We’re losing our constitutional rights because of the so-called “war on terror.” It reminds me of that line from the movie Full Metal Jacket: “Guess they’d rather be alive than free—poor dumb bastards!” Not me—once America is no longer what our country has stood for since 1776. We’ve gone backwards. When you look at how religious fanatics and corporate America are teaming up, we today are on the brink of fascism.
What infuriates me more than anything is that it’s my generation that is now in charge. We came out of the sixties, the Vietnam era. I served over there, but it’s now a historical fact that we were duped into that war by our leaders. Now, we’ve let it happen again with Iraq—a war based on lies and deceit that’s costing thousands of lives.
We’re also the generation that experimented more than any other with recreational drugs. If anybody should understand how wrongheaded the “war on drugs” is, it’s us. Marijuana should be legalized and regulated the same way as alcohol and tobacco. Bill Maher recently put it in this context: the Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper’s. Anna Nicole Smith’s autopsy turned up nine prescription drugs and she couldn’t dial 911. Yet the first drug is outlawed and you’ll go to jail for it, while all the others are given to you legally. I don’t get it.
And thirdly, we—“the free love generation”—are now telling our children to abstain from sex? When I spoke at Carleton College, I told the young people: “Unless they were a virgin on their wedding day, anyone who preaches abstinence to you is a hypocrite.” Two weeks later, Ann Coulter showed up at the same school, and one of the students raised his hand and asked her whether she’d been a virgin! It made the papers—and made me laugh. You know what Coulter did? Attacked the kid and changed the subject.
What also makes me so angry about America is that 50 percent or more of us don’t vote. Yet we’re out supposedly spreading democracy and spending billions of dollars to give it to Iraq—when half of us don’t even bother?
We’ve allowed our media to be turned into entertainment, rather than facts, enlightenment, and knowledge. We’ve gone from Woodward and Bernstein to Bill O’Reilly. From Walter Cronkite to Katie Couric. The death of Anna Nicole Smith received more coverage, for a longer period, than the assassination of President Kennedy did at the time.
Why is our government so secretive? If we are indeed a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, how come they insist upon keeping us in the dark as much possible? I call it the dumbing-down of America, by both the media and the government. But the tragic fact is that we, the people, are becoming like lemmings racing in a suicidal pack toward the sea. And most of us won’t even face the fact that, because of our neglect, the seas are dying.
If you want good government, you must have an involved citizenry. Yet it seems like apathy is a contagious disease. People don’t pay attention to government because they don’t think it affects them. Well, you work five days a week. Why wouldn’t you pay attention to an entity that’s taking the fruits of your labor two of those days? Wouldn’t that be enough motivation to pay heed to what your tax dollars are being used for?
Today, the special interests have a stranglehold on our reality. Nobody is being told the truth. We’ve bought a bill of goods. I can’t believe everyone is so asleep. I achieved the impossible once—a wrestler becoming governor of one of our fifty states. Why is nobody else coming forward?
Or do I have to throw myself into the political ring again? And, if I do, is it worth the price that my family and I will have to pay?
This is the dilemma I’m facing. I can’t live with this apathy. I can’t tell myself it’s not happening. I have to stand up and talk about it. I love my country and what it was founded for. I believe deeply in its inherent freedoms. And we’re losing them. We’re losing more of them every day. I can’t just ignore it.... I don’t know about you. . . .
Psychologically, I needed to break away from the United States. I also felt it was time in my life to go on an adventure. I was still young enough, but I knew the window of opportunity was closing. From watching my parents pass on, I knew that your health becomes an issue at some point and eventually you’re not going to be able to travel. As you get older and older, you revert back to a childlike existence, where your little house and neighborhood are about the extent of your world. So, an adventure was important for me—not only physically, but mentally.
I needed to refocus, to do something that really went back to basics. And I found that, even in the twenty-first century, you can still be something of a Kit Carson. There are frontiers left to explore that are relatively untouched by humans. Some of these are located along the Mexican peninsula known as Baja California, almost a thousand miles of desert, mountains, and sea.
My wife Terry and I left Minnesota in the middle of winter, planning to drive our truck-camper, pulling a trailer with two wave runners, all the way across America and then over the border into Mexico. This was also an opportunity to renew our relationship. After playing the game of governor and First Lady for four years, in the public eye constantly, with our fully scheduled agendas, we’d often been like ships passing in the night.
Our two kids were grown up now, and had their own lives to lead. Tyrel was out in Hollywood, where he was working at becoming a screenwriter. Jade still lived in Minnesota, and was making plans to get married. So Terry and I were free in a way we’d really never been during all those years I’d spent in the limelight—as a pro wrestler, a movie actor, a radio personality, and finally as the improbable governor of the thirty-second state.
I’d have a lot of time along this journey to reflect.
At first, it feels strange leaving all the comforts of home behind. The three-story place we moved into after I decided not to seek a second term as governor is really my dream house. Built on a lake, the house is also right next to a railroad track. Even though I might be fishing and in complete solitude when a train goes by, it always awakensed me to the fact that the rest of the world is still moving. It’s a beautiful sight actually, when you’re out on the lake. Maybe that’s what helped put the wanderlust in me, too.
