Terminating the Terminator's Speech at the Santa Monica Community College Graduation Ceremony

Josh Saxe

One way of thinking about the role of far left activism is that it helps channel people's individual uneasiness, anger and frustration about the social system into collective grassroots direct action outside the channels of capitalist "democracy." A group of us in Los Angeles had the honor of playing that role in bringing together people's anger when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the "B" movie actor governor of California and "leader" of the world's sixth largest economy came as the keynote speaker to the Santa Monica Community College graduation ceremony. He had helped cut the education budget, groped and sexually harassed women, and attacked immigrants and teachers.

We drowned out his entire speech, getting hundreds of people in the audience chanting, whistling and booing.

This action made headlines around the world, even a Japanese newspaper wrote: "SANTA MONICA - California's movie star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, long used to public adulation, has been heckled and booed by hostile students and teachers over his contentious political reform plans." Another article, syndicated across the country, stated: "Virtually every word of the governor's commencement address was accompanied by catcalls, howls, and whistles from many in the audience. Others held up signs protesting the governor's cuts in education." Other newspapers closer to home delivered even more bad press to the Terminator and pumped some more lead into his declining approval rating.

So, let's go blow-by-blow. By methodical means anti-Arnold students donated their extra graduation ceremony tickets into a central pool set up by our group, Progressive Alliance, a radical community-student group that emphasizes direct action.

On the day of the commencement a public demonstration organized by the anti-war coalition ANSWER converged outside the community college, and we went through the crowd, recruiting people to come inside with us to heckle Arnold. We divided the stadium where the graduation took place into 4 sections, and divided into 4 teams of about 15, and before the commencement we circulated leaflets explaining our reasoning for the action and asking people to join in. We told parents and family and friends of the graduates that we were planning to respect the entire ceremony to honor our friends who would walk the stage, but that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has cut the education budget, made it harder for teachers to get tenure and had praised the Minutemen anti-immigrant vigilantes, was an insult to students and their families and had to be disrupted.

We were silent and respectful throughout the entire boring, cliché, and platitudinous ceremony. Then Conan the Barbarian ascended the stage. Some people cheered. What we did is captured (only partly, this is just one of four groups) on video here:http://www.la.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/129219.php. We started booing and chanting for a few minutes, while some others cheered for the Terminator. Then they stopped cheering. Then we kept booing, chanting and blowing whistles, and others began to join the 60 or so who had planned to do this from the beginning.

The media reported "hundreds" had booed him. Then he tried to speak. Then we continued to drown him out. Then a group of faculty on stage turned their backs on him. Then some faculty held up anti-Schwarzenegger signs, and we raised banners we had smuggled in, while continuing to chant, and the direct action group CODEPINK dropped a three-story anti-Arnold banner from a nearby parking structure.

Then the cops came up and started confiscating banners and we chanted louder: "The students, united, will never be defeated." This continued to the end - our friends who were graduating and were within 20 feet of the Kindergarten Cop said they couldn't make out what he was saying. The faculty on stage that heard Arnold Schwarzenegger leave after his speech had been entirely drowned out heard him say "SHIT, FUCK!" - he got into a golf cart with some of his secret service people and left immediately.

E.P. Thompson talked about how early English workers got satisfaction simply by "tugging the chain" of the ruling class - pissing them off, humiliating them, shaming them, giving them a tiny piece of the banal humiliations of daily life their privilege rests upon.

I'm sure when people saw what we did on local news, and on CNN that night and the next day, there were a lot of smiles around the country and even around the world.

Josh Saxe, 23, is a member of Progressive Alliance and Labor's Militant Voice. He is a graduate student in History and substitute teacher.