Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  When even the Democratic Senate passed the twenty-four-hour notification bill only a few days after the Republican House, my office was literally besieged with thousands of phone calls from both sides on the issue. I had to either sign the bill, veto it, or allow it to become law without my signature in three days.

  Terry and I were on our way to Washington, where Vice President Gore had invited us to dinner at his home.

  They stayed up past midnight chitchatting about “everything under the sun.” Their wives went horseback riding together. They chuckled at each other’s jokes, took turns poking fun at reporters and even dressed alike, in chinos and polo shirts.

  Headline: Gore’s New Pal, a Favorite of Independent Voters

  But the broader political point Mr. Gore seemed intent on hammering home was his own growing closeness to Mr. Ventura, a former professional wrestler who won election on the Reform Party line in 1998 and remains a favorite of independent voters across the nation.

  —The New York Times, June 23, 2000

  I like Al Gore a great deal. The first time we met, the Gores had come to Minnesota after I became governor. My daughter, Jade, was in the Cavalcade of Roses horse show, and they sat in the audience. His Washington residence was the old Naval Observatory, where they have the big telescope. A highlight of our night there was when my First Lady beat Tipper in pool.

  I spoke with Al about the abortion bill situation. I told him the whole scenario, how I was taking a tremendous amount of heat, being called a flip-flopper and a bunch of other names because, as a candidate, I’d said I had no particular problem with the bill.

  “What do you do in a situation like this?” I asked the vice president.

  “It’s simple,” he told me. “You throw everything else out of the equation, and you go with what you believe is right.”

  The gave me the courage to stick to my convictions. I went on National Public Radio in Washington and, when asked about the twenty-four-hour waiting period, I said: “It’s not like driving into a McDonald’s and pulling up and saying, ‘I want a number-four cheeseburger.’ You have to make an appointment.” I went on ABC’s Good Morning America and told Charles Gibson: “Really, what I think the question comes down to is, how involved in our personal, private lives do we want to interject government?”

  I made an offer to the right wing: “I’ll sign this bill if you make all optional surgical procedures have a twenty-four-hour waiting period, which would include liposuction.” They were appalled.

  Back in Minnesota, I announced my decision on the bill in the governor’s reception room. No lawmakers, lobbyists, or members of the public were allowed. I read my statement, and took no questions from the media. Security was tight, because of all the emotion this arouses in people.

  I said: “I have decided it is wrong for government to assume a role in something I have always believed was between a woman, her family, her doctor, and, if she chooses, her clergy.” And I vetoed the bill.

  The next year, the House Republicans decided to attach the “twenty-four-hour notification” to a Health and Human Services bill that set aside money for health care, nursing homes, and welfare for low-income citizens. They were basically making hostages out of the sick, the elderly, and the poor. More political gamesmanship, and the Senate went for it, too!

  I vetoed this bill also, and sent it back asking the legislature to remove the four pages of abortion language. That was the year I had to threaten a government shutdown. They ended up giving in.

  Let’s talk about a few of the other “heresies,” in the eyes of the religious zealots. President Bush supports a ban on abortion, but opposes stem-cell research. That clearly shows me that he has more concern for the unborn than for the living. In fact, he apparently has no problem with sending the living off to die in a stupid war. Unlike what’s happening over in Iraq, stem-cell research seems like a great potential boon to humanity.

  I have a strong belief that you are in charge of your body, whether male or female. It’s the house you’re living in for your entire existence—your temple, as the more religious might say. When that body gives out, as happened to Terry Schiavo, I also think the family has a right to “pull the plug.” Where was the public outcry over what the U.S. Congress did in the Schiavo case? After all those years on life support, Congress voted to keep the woman alive, when even her husband wanted to let her go. What Congress did was actually a violation of the Constitution—which states, unequivocally, that you cannot pass a law for one person. Was that done out of arrogance? Naïvete or stupidity? Bowing down to the religious right constituency, perhaps?

  Another of the religious right’s scams is marching into public school science classes and trying to mandate teaching of “creation science,” as opposed to evolution. Somehow, they put evolutionism and creationism in the same category—believing that one makes the other impossible. But aren’t these two separate systems of knowledge? One is a scientific theory, the other is a religious doctrine. It’s kind of like comparing the law of gravity to the Sermon on the Mount. Evolution doesn’t pretend to disprove the Bible’s version of creation, or the belief in an all-powerful being as “prime mover” of the universe. Science only deals with what’s observable, definable, and measurable. It’s open to all possibilities, unlike creationism, which is a closed book. So leave evolution to the science teachers, and creation to the Sunday school of the parents’ choosing.

  I find it one of the ironies of our times that DNA evidence is now considered indisputably scientific when it comes to convicting or releasing criminals. Yet, to many evangelicals, DNA evidence about how old the earth is or when we humans arrived here is dismissed—because the “literal truth” of the Bible says something different.

  Given how many convicts awaiting capital punishment have been cleared because of DNA evidence, I no longer support the death penalty. Minnesota doesn’t have this on the books, so I’m thankful that, as governor, I never had to face the decision of whether to execute someone on death row. Again, I simply don’t believe that government has the inherent right to make those kinds of choices.

