I have this irrational hatred for Der Gropinator's accent.....

[Webster Green]

I know why I hate what he's saying,...its all evil, right wing bullshit... but, aside from that, I can't stand to listen to that fucking accent. It really pisses me off when I hear it.

This is the first time I remember being turned off by someone having an accent, and it is totally irrational. I think I just despise everything about Governor Asshole.:mad:

[fasttense]

1. I know what you mean.

My first language was Spanish so I really don't mind other people's accents but the Gropinator just irritates me to no end. Maybe because I think he sounds like Hitler.

[Warpy]

10. There is nothing remotely beautiful

or sexy about a German accent, plus we've had movies for years associating the accent with mad professors, Nazis and nutball psychiatrists.

[skylarmae]

2. recall, recall, recall!

It's never too late to wise up and fly right, California...

[blogbear]

3. Don't blame you! He's a user and reminds me of..

Marie Antoinette..

[slackmaster]

4. I'm glad you recognize this feeling as irrational

I have a German surname. Hatred of Germanic people was still common in the culture in the '60s when I was a child. I got teased about my name.

These negative stereotypes are still common in the media. Please try to think of us as harmless Krauts like Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz in Hogan's Heroes. ;)

[Webster Green]

7. Ha!......OK, I will do that!

For you!

But I don't know if I can do it for shrivel-dick.

[EFerrari]

5. Austria feels the same way.

They cancelled a monument to him and were considering revoking his citizenship over his pro-death penalty stance.

Der Grope's options are pretty limited and getting more so.

[tridim]

6. I didn't mind it when he was just a crappy actor

I have the same reaction now that I have for the war criminal Kissinger's accent.

[EFerrari]

8. Thinking over what slackmaster said,

Ahnood made a zillion dollars exploiting the stereotype, so it's actually no accident that people respond to him that way.

[GoldenOldie]

9. Ahnold's speech impediment may be due to his use of steroids.

German/Austrian speech although sometimes hard and guttural can be fascinating to hear. I agree that Ahnold's is irritating.....like the sound of fingernails accross a blackboard. The tongue is a muscle and if steroids are used to build body muscle, it had to affect his tongue. Viewing the recent vacation photo's of Ahnold in Hawaii, shows his muscles are now sagging.....one can only assume that with his aging sagging his tongue is flopping around his mouth like a wet fish when he speaks. What an image!

[peacetalksforall]

11. He is absolutely loathsome to me. Everything about him. n/t

[Lexingtonian]

12. yeah

He's extremely annoying. For me, as a bilingual person, what bothers me is not even the pronounciation per se. Californians- fascists and immigrants and liberals- gave him an awful lot of leeway on that a year and a half ago, for different reasons, and that was incredibly frustrating. Republicans really exploited that first (and maybe second) generation immigrant Californians really discounted the contents of what he was saying out of unwarranted sympathy.

Everything else about the way he speaks is appalling. His pronounciation, syntax, and choice in ideas in how he replies to questions- trust me on this- screams Yokel to native speakers of German. The only reasonable explanation is his raising in the Burgenland...that's Austria's border region with the Slavic world (i.e. Slovenia) which is rural and due to the somewhat questionable ethnic Germanic-ness of its society, notorious for its compensatory fascism. Schwarzenegger didn't have to identify with Naziism or fascism, didn't have to make a conscious choice at all to get imbued with that way of looking at the world- which is far less ideological than people believe. It's far more a mix of cynicism and provincialism deficient or unclear in moral limits, and adding on a formal political label brings no advantages. (Which is, incidently, why Republicans embraced him so easily- most of them are opportunists too, afloat on a sea of bad ideas from the past which are resorted to whenever there's a need for an excuse.)

What bothers me most deeply is the way is the way he thinks and talks when off the script the ex-Wilson schemers give him. The ideas and phrasings strike people as wierd and somewhat interesting and something like original. All I hear is medieval European peasantry's ideas about the world, defined by Nature (both as wonder and as terror) in coldly applied Laws Of Nature, with these interpreted in the form of inhuman deities and inhuman rules to which the individual must conform, if necessary by coercion.

It hurts me to think of all the Holocaust survivors now in California who have to deal with these images and words every day or every other day, see this revival of medieval Europe (and they know it as a Heart of Darkness) show up yet again in a part of the world where it truly doesn't belong at all- where, in fact, something like an Other Israel lies.

Of course, other parts of Californian society- the American Religious Right and the colonial plutocracy that lies at the heart of the California Republican Party- are a particular offshoot of medieval Europe in all its spiritualized materialism, puritanism, occultism, and paganism-with-a-Christian-facade.