9-29-05, 9:02 am

COMPARING the destruction of the twin towers with the Reichstag fire is not likely to win you any accolades in US government circles, but then Gary Indiana is not out to win praise from them.

This slim volume is a rhetorical tour de force, a diatribe of barbed wit and political acumen, meticulously attacking the neocon US, its brutality, corruption, fundamentalist insanity and democratic deficit.

Indiana is a highly intelligent observer who cuts though the subterfuge and the cosmetic bloom of health to reveal the rotting flesh beneath.

A testosterone-fuelled, muscle-bound movie star is elected governor of California - the most populous US state and with the sixth largest economy in the world.

This is democracy, Hollywood-style. You couldn't satirise such a process. It is already a grotesque caricature of capitalism taken to its ludicrous extreme.

A pea-brained icon for the bodily inadequate and mentally challenged is marketed as a capable politician able to solve society's woes.

Like Conan the Barbarian or Terminator I and II, he will wipe out health-care worries, poverty and the energy crisis with his sci-fi laser guns. Welcome to a tinsel town dream world. Schwarzenegger plays the dream for all that it's worth. He is the young immigrant, fleeing a post-nazi Austria under constant threat from Soviet tanks and 'socialist' governments.

In the land of the free, no dream is unrealisable.

This one-time small-town body builder was catapulted to stardom as a pneumatically inflated screen hero in second-rate sci-fi fantasies.

And, now, he has been politically inflated too, by a supine press controlled by big business and an electorate conned by glitz rather than policies.

As has been cynically remarked, politics is showbiz for ugly people, but, now, we have the 'beautiful people' taking over this stage too.

When politics becomes celebrity and spin, democracy becomes an empty concept.

Warren Beatty's film Bulworth, which had a similar scenario, was meant as a satire, but reality, as Indiana demonstrates, has left it standing.

He has done a wonderful job in peeling off the layers of packaging from US Democracy Inc and exposing the Californian gubernatorial election for what it was - a travesty of democracy.

He gives us a whole number of interesting and unsavoury facts, which the local press by and large chose to ignore, no doubt following Ronald Reagan's philosophy expressed in his memorable words. 'Facts are stupid things.'

Schwarzenegger Syndrome by Gary Indiana (New Press)

From Morning Star