Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  The uprights that hold them are breaking down, so the wave runners are riding directly on the trailer. These are fiberglass craft whose hulls you don’t want to wreck, because that may be a permanent condition. Here we are, in blisteringly hot sun, unable to drive more than five miles an hour. Every mile or two, we have to stop the car, go back and readjust and re-strap the wave runners. We are using the belts from our pants, our camera bags, every belt we can think of imagine to try to secure them to the trailer.

  An excerpt from Terry’s journal: After about five times of straightening the one wave runner, I decided to look for something to tie the board down with and could not find anything, so I took out my brown belt. I had to convince the husband to try it and, lo and behold, it held up pretty well. Then the blue wave runner, the much heavier one, was bouncing all over the place. So we drove at ten miles an hour.

  “Jesse,” Terry says, with a mixture of wonderment and fury, “this is crazy!”

  She is right, of course. In the middle of nowhere, cut off from all communication, not carrying any food or water to speak of. You look around and see no remnants of anything human. Or any greenery either. The land holds a kind of glowing yellowish rock, reminding me of sandstone. The dirt is red, and so are the mountains in the near-distance. This is like being on Mars, I think. Or maybe the moon.

  I remember an old black man from Georgia, more than a hundred years old, who’d been interviewed when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Willie Smith wasn’t buying it. He said, in his opinion, they were out in the deserts of Arizona somewhere. After seeing this portion of the Baja, I start to side a little bit with Willie.

  And I think to myself, wow, maybe my experience in the Navy SEALS ended up preparing me even to walk on Mars. The way the camper is shaking, I guess we may be on foot any minute now.

  Even in our dilemma, it is eerily neat to get out of a car and hear no human sounds at all. I think, my God, we are truly alone. In a place where seeing any living creature, be it a lizard or whatever, is a unique event. After living the life I’ve led on a total schedule 24/7, I feel in some way purified. If there is a Supreme Being, I feel close to it.

  But we sure aren’t going to make it halfway down the Baja by nightfall.

  On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair.

  Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air.

  Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.

  My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim.

  I had to stop for the night.

  —“Hotel California,” The Eagles

  CHAPTER 8

  Longing for Light Rail

  There are 552,446,061,128,648,601,600,000 (five hundred fifty-two septillion, four hundred forty-six sextillion, four hundred seventy-four quintillion, sixty-one quadrillion, one hundred twenty-eight trillion, six hundred forty-eight billion, six hundred one million, six hundred thousand) possible arrangements of the numbers on a bingo card.

  —“Bingo (US),” Wikipedia

  Our map indicates that the beach camp of Puertocitos is fifty-some miles below San Felipe. We make it that far, to a cluster of little stone houses and wooden shacks built around a cove. There is also a Pemex gas station, except the pumps apparently haven’t worked in some time. Instead, a fellow is standing there next to them with some big plastic bottles of high-test unleaded “PREMIO” and regular unleaded “MAGNA.” These cost a pretty peso, too.

  The road goes from bad to worse after Puertocitos, and Terry starts to get a bit frustrated at our slow travel. “At the next cliff,” she suggests, in all seriousness, “why don’t you unhook the trailer and push it over—wave runners and all.”

  I say, “Honey, come on, if we run into anyone along here, I would rather give the wave runners away. Somebody will find a use for them. Out here, they’ll probably take the engine and make a rock-breaker machine out of it. The very next occupied place we see, I promise we’ll drop the wave runners off—and if we never see them again, so be it.”

  We drive on in silence. Being shaken to shit, as the phrase goes, is putting it mildly. Finally we come to a place where the first thing that catches our eye is a group of four small wooden shacks, obviously well cared for. Out in front is a huge resurrected whale skeleton, looking like a prehistoric dinosaur. We pull in. A Mexican gentleman comes out who speaks virtually no English, and I speak virtually no Spanish. Somehow we managed to communicate through pantomiming.

