Meanwhile, a slavish appreciation of the perquisites of power -- and the ranks of privilege -- is also required. All people, it is understood -- the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding -- are not created equal. Mortals must never be confused with corporations.

Dutiful help recognizes the corporation's face, like that of Jesus, as blue-eyed, white and male. As historical construct, this anthropomorphitization of Enterprise as Aryan Godhead is recent. Not surprisingly, it has been squeezed, like lemonade, from the sour gains of the less-endowed.

In the wake of the Civil War, triumphant northern capitalists used newly-enfranchised slaves to, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, "guard property and industry" until southern resources could be secured with white capital. "The capture was complete by 1877 when the capitalists brokered a deal over a contested presidential election whereby federal troops were withdrawn from the South in return for a promise by the Southerners to become junior partners to the Northern capitalists."

This end to Reconstruction paved the way for the wholesale transference of political rights from the lowest to the highest class.

"The Supreme Court gave its approval to the new social order in 1883 when it declared the Reconstruction-ear Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. Frederick Douglass declared that this decision by the Court 'inflicted a heavy calamity upon seven millions of the people of this country, and left then naked and defenseless against the action of a malignant, vulgar, and pitiless prejudice.' He yearned for 'a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demands of slavery!' "

After consolidating political power, Northern Enterprise overcame a legal system oriented toward individual rights by personifying an organization necessary to consolidate control over an evolving industrial system. Arguing before the Supreme Court, Roscoe Conkling (a former U.S. Senator who had served on the congressional committee that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment protecting the rights of former slaves) claimed that, according to his copy of the committee journal, the original intention was that the amendment should apply to corporations and human beings.

The journal had not been published at the time the case (San Mateo v. Southern Pacific Railroad) was being heard and the justices did not question his account. Decades later, the journal was published and showed Conkling's claim was, as a modern authority on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment put it, 'a deliberate, brazen forgery.' "

In time-honored fashion, Conkling and other lawyers representing railroad robber barons lied and appealed to white racial solidarity. In 1883, Silas W. Sanderson argued, "It is very clear, if we look back over the history of the past twenty years, that this country has done a great deal for [members of] the negro race...It has made them free men...it has placed them on par and equality with the white man....we do not complain of that.

"We only say that something should now be done for the poor white man. We ask that he...be lifted up with the level of the negro...that this fourteenth amendment be so construed as to concede to the white man equal rights ...with the black man. Our claim is for universal equality under the law."

As this corporate lineage demonstrates, "...the modern corporation was not to be just any kind of person; it was to be -- it had to be -- a white person, a white person created by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations in direct opposition to the aspirations of African Americans to live their lives as human beings."