Gov. Schwarzenegger, once a master of media sophistication (or manipulation, depending on your point of view), seems to be losing his touch.
His biggest talking point these days is that the current budget crisis in California presents all kinds of opportunities to do things better than they have been in the past.
What kinds of opportunities, you might be wondering?
In an interview with San Francisco Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz, Schwarzenegger actually proposed that school kids should be put to work mowing their school grounds as a way to help close the state’s latest deficit — now back up to $24 billion (thats in addition to the $36 billion deficit the Legislature and the Governor have already erased).
Yes, that’s right. Mow the lawn.
Let me quote directly from Diaz’ column:
“Maybe they can find someone in this crisis who will mow the lawn for free, so the school doesn’t have to lay off a teacher,” Schwarzenegger said. “Maybe the kids would like to mow the lawn, because that’s what we did in Austria and it didn’t hurt me by any means”
“We loved to mow the lawn,” Schwarzenegger said, swinging his arm to explain how they did it with a scythe.
Most schools I know of have little or no grass to mow. The only green vegetation in my kids’ school (Jefferson Elementary in Berkeley) is a vegetable garden inspired by Alice Water’s edible gardens movement, and a small patch of grass in the middle of a pint-sized track.
Up the road, at King Junior High, there is a larger section of grass in the middle of the track. But I can’t imagine it would cost more than $100 a month at the most to cut the grass.
And you’d need an industrial size mower to do the job. I wouldn’t feel comfortable handing one of those over to a junior high student.
OK, our governor must be thinking of high school students mowing playing their playing fields.
Even it if were feasible (getting over child labor laws, etc. etc.), it would open the district to all kinds of liability issues.
And I doubt the governor has calculated exactly (or even approximately) the state would save if kids mowed the grass.
I’ll concede perhaps our governor was just making a flip remark, just like he did in the old days when he talked about the “girly men” in the Legislature. But didn’t he learn his lesson?
If President Obama had suggested that school children get out and mow their school lawns as a way to reduce their budget deficits, he would have been accused of being heartless and opaque. Within-the-Beltway reporters would have had a fine time with it. Jon Stewart would have gotten in a few choice routines.
But it is a sign of a weakened press in California that even a celebrity governor like Arnold Schwarzenegger can make such statements with barely any attention being paid to them.
So he continues to make them. And the state moves closer and closer to financial disaster.