I live north of St. Paul, and it’s the first time I’ve ever lived east of the Mississippi River. As we pull out of our gate and head down along the shoreline of nearby White Bear Lake, I recall to Terry a story that my dad told me long ago. “This was a very famous lake back in the twenties and thirties. Back then, most of the laws were state-to-state, and if you hadn’t committed a crime in one particular state, the authorities there wouldn’t bother you. The folklore was, Al Capone and his gangsters had kind of a working agreement with Minnesota law enforcement—they wouldn’t do anything illegal if they could go on vacation to White Bear Lake. We were their home away from home.”
Terry laughed. “Your dad’s stories,” she said, “were amazing.”
TERRY: When we started doing the family holiday thing, it was unbelievable. His whole family had the best time sitting around arguing politics. I would just sit there, because my own family was really non-political. In southern Minnesota, when you went to someone’s home or a gathering, you didn’t talk about your religion, you didn’t ask how much anything cost that they owned, and you never mentioned politics! But his family would sound like they were beating the living heck out of each other mentally, and at the end they’d say, “Wow, what a great time we had!”
My dad George only got as far as the eighth grade, and worked as a laborer for the Minneapolis street department. He was ten years older than my mom, Bernice, who survived the Great Depression growing up on an Iowa farm and somehow put herself through nursing school. They both served in Africa during World War Two. He was an enlisted man, and she was a lieutenant. I remember when they’d get into an argument sometimes, he’d say, “Ah, the lieutenant’s on my case again. What the hell is them officers’ problem, anyway?”
I was born on July 15, 1951. My older brother Jan and I grew up in a two-story house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of south Minneapoli
s. When I was in sixth grade, I used to set up a ring in our basement and stage different fights among my classmates. Sometimes I’d referee, sometimes I’d jump in there myself. Pro boxing was pretty big then in Minneapolis, and Jan and I loved listening to the bouts on the radio. I was probably no more than nine when my elementary teacher asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I said, “a pro boxer,” she told me that was a ridiculous idea.
Bernice was the disciplinarian in our family, and also handled all the finances, including our allowances. George was an easygoing type—except when it came to politics. We often watched the TV news while we ate dinner, and he argued back loudly whenever something pissed him off. He didn’t have much good to say about any politician, or our government. Minnesota’s own Senator Hubert Humphrey—whose son I eventually defeated in the governor’s race—he called “Old Rubber-Lip.” Richard Nixon was “The Tailless Rat.”
Years later, I remember we were watching TV together the night Nixon gave his famous “I am not a crook” speech during Watergate. “Look, you can see the son of a bitch is lying,” George said. I raised my eyebrows. “Come on, how do you know that?”
“Because anyone with sweat on their upper lip is lyin’ to you,” he said. I’ve thought of that a lot lately, watching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Minnesota had quite a few people like my father, more than you find in most states. They liked straight shooters—politicians who weren’t afraid to put themselves on the line for what they believed. Even if those beliefs went against the grain of American public opinion. A statewide poll once showed that Minnesota voters favored “independents” above either the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party or the Republicans. The thing was, party didn’t matter so much. The man was what counted.
Think about some of the unique politicians that Minnesotans went for. Harold Stassen—called the “Boy Governor” when he was elected in 1939—came out fiercely against the isolationists, who were pretty powerful just before World War Two started. He actually stepped down as governor to join the Navy, ending up with the Pacific fleet fighting against the Japanese. Can you imagine any politician doing that today? For the most part, they wouldn’t let their third cousins serve! After the war, Stassen was instrumental in creating NATO and the United Nations. He then became best known as a “perennial candidate” for president. He ran ten times between 1948 and 1992, and the media made a laughingstock out of him. But I admired this man so much that, when he passed away during my term as governor, I ordered that he lie in state.
During the 1970s and ’80s, Rudy Perpich was elected governor twice. His detractors called him “Governor Goofy,” and he did do some curious things. He’d personally stop speeders on the freeways, and go back to the ghost town where he was born to “talk” to his ancestors. But Rudy was all right. I actually think he was ahead of his time. He proposed selling off the governor’s mansion to save money, and later I ended up shutting down the old mansion for a while after the legislature cut back on my budget. Rudy also worked hard to put Minnesota on the international map by traveling to many foreign countries, something I emulated with my trade missions to Mexico, Japan, China, and even Cuba.
Wendell Anderson was another remarkable governor, a former Olympic hockey player. After he found it necessary to raise people’s taxes fairly steeply, he traveled to every county telling the voters his reasons—and he won all eighty-seven counties in the next election.
In 1978, another Rudy—last name of Boschwitz, known for doing these hokey TV commercials for his Plywood Minnesota company—successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. He was replaced after two terms by a former wrestler who had no political experience, and who no one thought had a chance. That was Paul Wellstone, a liberal professor from Carleton College.
Between 1964 and 1984, from Hubert Humphrey to Walter Mondale, five out of the six presidential elections had a Minnesota native on one of the major party tickets. No other state in the union could claim that distinction.