  I don’t think that patriotism should be forced upon people, either. Patriotism comes from within. I learned about it from my mom and dad, from knowing that they went and fought in World War II. I don’t find it patriotic to make our youth pledge allegiance to their government. In fact, wasn’t that what the Hitler Youth did? Or something maybe the Taliban do today?

  So when the Minnesota legislature passed a Pledge of Allegiance bill that would have required public school students to recite the Pledge, I had my veto pen ready again. That was the way my fourth, and final, legislative session ended. Let me expand on my reasoning a little bit. Take the “under God” part of the Pledge. If there is a child in school whose parents are atheists, why should there be a reference to God that they are forced to say? Yet what kid won’t do so, rather than face the pressure from their peers if they refuse?

  Especially at these young ages, I call it brainwashing to make it mandatory to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. If a teacher wants to make this part of the classroom, all they need do is simply say, “You know, I’m very patriotic. And every morning when you come into class, I’m going to stand up and say a Pledge of Allegiance to my country. You’re welcome to join me if you’d like.”

  In my opinion, this is even more apropos in a free society where we’re supposed to be able to protest our government if we don’t like what it’s doing. I saw a great bumper sticker recently, on a car being driven by an elderly couple in Minnesota. I’m going to use it now whenever I talk about my opposition to the Iraq War and to George Bush. It said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

  Guess who said that? Thomas Jefferson. He is a helluva lot higher on my list than Bush, when it comes to who created this country and who knows what America is supposed to be all about.

  “All that inspired by what the priests in Baja used to do to the Baja Indians?” Terry wants to know. I a
dmit it’s pretty easy to get me standing on my soapbox, whether or not there’s anybody listening, something I do wonder about. We were back on Highway 1 again. Not far below San Ignacio, three spectacular volcanic peaks called “Las Tres Virgenes” (the Three Virgins) crown the horizon at more than six thousand feet. They were capped by clouds, and rather startling as they rose ponderously above a sea of cactus. Our guidebook says the volcano last erupted 27,000 years ago, but it still holds seething, molten rock, seeming to promise a future return to power.

  As Terry finishes reading that passage aloud, she adds, “Reminds me of somebody.”

  “Yeah, I’m still seething, but it hasn’t been that long!”

  I think back to a headline I saw on a Mexican newspaper when we stopped for gas. In the U.S., the Virginia Tech shooting spree had just occurred. “USA 33, Mexico 20,” the headline read.

  “That’s because Mexico had twenty people killed in the drug war that day,” I tell Terry. “People are being gunned down, even governments in Latin American are being bought out and overthrown because the drug cartels have more money and more firepower. It’s all because of our war on drugs—because of the high prices they’re getting are coming from us.”

  “I remember you telling me what your mom said right before she died,” Terry says.

  “She was coherent until the very end. ‘You know, this war on drugs is identical to prohibition of alcohol in the twenties,’ she told me. I said, ‘Why is that, Mom?’ And she said, ‘Because when something is prohibited, the gangsters get rich. In the twenties, it was Al Capone and all those guys. Now it’s the same thing with the big drug dealers.’”

  It’s long been another pet peeve of mine. I wish that Canada and Mexico would legalize marijuana, because that would put the United States on an island. You’d have two countries proving, like the city of Amsterdam has, that making drugs legal is not a negative formula, but the best way to deal with the problem. Making something illegal doesn’t mean it goes away, it just means criminals are going to run it.

  Why not treat marijuana in the same way as alcohol and tobacco? It’s so widely used, and it has medical purposes that are denied by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Numerous doctors and private studies have clearly shown that medicinal marijuana is a painkiller that can help cancer and AIDS patients, and can also be used to treat glaucoma. The latest breakthrough is that it helps Alzheimer’s patients. The hippie generation used to be warned that, if you smoke pot, pretty soon you won’t be able to remember what happened two days ago. Well, turns out it does something to protect a chromosome in the Alzheimer’s patient’s head to allow them to keep their memory. Since this has now been proven, I wonder what the next excuse will be for not legalizing it. (And yes, I have inhaled. Very few didn’t who came of age in the sixties.)

  On the Internet, I read that if you factor in the price per ounce of marijuana, it’s now the largest cash crop in America. It’s passed corn, wheat, and soybeans. But you have to look at how things are skewed by keeping marijuana illegal. Roughly an ounce of top-grade marijuana today costs around four hundred bucks. Well, how much is an ounce of corn, wheat, or soybeans? You’re lucky if it’s two cents! They don’t even bother to measure these in less than bushels. What would a bushel of marijuana be worth, going at $400 an ounce? That’s why it brings in more revenue than all those other crops.

  The fact is, growing hemp for industrial purposes would make it a very useful plant. It can be a fiber for clothing, a source of paper, even an alternative fuel. Canada is already using hemp this way. I simply don’t see that cannabis grows wild on earth just so humans can eradicate it.

