People Get Ready

Ever
since the Terminator won that trumped-up election in California in
the slickest piece of political prestidigitation since Kennedy got
elected by dead people in Chicago, I have been working on a wry post
along the lines of "Sorry, Arnie, if you want to follow Bonzo ALL the
way to Washington you’re gonna need a Constitutional Amendment".

Well, my smug confidence was once again misplaced.  Turns
out that just this past July, Schwarzenegger’s friend Sen.
Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, introduced a bill that would amend the
Constitution
so that
anyone who has been an American citizen for at least 20 years would be
eligible for the office of President of the United States.  Suddenly
the scene in "Demolition Man" where Sylvester Stallone is woken up from cryogenic
storage to learn that Schwarzenegger was elected president early in the 21st
century seems eerily preminescent.

Dowbrigade laughed 30 years ago when California first
elected a bad actor governor and then had to leave the US for eight years
of self-imposed exile in Humiliated Chagrin (not the name of my Andean hideaway).
Suddenly it’s deja vu all over again, and maybe we’d all better start
making alternate
plans…

related Boston Globe column