Not that I paid too much attention to all this when I was growing up, except for my father’s political opinions. George had been a terrific swimmer—he could go across the Mississippi and back—and that gene apparently passed on to me. I was captain of the swim team at Roosevelt High, a district champion in the butterfly stroke. I also played defensive end on an unbeaten football team my senior year, got average grades, and ran with the same kids I had since grade school. We called ourselves the South Side Boys, and did a lot of camping, fishing, and drinking. I liked being a center of attention. And I liked being mischievous.
The one subject that grabbed me was “Mac” McInroy’s American history class. I’d get in some heated discussions there. And his admonition to his students stayed with me. He’d say, if we didn’t like the way things were, then stop bitching and start a petition and do something about it. America, he drilled into us, was a country where the individual could make a real difference.
My brother Jan had seen a Richard Widmark movie called The Frogmen and, after he graduated from high school in 1966, decided that’s what he wanted to be. Three years later, when I graduated, my parents badly wanted me to go on to college. I tried for a swimming scholarship to Northern Illinois, but I was only in the upper half of my class and not the upper third, so academically I didn’t qualify. I was working for the state highway department, repairing bridges, when I went along with a friend to hear what a Navy recruiter had to say. Even though Jan had come home on leave from Vietnam and tried to convince us this was a lousy idea, I ended up getting talked into enlisting. It was September 11, 1969.
My mom was especially upset about it. My dad opposed it, too. I think one of the driving forces, subconsciously, that led me to enlist was that every other member of my family was a war veteran. George had seven Bronze Stars for battles in World War Two. He fought in Normandy, Remagen Bridge, the Battle of the Bulge. He started off against Rommel in the North African desert, came up through Anzio in Italy, and finished in Berlin. Bernice was an Army nurse in North Africa. Jan was in Vietnam. Not that any of my family would have cared, but I must have wondered how I could sit down with them at the dinner table: three veterans and one nonveteran. Especially in a time of war.
So, I reported for boot camp with a buddy of mine named Steve. That was January 5, 1970. The date became relevant again for me in 1999: Steve would be there when I held a dinner party at the governor’s mansion for a bunch of old friends, the night after my inauguration. When he raised his glass for a toast, Steve said, “You guys probably don’t remember, but it was twenty-nine years to the day when Jesse and I went off to the Navy.”
The Navy SEALs were created by President John F. Kennedy. SEAL stands for Sea-Air-Land, an elite special team trained to carry out clandestine missions abroad. Basic training is called BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL). It lasted twenty-two weeks. It’s set up so that, literally, only the strong survive. There was an 80 percent dropout rate.
My first phase instructor was Terry “Mother” Moy (I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what the “mother” stood for). At my inauguration, he would stand behind me in full uniform, along with two others from my SEAL team. Later, “Mother” Moy told one of my biographers that, out of maybe 2,300 recruits who went through his training, he could only remember about a dozen. I was one of them. He recalled that I had a good sense of humor which, he said, “leaves you open to a little play, ’cause the instructors have a sense of humor, too.”
He was the scariest guy I ever met. My first day, we went through an obstacle course that took me forty-five minutes. Eventually, we’d have to do it in about ten. I came away with torn blisters hanging from my hands. When “Mother” Moy asked if any of us had any such “flappers,” I admitted that I did. He asked me to put out my right hand—and he ripped all the loose skin right off it. Then he had me do the same thing to my left hand, myself.
The first five weeks were all physical training—you ran everywhere you went—capped by what the instructors referre
d to as “Motivation Week” and we recruits called “Hell Week.” Those who made it through the pits of hell then went through nine weeks of demolition, reconnaissance, and land-warfare training, with new instructors to teach us how to blow things up. After that came six more weeks of underwater diving—how to swim with attack boards, navigate underwater with a compass at night, and dive scuba and deeper with mixed gas. Our mainstay was using re-breathers that emitted no bubbles.
Then it was on to jump school, becoming a skydiver. I was deathly afraid of heights. One of the reasons I joined the SEALs was to overcome that fear in my psyche. It worked—in the course of thirty-four parachute jumps, fast-roping out of a helicopter, or rappelling down a mountain.
After jump school, it was a week with the other services in SERE School (Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion). We started out in the desert around Warner Springs, California, where even lizards can’t live, and ended up frying acorns for our meals. For the last twenty-four hours, you become a POW. They put me in a box so small that, given my size, they had to stand on it to close it. When they pulled me out—it may have been ten minutes, but it felt like ten hours—I couldn’t stand because my legs and arms were completely asleep. The infamous Chinese waterboarding procedure was also employed. This is where a towel is wrapped around your head and water is poured over your face, giving the sensation that you’re drowning. (It was recently deemed torture when the Americans applied it to the detainees in Iraq, but in SERE School they did it to our own soldiers!)
I moved on to SEAL Cadre, or SBI School, seven weeks of advanced guerrilla warfare in Niland, California. It was all in a jungle context, because we were being prepared for Vietnam. You learned it all, including how to conduct ambushes, kidnappings, and assassinations. And you fired every hand-held weapon known to man.
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 2
