Do Ventura’s Swipes Put Him Down for the Count? Don’t Bet on It

My 15 minutes of fame have finally arrived. It began with a 6 a.m. wake-up call from “Inside Edition” wanting to know if they could send a camera crew to my house to get my comments on the interview I did with Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura for the November issue of Playboy. I knew the magazine was coming out but forgot that the interview was put out on the Associated Press wire early. Within the hour, I had heard from Playboy’s publicist: ABC and NBC “Evening News,” “Geraldo,” “Today,” C-Span with Brian Lamb, “Extra,” MSNBC, two Minnesota stations and half a dozen radio shows from San Antonio to St. Louis to Buffalo wanted to talk to me.

What was the cause of this sudden brouhaha? The governor had called organized religion a “sham and a crutch for weak-minded people”; he said overweight people are too weak to push away from the dinner table; that the Tailhook Navy sexual harassment scandal was “much ado about nothing,” and that it was our own military-industrial complex that killed President Kennedy. He had backed up these comments in our interview, but in a sound-bite world, only the most sensational parts of paragraphs get lifted and highlighted on television.

The Christian Coalition immediately called for Ventura’s resignation, as did the leadership of the Reform Party. His approval rating in Minnesota dropped from over 70% to around 50%. People were demanding his public apology. Yet the governor stood firm. He never denied saying what he said, and he refused to apologize or back down.

How ironic that the same week this interview appeared, another I did with the late James A. Michener came out in book form (“Talking With Michener”): a far more extensive and in-depth series of conversations that took place over 17 years. Michener took on some of the same issues that people got so upset about with Ventura. Michener, who once ran for Congress as a Democrat from Pennsylvania, spoke about his own fears of the religious right, “who tried to do to this country what the Ayatollah Khomeini did to Iran.” Michener singled out Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as the prototypes.

“My concern was what Falwell and his men announced they were going to do to me and to the society of which I have been a proud and willing part. These people do not serve society well. . . . The Moral Majority had a fairly large hunting list. They wanted to exterminate from public life everybody they called a scientific humanist. They would have liked to have gotten rid of the Jews and anybody else who didn’t believe in their God and the New Testament.”

Strong, opinionated words, but no spark of moral outrage from the Christian Coalition. Not a peep. Like Ventura, Michener also thought that there was something fishy about the Kennedy assassination. Ventura believes that marijuana should be decriminalized. Michener agreed: “I have had great difficulty in believing that it is the evil drug that people said. The harsh sentences by the Texas courts are way out of proportion.” As for the Navy and Tailhook, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Tales of the South Pacific,” from which the play “South Pacific” was adapted, said: “We’re in an area of sexuality that we’re just beginning to understand. We’re in the Dark Ages, really. The incident of Tailhook in the Navy is symbolic of the terrible confusion we’re in. It’s very dangerous ground because the military has always been of a certain type. I saw ‘South Pacific’ recently, and when you hear that chorus: ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’--that is an invitation to the kind of behavior that sailors have had all through history. It’s pure sexual harassment.”

Michener didn’t criticize fat people, but he did talk about the cannibals he visited in the New Hebrides. “They were delightful,” he said. “I mean, if they’re not eating you, they’re a very pleasant people.”

One can only smile at such a remark, just as I did when I asked Ventura what he’d like to come back as in another life. He responded: “A 38DD bra.” I’ve listened to people claim to be shocked and outraged by this remark. When I heard it, I thanked him for giving me my ending. I didn’t get the sense that he was being crude, just amusing. As a trained professional wrestler, he has an acute sense of his audience. He just never counted on so many members of the Christian Coalition picking up Playboy.

If enough people actually read what Ventura has to say and can put it in a historical perspective the way Michener did, then this article may do for Ventura what Jimmy Carter’s admission--also in Playboy--of lusting in his heart did for him as a presidential candidate. When all the fuss died down, the governor from Georgia was elected.