Globally it’s been a week to make you long for precedented times, with the current US President’s marbles being publicly counted mere months from an election that will give him the nuke codes for another four years.
And this while the last one looks unlikely to face criminal prosecution for his role in efforts to overturn the election he lost.
At home it’s been a week of divisions, not common ground, with anger from WA farmers over the Federal Government’s live sheep ban and rogue Labor Senator Fatima Payman officially breaking up with the party, as though her status as an independent is what’s been missing in the struggle to bring peace to the Middle East.
In dark times, it’s important to seek light. My unlikely source of it? Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Not Commando-era Arnie, hoisting a tree trunk like it’s a French baguette. Not Terminator 2: Judgment Day-era Arnie, in which he’s the killing machine humanity needs to fight back against AI (although give us another five years and maybe we’ll need him, too).
I’m talking about 2024 Schwarzenegger, who has carved out a new identity as what I can only describe as a life coach/wellness guru/soothing balm to the frightening, exhausting and the polarising.
The first I really knew of this new Schwarzenegger was via social media when he popped up with a list of things to do for a good life.
Here we go, I thought when I heard about it: will it be steroids or green juice Schwarzenegger is flogging, I wonder? (And how many housekeepers should one be clandestinely shagging, Arnie, to optimise metabolism function? The science is so unclear on this point.)
Instead what I read was refreshingly sensible.
“You should mostly eat food you know is healthy, there is no magic food,” Schwarzenegger wrote.
“You should also occasionally let yourself eat delicious food you know isn’t healthy. Otherwise what’s the point? . . . You should know there isn’t a magic pill, a hack or a diet and most of that cr.p people put in their lists is just meant to confuse you so you pay them to figure it out for you with whatever they are selling.”
Schwarzenegger, of course, was also “selling” something: the newsletter, podcast and training plan that are all part of Brand Schwarzenegger.
But there was something in his no-nonsense advice that tickled me. Sure, it was obvious — another line of his: “the only trick I know is that you have to work” could equally have come from the coach of a scrappy team of underdogs in a B-grade sports movie — but it felt like an antidote to the usual wellness swill.
It’s not just the wellness stuff that has turned Schwarzenegger into an off-camera hero.
Schwarzenegger, by no means a perfect man or politician, reaches across the divide, carving out a bulls..t-free zone in a world ankle-deep in the stuff.
Schwarzenegger, a former Republican Governor of California, confounds conservative stereotypes by being not just a believer in climate change but a campaigning environmentalist — Greta Thunberg is a hero to him.
The bodybuilding champion, whose physique was so memorably described by Australian wordsmith Clive James as “a brown condom full of walnuts” is mostly vegan.
After the 2021 riot at the US Capitol Schwarzenegger, whose father joined the Nazi Party, compared it to events in nazi Germany and was scathing of then-president Donald Trump’s lies.
“My father and our neighbours were misled also with lies. I know where such lies lead,” he said.
In a world that feels increasingly polarised, Schwarzenegger, by no means a perfect man or politician, reaches across the divide, carving out a bulls..t-free zone in a world ankle-deep in the stuff.
He reminds us that we all want a happy life, a better future for our grandkids and to buy a bag of groceries without selling a vital organ to do so, regardless of who we vote for and what we look like.
If you think I’ve written a column about Schwarzenegger to avoid addressing more serious topics, you might be right. If you find it deeply simplistic to suggest that one man — one very buff, very rich man — can unite us all, you’re probably right about that, too.
But just as watching Schwarzenegger impale a baddie with a pipe in the 1985 classic Commando, delivering the line “let off some steam, Bennett” brings joy to all who see it, 2024 Schwarzenegger brings a different kind of joy in his ability to straddle the political divide and his refusal to be polarised.
He may not be the hero we expected, but he’s the hero we have.