Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [25]
I came back to Letterman’s show a year or two later. The first line out of David’s mouth was, “Well, what have you been up to, and what have you learned in the last year, being governor?” I looked over at him and said, “Well, David, I’ve learned that I can get in trouble without you!” Because I’d been in hot water for a half dozen other things I said or did by then. Letterman roared.
I had some fun with Tim Russert, too, on Meet the Press. Our first exchange, soon after I became governor, went like this:
Tim: “If I call you Jesse ‘The Mind’ Ventura, will you call me Tim ‘The Body’ Russert?”
Me: “Take off your shirt right now, Tim. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Shows like Russert’s would often display a picture of me wearing my pink feathered boa from my wrestling days and say, “Look, there’s the governor of Minnesota!” Well, one day an old college classmate of Tim’s sent us a picture of him from those years, wearing a beard and shoulder-length hair and looking a lot like Meathead from All in the Family. So when I went on Meet the Press the next time and he started remarking about old photos of me, I said, “Speaking of photos, Tim”—and I whipped this one out and asked the cameraman to zoom in—“I want people to see the real Tim Russert!” He looked kind of embarrassed, but he was a good sport about it.
I got a fair shake from Chris Matthews on Hardball, even from Geraldo Rivera. They didn’t take cheap shots and they asked good questions. The thing about most of the media is that they want to reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. They don’t want people to have any heroes. I’ve got nothing against criticism of political figures, but that’s different from a personal attack. It’s easier to do sensationalism and character assassination than focus on the real issues. And they’re obsessed, it seems, with portraying the ugliest side of humanity—the dishonesty, hypocrisy, ego battles, and fights.
How dare Fox, CNN, and MSNBC call themselves news stations? They’re entertainment stations. Think about Anna Nicole Smith. A live feed to the hotel where she died? Why would she deserve this type of coverage? She’s nothing but a silicone-breasted gold digger who married an old guy to get his money. I wouldn’t even list her as the poorest poor man’s Marilyn Monroe. Yet the woman warrants weeks of our attention? At the very same moment, a group of scientists came out and said unequivocally that global warming is being caused by human beings. Did you hear that mentioned on the “news”? No, that day Britney Spears shaved her head. People would rather hear about this than what’s happening in Iraq? Or are we simply being dumbed-down to that point? The people of the United States should demand more than this!
Which is why I go ballistic in a truck stop that can’t manage to switch away from Fox News.
The famous Route 66 out of Oklahoma City doesn’t get traveled much anymore. There’s even grass growing over parts of it. John Steinbeck, when he described the westward migration of the Dust Bowl farmers to California in The Grapes of Wrath, called Route 66 the “Mother Road,” a nickname it still retains. As a kid, I remember Nat King Cole, and later Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, singing about how you could “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.” Then there was the TV show Route 66, featuring these two young guys in a Corvette looking for adventure on the highways of America.
So the road became part of our auto culture mythology. The first drive-through restaurant sprang up along Route 66—Red’s Giant Hamburgs in Springfield, Missouri. And yes, the first McDonald’s, out in San Bernardino, California, also appeared in the mid-1950s on 66. Later, you found restaurants like the Big Texan, which advertised a seventy-two-ounce steak dinner that was free of charge to anybody who could down the whole thing in an hour!
Given all this history, Terry and I had to check