  Of course, the work of eradicating marijuana creates jobs within law enforcement. If we made it legal, and taxed it like we do tobacco and alcohol, maybe those law enforcement people could start paying more attention to murders and terrorism. I also think it’s time for people to rise up against the prescription drug industry, the biggest opponent of legalization. You have to remember that they don’t want anything out there that they can’t make a profit from. Marijuana is a weed, and that means you can grow it, essentially free. This doesn’t sit well with the pharmaceutical industry, and I think our Food and Drug Administration is nothing but a puppet whose strings the industry pulls.

  I continue to muse about the political process and what’s happened to it. “You know,” I say to Terry, “it’s a myth that somehow all these career politicians are something special. My election killed that mystique. It wasn’t my career. I wasn’t created by the system that maintains only these supposed ‘leaders’ can do the job. You mean a dumb old wrestler could come in and be the chief executive in charge of a $28 billion budget?”

  “We can’t have that!” Terry echoes my thought.

  “By God, then people will think the gas station attendant might be able to do it! But in essence, isn’t that what we’re supposed to be? According to our founding fathers, we’re a government of the people, where you bring to bear whatever your life experiences are. Not today.”

  “You’re also supposed to work for the good of the state, so . . .” I interrupt, “Today you have to be created by the political parties to lead the country.”

  “Paul Wellstone wasn’t really like that,” Terry says. “But I think the saddest example of what it can all devolve into was his memorial service.”

  “Oh,” I say, and take a deep breath. It was painful to remember the night. “For the first half hour, I actually said to myself, ‘By God, they’re going to do it right.’ They had the opportunity to be above it all. I guess I should have expected they’d blow it.”

  Senator Wellstone was killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota on October 25, 2002. This was only eleven days before his potential reelection, in a crucial race that might determine whether the Democrats would control the U.S. Senate. A lot of people have speculated that somebody might have tampered with his plane, but I don’t believe there was any conspiracy. I remember the morning he crashed, and the weather was horrible. I wouldn’t have flown that day, especially in a twin-engine private plane.

  Wellstone and I did not get along very well, by his choosing, I think. He didn’t like me, because he’d been considered “the man of the people” and I kind of took his title from him—winning as an independent with even a more grass-roots campaign than his had been. He was quite belligerent to me once, when we were both in Washington. Toward the end, he started to mellow and soften up a bit.

  Of course, I must admit I had once given him “the look.” Senator Wellstone had never served in the military, but as a politician he did a lot for vets, which of course I respected. One Veterans Day, we were onstage together at a function out at a VA Hospital. They announced to us that the Veteran’s Band would be playing the four different songs of the services—including “Anchors Away” for the Navy and “Caissons” for the Army. When a service’s song was played, they asked members of that service to stand.

  My branch, the Navy, happened to be last. The Army’s was first. The Senator was sitting next to Colonel Lord, a good friend of mine, a former “helo” pilot in Vietnam. As they started to play the Army’s song, naturally Colonel Lord rose to attention. I glanced over, and Senator Wellstone was standing, too! So I gave him “the look”—which meant, “Excuse me, senator, at what point did you take an oath to give a few years of your life to Army service? You stand when they play the National Anthem, but this is not a photo-op. This is for the guys who actually put on a uniform.”

  Obviously the senator hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to what was going on. I think someone from his staff came over and whispered to him, and he then quickly sat back down.

  Of course, what happened to Senator Wellstone, his wife, and one of their children was a terrible tragedy. A memorial service was held in Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota and broadcast live on national TV. A number of high profile politicians attended, including President Clinton and his wife, and Vice President Gore. I told Terry
as we arrived, “I’m here to honor the senator and his death and his family, but if this turns political, we’re leaving.”

  TERRY: We went to a little get-together beforehand. It was just the Wellstone family and a few other politicians. The husband of Paul and Sheila’s daughter, who was also killed in the crash, came over and hugged me and cried on my shoulder. It was so touching, so very sad.

  But I knew it was going to go badly when, as we walked into the arena, some of the mourners booed me. They also booed Trent Lott, the Republican Senate minority leader. Granted, Lott and Wellstone were probably polar opposites—but the senator from Mississippi was nonetheless traveling a considerable distance to pay his respects.

  After an hour and a half, the service was going on and on. It had ceased to be a memorial. It had turned into a campaign rally for a Democratic successor to Wellstone. As things deteriorated, I sat there grinding my teeth.

  TERRY: When he sits too long, he starts shaking his leg, wanting to rock and move. He’s just that way. I always carry gum because my mouth gets dry all the time from taking allergy medicine. So I was going to have some, and I handed a piece to him, because then he could move his jaw instead of bouncing his leg.

  By that time, I probably needed a piece of gum because I was getting so pissed off. Later on, Al Franken took me to task in his book for chewing gum at a funeral. When I ran into him on an airplane, I explained what had been happening inside me. We had a respectful conversation, and we’re on good terms now.

  Minnesota law required that Wellstone’s name be removed from the ballot, and the replacement candidate the Democrats had chosen was former Vice President Walter Mondale. I’ll never forget Rick Kahn, one of Wellstone’s closest friends, saying to the crowd: “I’m begging you to help us win this Senate election for Paul Wellstone.” I found this extremely offensive at a funeral!