  Terry’s journal, continued: His name was Augustino and he agreed to keep the trailer and wave runners for us. The husband gave him $50, or 500 pesos, and we took photos of him and the husband and the wave runners and the giant whalebone skeletons he had in his yard, and a photo of his white horse. He was a nice man and lived in a stretch of terrible road in a place called Five Isles. Across the road from his house was a gorgeous stretch of beach, and in the water were giant rocks and small islands.

  Augustino asks me where I am going. When I tell him, he rolls his eyes, because it is still many hundreds of miles away. I explain to him that I might not be back for a month or two. He assures me that, whenever I do, the wave runners will still be there. I believe him. Not that I really have much of a choice. I unhook the trailer, he puts rocks underneath the wheels so they can’t move and covers it all with a tarp underneath a shed, so that the elements won’t seep in.

  And you know what? When I do come back to retrieve the trailer and wave runners three weeks later, there they both be, safe and sound.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d run into problems over wave runners. When I became governor, I happened to own four of the personal watercrafts. The legislature had placed a separate tax on them that applied to no other boat, to hire police to keep the people who used wave runners in line. I was getting nicked $50 apiece, $200 a year, for this new surcharge that was, in my opinion, completely unconstitutional. It was the equivalent of putting a tax on all red sports cars. So I managed to have the surcharge repealed.

  I was accused of getting laws passed to benefit myself or my friends. Well, my view is, what else can you govern by except personal experience? That’s why I also did my best to correct what I felt was a ten-year sales tax masquerading as something called license tab fees. You already paid a sales tax when you purchased your car. But, to be able to get your license plates, you also had to pay an additional fee to the state—a percentage based upon the price you paid for the vehicle. I happened to have bought a new Porsche in 1990 and, just to drive my car, it cost me upwards of four thousand dollars in license tab fees over the course of ten years.

  How can you have a licensing system based upon the street value of the car? If you’re going to do something like that, then base it on the weight of the car—that’s what tears up the streets! A Lamborghini doesn’t, in fact it probably does less damage because it’s so aerodynamically perfect. Plus, this policy didn’t apply to motorcycles. You could have the most expensive Harley-Davidson or the cheapest little Honda 50, and the license tab fee stayed at a flat rate.

  So, when Minnesota showed a budget surplus in 2000, I sat down with our Senate majority leader—a Democrat named Roger Moe—and Steve Sviggum, the Republican Speaker of the House. As you might expect, we all had divergent opinions on what to do with the surplus. Finally Moe came up with what I thought was a great idea. He said, “Let’s divide the surplus into thirds, and each of us can do whatever we want with our third.” That’s what we ended up doing. The Democrats applied their third to spending, which didn’t surprise me. The Republicans gave theirs back to the people in the form of mild income tax relief, which also came as no surprise.

  As the independent, I decided to use my third—which came to about $175 million—to reduce the license tab fees to a flat rate: a maximum of $99 for any car more than a year old. This represented a savings of hundreds of dollars for many Minnesotans.

  So my critics, in the legislature and the media, were absolutely right that I governed from a personal approach—taking on what I felt was wr
ong, as a citizen. Here’s another example: a bill was introduced at one point having to do with auto glass replacement. If you had a cracked windshield, the insurance company would be the one to tell you where to go to have it replaced. One of my best friends had his own little auto glass repair business, and I called him. He told me this law was bogus, basically being done to run smaller companies like his out of business. It wouldn’t help the consumer one bit, but the insurance companies could make more money. An attorney I knew verified this. I vetoed the bill. The legislature overrode my veto and passed it into law anyway. That shows you how powerful the insurance lobby is. And it shows you how I governed. I didn’t go to the lobbyists, I went to people I knew who wouldn’t bullshit me.

