Concerning Girlie-Men

I'm sure you've heard all about this by now, but Governor Arnold "True Lies" Schwarzenegger referred to democrats attempting to block two anti-labor budget measures repealing laws preventing schools from subcontracting and permitting workers to sue employers to enforce labor laws.  For supporting these pro-worker measures, Schwarzenegger called the democrats "Girlie Men", referred to election day as "judgment day," and called republicans "terminators".  First, it's clear that the term "Girlie Men" is profoundly homophobic.  The notion that support for workers rights is an effeminizing trait in Schwarzenegger's understanding of the world is clearly very telling about the gender politics of "compassionate conservatism." 

 

What's bizarre is that the term "girlie men" originates not with Schwarzenegger himself, but with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon's "Hans and Franz" Saturday Night Live skits in the late '80s and early '90s.  Schwarzenegger's political masculinist performance is nothing more than a bizarre caricature of his own filmic self-representation as sarcastically imagined by unflattering impersonators.  And, lest we forget, "judgment day" in the Terminator Cycle was the date at which evil semisentient robots detonated massive nuclear strikes against humanity and destroyed civilization as we know it, except for Claire Danes.  That's either not a particularly useful metaphor for the democratic process, or it's a profoundly telling comment about how republicans understand their relationship to the rights of working people.