The old phrase “you can’t go home again” looks like it may be literally true for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who’s engaged in a tiff with the Austrian town of his birth.
Not only has it taken The Governator’s name off of its stadium (as per his demand after they threatened to take it off) but now they’ve purged him from their website.
What next? Will they ban him from using his Austrian accent in California?
Here’s a summary of the dizzying “TO YOU!” events in this fascinating international stinkfest. The AP:
The Terminator has been terminated in his hometown.
On Tuesday, a day after officials in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian birthplace of Graz removed his name from a soccer stadium to comply with the California governor’s wishes, they deleted references to him on the city’s Web sites.
Schwarzenegger earlier this month wrote to Graz officials asking for his name to be removed from the stadium and ordering the city to stop using it for promotional purposes.
He was reacting to fierce criticism from opponents in his hometown who denounced him for refusing to block the Dec. 13 execution in California of Stanley Tookie Williams.
Late Sunday or early Monday, Graz officials took down the large metal letters spelling out Schwarzenegger’s name on the 15,300-seat arena. On Tuesday, the mayor’s office said references to the actor-turned-politician were scrubbed from Graz’s main Web site and from a sister site devoted to the region’s sports scene.
“It’s all settled,” Thomas Rajakovics, a spokesman for Graz Mayor Siegfried Nagl, told Austrian media.
Although special folders and presentations devoted to Schwarzenegger were expunged from Graz’s official site, http://www.graz.at, the site still carried a news account of the renaming of the stadium, which had borne the governor’s name since 1997.
“We rewrote the contents a bit,” added Dieter Hardt-Stremayr, an official in charge of tourism in the city about 120 miles south of Vienna.
Reuters notes that the politicking within the city played a role in The Big Confrontation Of 2005:
Graz Mayor Siegfried Nagl opposed renaming the stadium, but a City Council majority of Social Democrats, Communists and Green Party members supported it.
That prompted Schwarzenegger to turn the tables and withdraw his name himself. On Dec. 19, Schwarzenegger demanded that Graz stop using his name on the stadium and in promotions. He returned a “ring of honor” that he had been awarded by city officials in 1999, saying politicians in his hometown appeared to have rejected him.
Schwarzenegger, a former bodybuilding champion and Hollywood star, trained at the stadium as a young man. It was renamed in his honor in 1997.
What’s interesting now is how all of this helps frame Schwarzenegger. His popularity is at an all-time low here in California but he ends the year with having thrown both Democrats’ and Republicans’ noses out of joint as he attempts to inch back to the middle. Now you have this: he’s being opposed by Social Democrats, Communists and Green Party members in Austria.
So, if he plans to for run for re-election arguing that he’s an independent, he’ll be able to boast that he’s hated by partisans on TWO continents.