  Terry’s journal, continued: After we dumped the trailer, we could go about 20 miles an hour with lots of slowdowns to keep from ruining the camper. We even went off-road onto the Baja 1000 track, which at times was smoother, but then we would have to go back on the road. We spent about four hours or more trying to navigate that road, and I think it was about 125 kilometers [a little over seventy miles] long. We had some very treacherous turns on hills going through the mountains that were very scary, with and without the trailer, where I was looking down into canyons that were about a hundred-foot drop or more.

  You can’t make any time on the Baja 1000 track either, because it’s up-and-down like a roller coaster. But at least you don’t get the washboarding. Occasionally, the road consists of volcanic black gravel and, at those times it is passably decent. At a place called Alfonsina’s, a supply point for the next bay, we decide to take a break and stay the night. We go maybe one-tenth of the distance I’ve figured on making today.

  As we get Dexter settled and climb into our bunks, Terry smiles and says: “Now here’s a place where your light-rail transit system would really come in handy!”

  I laugh. “When I take over the Baja,” I say, “that’s the first thing I’m gonna push for!”

  Headline: LARRY KING LIVE: JESSE VENTURA DISCUSSES YOUTH VIOLENCE, POLITICS, AND THE ECONOMY

  KING: What’s the toughest part about not being in a party and governing a state?

  VENTURA: Well, you don’t have any political punch out there. You don’t have spin doctors and people that can try to make it right and all of that stuff. You really kind of stand on an island, and you have to, you know, take your own punches and weather the storm as it goes along. But I like that. I’ve been kind of a renegade and a loner and a rebel my entire life and career. So I’m very comfortable doing that.

  But the nice thing is, too, I don’t have to answer to a political party either very much. You know, I don’t have to get in lockstep with a party, and I don’t have to hire party cronies. I can get the best person for the job regardless of their party without having to hire within a party.

  —CNN, March 14, 2001

  I like to steal a line that I heard Kinky Friedman say when he was running for governor of Texas as an independent: “A politician looks to the next election, a statesman looks to the next generation.” As governor, I tried to accomplish some things that, maybe ten or fifteen years later, people would look back at and say: “Boy, what a bright decision that was. Ahead of its time.”

  The light-rail transit system I fought for might fall under that category. Light rail is the modern version of the streetcar or trolley, using less massive equipment and infrastructure than rapid transit systems. Back in the early fifties, the Twin Cities had probably the best mass transit in the world—a streetcar system that could take you anywhere in the metropolitan area. That is, until the automotive, gasoline, and tire industries lobbied successfully to destroy it. Like they had done in Los Angeles a few years earlier. Thanks to those same people, all the track was pulled up and gotten rid of. I was told while governor that some of the streetcars are still in operation—in New Jersey, where Minnesota ended up selling them.

  I pushed for light rail because I saw it as playing an important role in the future. Especially when it came to transportation, I felt that people need options, choices. Here’s how my thinking evolved. When I’d gone to work for Ted Turner as a commentator for World Championship Wrestling down in Atlanta, in the early 1990s, I used to take a taxi from the airport to CNN Center that would cost between twenty and twenty-five dollars. Along the way you’re subject to an accident on the highway that causes congestion, or whatever it might be. One day, after I’d been doing this for a couple months, a fellow who’d been sitting next to me on the plane walked me over to the Atlanta rail system at the end of the airport. It only cost a dollar and a half, and took me downtown on a very relaxing ride where I could sit and read the paper—instead of flying around in the back of a speeding taxicab wondering if I’d be alive long enough to reach my destination. Reaching downtown, I changed trains quickly, went to the first stop, and had to then walk one block to my place of work. I now knew exactly when I could catch that train to get me back to the airport. It saved me roughly forty-five dollars every round-trip. In the course of a year, that becomes pretty substantial.

  In Atlanta, the mass transit riders were predominantly African-Americans. I remember some young black kids recognizing me once and saying, “What are you doing on here?” I guess they felt that, being a celebrity, I should be riding in a limousine stuck in traffic. I responded, “Do I look stupider than you? You’re on here getting where you need to go for a buck and a half—well, so am I!” They laughed, and accepted that as pretty damned logical.

