Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [39]
—former President Harry Truman, December 1963
The longer we drive through Texas, the more I realize the monotony of American culture today. Whether you’re in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, or El Paso, it’s the same stores, the same everything, and it’s continuous. It’s not just McDonald’s—every sit-down place is now part of a chain. The only way to get away from it is to pull off onto a side road and go into some Podunk town. One time Terry and I finally find a little rib joint—we and two others are the only white people in there, and what a moment of fresh air!
What are we doing to our country? I wonder. Lord, I think, give me one of the so-called underdeveloped nations, where I can walk into a local man’s shop with its own unique character, not a conglomerate like Wal-Mart that offers everything under the sun.
Coming in east of El Paso, right in the residential section—which I’m sure wasn’t residential when it was built—is a huge oil refinery. Now the city has expanded out to contain it. All the wealthy citizens live across on the New Mexico side. El Paso itself is down in a valley and, as we cross it east to west, the smog lingering beneath the mountains looks almost worse than L.A. I realize, here’s another place with environmental destruction I wouldn’t want to live in.
For a whole day, we are literally going down the highway with all the NASCAR people. They had a big race in Dallas and now they’re going to Phoenix. One thing about NASCAR—they’ve got some money! You ought to see these rigs! The best looking semis I’ve ever seen in my life, all polished and chromed, freshly painted. State of the art.
An excerpt from Terry’s journal: We were going through Flagstaff, a really big down grade to Phoenix. Husband was in a really good mood. On a sixty-degree grade, he took his foot off the gas and was going fifty-five miles an hour without any help from the engine. I was looking over the side of a gorge about fifty feet below us and said, “Hey, could you slow down a bit?” And husband said, “I’m not losin’ face by slowin’ down, I’m goin’ out NASCAR, baby!”
We stay a couple of days with old friends in Phoenix. They haven’t seen us since my governor days, and we have a lot to catch up on. They’ve gotten into studying Eastern religions, and I notice a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead on a coffee table. Which, of course, inspires me to tell the story of my meeting with the Dalai Lama.
We have a Tibetan population in Minnesota. I don’t think they’re a huge population anywhere, but we seem to have a fairly substantial number. So, when the Dalai Lama was traveling the country in the spring of 2001, he came and spoke to a joint session of our legislature. I was scheduled to visit with him privately for twenty to thirty minutes in my office.
As the meeting date approached, I thought, what am I going to ask this guy? “Mr. Dalai Lama, please tell me the meaning of life?” I mean, how many times has he heard that from people? What could I ask that I’ll bet no one in the world ever has?
Then it came to me. I’m a big fan of the movie Caddyshack, as any golfer is. Remember the great scene with Bill Murray, where his character—Carl the Groundskeeper—is telling the kid how he used to be a caddy? And who did he get but the Dalai Lama himself? Big hitter, even wearing all his robes. At the end of the round, he figures, “The Lama’s gonna stiff me.” So he says, “Hey, Lama, how about a little something for the effort here?” That’s when the Dalai Lama tells him, “Gunga gunga la gunga.” Which means, “When you die, you’ll have total consciousness.” And Bill Murray says, “So I’ve got that going for me!”
I was really curious whether the Dalai Lama had ever seen Caddyshack. But I wouldn’t just out-and-out ask him, I wanted to get a feel for him first. He sat down across from me and my family in his flowing robe. Apparently he had done his homework on me, because he wanted to know what diving under the water was like. I told him, “You need to do