Obsession of a down

Democrats should listen to Arnold

It’s Monday, and it’s raining, raining, all day it’s raining, in Georgia. A category 5 hurricane named Melissa is slowly moving toward Jamaica, and by Friday it will be in the North Atlantic. The models don’t see it as a threat to the U.S. east coast, but I am praying for the Jamaicans. Friday is Halloween, a holiday I detest. It’s a good thing that Georgia high schools are playing football on Friday, so many of the kids who’d normally be prowling the neighborhood looking for TikTok challenge action (read: trouble) will be instead working on their CTE diagnoses. Being a marching band family, we will be at the game, praise God and His angels for this year’s calendar.

Image: Grok

One of my favorite filmmakers produces documentaries about food. Specifically, Alvin Zhou makes films about people concerned with the quality of their product to the point where it becomes obsession. The latest is about Hundred Burgers, based in Valencia, Spain. For the second year in the row, the seven restaurant chain (Madrid and Valencia), has won the “World’s Best Steaks” best burger in the world category. To describe the owners, Alex González-Urbón and Ezequiel Maldjian, devotion to their craft as “obsession” would not do the word justice. In the film, the rancher who supplies Hundred Burgers their aged beef refers to the act of slaughtering his cattle as “sacrificing” the steer, which is done in pairs so the animal does not die alone.

Everything, from the buns, to the cheese, to the barbecue sauce (which is made daily by one of the owner’s mother), to the smoked pulled pork (which is part of a side dish, not one of the burgers) is lovingly and painstakingly brought to as close to perfection as Golzález-Urbón and Maldjain can achieve. Their secret, they tell Zhou, is a spreadsheet showing the exact quantities of everything they sell, make, and all the ingredients to those dishes. They have determined the exact time, to the fraction of a second, it takes to grind a kilogram of ground beef. On the company’s internal Telegram, photos of the “burger of the month” are send to the owners daily, for their approval and feedback.

Hundred Burgers is obsessed, in a good way, with making the best burgers in the world, and it seems their customers, along with people who evaluate burgers in light of unattainable perfection, agree.

In all of Zhou’s food films, the proprietors of each establishment show the kind of obsession and absolute devotion to what they are making. Sushi in Japan, coffee and cakes in Korea, BBQ in Texas, all operating at the peak of their ability, with a helping of love—the kind of love a parent has for their kids—thrown in for motivation—mark the best food stories. It helps that Zhou is an excellent filmmaker. He also cooks, appearing on Andrew Rea’s the Binging with Babish Youtube channel, which is rebranded as the Babish Culinary Universe, but I think Zhou’s best talent is filmmaking.

I digress. The topic here is obsession, and that condition can lead to either very good or very bad results. I would argue that obsession rarely leads elsewhere than the tail end of a graph depicting mainstream versus extreme results. Sometimes it leads to tragic results, like Mark David Chapman murdering John Lennon because he was obsessed with Holden Caulfield, the fictional central character in “The Catcher in the Rye.” John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan because Hinckley was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster, who starred in the movie Taxi Driver.

However, many times obsession, like with foodies who make delicious burgers, coupled with discipline and self-control, with an added heaping helping of raw talent and DNA, leads to impressive results. It matters as to what the obsessed person has as the object of their interest. One person in particular who knows quite a bit about this from various angles and incarnations is Arnold Schwarzenegger. As a young man, Arnold was obsessed with bodybuilding. The only way to get to the “Mr. Universe” level of competition is to be obsessed, to the point of each muscle, ripple, and tendon getting personal and disciplined attention. Obsession is thousands of hours spent in the gym, pumping iron (which happens to be the title of the documentary, “Pumping Iron,” about Arnold and bodybuilding in general) to get the perfect form.

As a young bodybuilding star, Arnold learned quickly that in every thing, no matter how weird, obsession is the key to determination and “making it.” Other than the object of obsession, that thing which must be pursued and captured, every endeavor, no matter how weird, is just another “thing.” Once you learn the ins and outs of that thing, it’s not so weird anymore, because learning it, you “get” the pursuit, and why people do very strange things in order to feed their obsession toward a goal. It’s why Arnold was able to walk into a producer’s office—a small man—trying to get a role, and ask the man behind the desk why his desk is so large for such a small man. He was thrown out for his candor, but did get the role. Hollywood is a very strange place, and Arnold learned its obsessions well.