  After I became governor, I went to Denver to study their light-rail system. They’re way ahead of the curve. They’ve eliminated buses from downtown. Imagine how good that is for traffic—and the environment. It’s the old wagon wheel concept; all the spokes lead to the city center, and those are your trains. Let the buses connect to the trains.

  The Denver officials told me, “Governor, the most difficult problem you’re going to have is acquiring the land.” I said, “No, we’ve already got it.” When I was a kid growing up in south Minneapolis, the state had come in along the Hiawatha Avenue Corridor, confiscated all the homes, and made people leave. I remembered that because friends of mine had been forced to move. They were going to make a highway along there, but somehow it never happened. The corridor sat there and I remember the locals planting gardens along this wide-open piece of land. Now the state had owned the corridor for thirty years, and it was regarded as an ideal place for a portion of the light-rail system.

  The idea was that the system would run for 11.5 miles, connecting the Mall of America to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to downtown, running through South Minneapolis and the Phillips neighborhood. That’s one neighborhood over from where I grew up. I found out that 60 percent of the people who live there can’t afford to own a car. By providing them a means of transportation, they’d now have the ability to get downtown or to the mall, and find at least an entry-level job.

  I tried to explain this one day to the Republican House Speaker, Steve Sviggum—how these people would no longer be stuck in their neighborhood and could go seek gainful employment elsewhere. I’ll never forget his response: “I don’t have anybody elected down there, what do I care?”

  That floored me. I looked at him and said, “Wait a minute, I thought we were elected to serve all the people of the state of Minnesota.” But he just wanted to make sure the Republican state of Minnesota advanced. And in the inner city of Minneapolis, places like the Phillips neighborhood, Republicans don’t even bother to campaign. So those people don’t count.

  I took abuse from talk radio show hosts who called the light-rail plan “the big boondoggle.” Or “the train to nowhere,” as some Republicans preferred to say. Their notion was, we have our cars, Minnesota doesn’t need mass transit. One morning I boarded a Metro Transit bus at my home in suburban Maple Grove, along with transit officials, several lawmakers, and the media. A sign on the bus said, “Ventura Express.” We headed downtown during rush hour, a twenty-mile journey that took about an hour. �
��Bumper to bumper, stop and start,” I intoned through a microphone at the front of the bus.

  A couple of hours later, a House Committee voted down my request for $60 million in light-rail funding. That money was crucial to getting the federal government to kick in another $250 million. The “Ventura Express” ran again that afternoon, back to Maple Grove, “bumper to bumper, stop and start.” A few days later, the Senate Transportation Committee voted to approve the funding.

  But because of the split between the two houses, the legislation didn’t get anywhere. In 2000, I walked into a Senate Transportation Committee to offer personal testimony. “I know this is not the way things are usually done,” I told the legislators. “But I am absolutely committed to breaking the twenty-year-old LRT logjam that has produced millions of dollars in studies but not one foot of progress.”

  The light-rail line also would have linked up to a commuter rail I was trying to get from St. Cloud, sixty miles northwest, to Minneapolis. It would have connected two veterans homes, meaning that veterans wouldn’t have to drive to the state-of-the-art facility in Minneapolis. They could just jump on a commuter rail to downtown, switch to the light rail, go right to the hospital, and probably get home that night. I couldn’t sell the Speaker on that reasoning, either.

  Today, it’s finally moving forward. That’s because the current governor, also a Republican, needed those votes along the I-94 commuter rail line from St. Cloud to Minneapolis, and so the House Speaker finally gave in and came on board. Expected to cost $7 million a year, the light rail system ended up turning a $1 million profit its first year! It’s safe to say that, if I hadn’t fought off legislators on both sides of the aisle who wanted to eliminate any funding for it, the first line would never have been laid. The sad part is, had politics not entered into it, the system would already be finished.