Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [4]
—Dick Russell, Eye of the Whale
When you’re at a crossroads, sometimes all you can do is take a reprieve from the fast lane. As I begin to write this book, I’m facing probably the most monumental decision of my fifty-six years on this planet. Will I run for president of the United States, as an independent, in 2008? Or will I stay as far away from the fray as possible, in a place with no electricity, on a remote beach in Mexico?
Right now I’m leaving Minnesota, where I was born and raised, been a pro wrestler and a radio talk-show host, and have served as both a mayor and a governor. I don’t know how much of an expatriate I’ll become. Looking at the political landscape of America today, my outrage knows few bounds.
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