Schwarzenegger presented himself at the RNC as the incarnation of American superiority, the living evidence that "working hard and playing by the rules" - whatever those were - could take a person anywhere in freedom's land.
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Arnold resurrected the specter of Communism and the moral aporias of the Cold War by burnishing his own history with wild hyperbole no nativist politician could have convincingly pulled off. It was propaganda in the service of narcissism, one of the many skills that George W. Bush himself had barely developed beyond the most rudimentary and obvious level. Schwarzenegger had refined it, with all the resources of Hollywood long before, into an effective tool, something like a jackhammer that produced a noise no more annoying than the wheeze of a dental drill in somebody else's mouth.
"The Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks on the street. I saw communism with my own eyes...as a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left."
The cunning European peasant youth who reads the world around him exclusively in terms of obstacles to his own advancement is a cherished figure of American immigrant mythology. It's easy to credit such a youth's fear "that the soldiers would pull my father or uncles out of the car, and I'd never see them again."
Even if you found the general drift of this speech appalling, only a heart of stone would fail to hear the ring of authenticity, especially a heart that grew up during the Cold War. That is, a heart unattached to a brain that didn't know that Styria, the Austrian province where Schwarzenegger grew up, was occupied after World War II by the Allies, and that there never existed more than a few Soviet tanks anywhere in postwar Austria, least of all Styria. (Austria was, in fact, the only country from which the Soviet voluntarily withdrew after being awarded it at the Yalta Conference. ) Or that the date of Schwarzenegger's birth through 1947 through 1968, the year he came to our shores, every Austrian chancellor was a conservative, and the country run by coalition governments.
Gary Indiana, Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt. Pgs. 60-61.
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