Politics is even more strange than Hollywood, and that’s why I selected Arnold as an example of someone who really understands obsession. Honestly, I think if the Constitution did not prohibit a naturalized American citizen from running for president, we’d have already seen President Schwarzenegger serve two terms as as Republican. (Then again, many things prophesied in the movie “Demolition Man” have happened, not to mention “Back to the Future Part II”.)

It’s no secret that Arnold is no fan of President Donald Trump. In the 2024 election, Schwarzenegger endorsed Kamala Harris. His reason: “I will always be an American before I am a Republican.” Some obsessions are overridden by enlightened self-interest, and a healthy belief in a nation’s ability, through its institutions and processes, to positively influence the world.

The only people that benefit from this crap are the politicians who prefer having talking points to win elections to the public service that will make Americans’ lives better. It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed!

That kind of transactional, divisive politics is just another thing, being obsessed with power, success, and a form of vicious narcissism. As an immigrant, Arnold understands how others outside America see our nation. He gets that, and many who live in places Trump described as “sh**holes” are obsessed with getting here. Making the U.S. a better place for those who live here also has the added (even if unintended) effect of making it the object of obsession for others who don’t live here. Somehow, the unenlightened self-interest of a president who is only obsessed with his own image and his own glandular desires misses that point entirely. Or maybe he gets the point, but keeping those who desire to live here out is part of the burnishing of his own ego. I don’t honestly know.

So it surprised me when Arnold, in an interview CNN with Jake Tapper, defended Republicans by attacking Democrats in California, who are looking to redistrict and gerrymander their way to a majority in Congress. He started by blasting Texas.

“There’s this war going on all over the United States. Who can out cheat the other one?” the action star and Republican former governor, who served from 2003 to 2011, told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Texas started it. They did something terribly wrong. And then all of a sudden California says, ‘Well, then we have to do something terribly wrong.’ And then now other states are jumping in.”

Arnold called the “temporary” redistricting measure “total fantasy.” Of course, gerrymandering has been around a long time, and when whatever commission that defines “temporary” comes back in six years, they’re going to find Republicans still doing it. Gerrymandering is done by Democrats just as much as Republicans, in places like Massachusetts (the birthplace of the term). The difference here is that the arms race to go nuclear on midterm redistricting outside the normal census cycle is, as Arnold puts it, it will result in “the American people get cheated on this whole thing.”

Obsession with really making America greater is not a bad thing in and of itself. We, as Americans, can disagree on the best way to accomplish it. But when the obsession turns toxic, and runs to the other extreme, we get behavior that destroys long-held beliefs and constitutional institutions in favor of short-term gains in power and self-image. This is what the Republican Party under the king of short-term thinking is doing. Texas and California, along with Georgia and other states, doing nuclear gerrymandering is going to unravel 240 years of regular old gerrymandering under the constitution.

That may well lead to the second half of Donald Trump’s second term owning both houses of Congress once again. Having neutered the Democrats’ threats by letting them shut down the federal government and using it against them by accomplishing mass firings much more effectively than Elon Musk’s DOGE, a second two-year cycle of Republicans in power, driven by obsession, will lead to places few want to contemplate. At least few who value the remaining institutions we have, like the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Supreme Court, and Congress. The only thing that restrained Trump in his first term was impeachment, and that didn’t really restrain him much.

In his second term, impeachment may not even be a speed bump, especially if this nuclear obsession with gerrymandering and redistricting moves forward on both sides. Democrats may be signing their own death warrant by doing a tit-for-tat with Republicans.

What the Democrats should do is they should outperform Trump. To me, it‘s all about competition creates performance. And so what they do is with the redistricting commission is that they‘re going to go and try to draw the district lines in such a way that they get voted in, no matter if they work well or not for the American people. So the American people get cheated on this whole thing. That is really the problem here.

When all the politicians, and the celebrities, and everyone with an opinion on Reddit, is obsessed with beating the other side, impressing Donald Trump, or just getting attention, nobody is watching out for what really matters, as in the institutions, laws, and practices that keep the United States influential, powerful, and relevant in the world. When those things are all broken and nobody knows how to fix them, we will learn the hard way what the fruit of bad obsession is, and why good obsession matters so much.

So far, all we’re proving is that the Democrats are just as obsessed as Donald Trump, and with pretty much the same things.

They should listen to Arnold.

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