Essay 1047

From The Los Angeles Times…

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By Steve Lopez

And What Do You Mean by Hot?

I’m confused. As the grandson of people from Malaga on one side, Naples and Sicily on the other, I always thought it was Spaniards and Italians who were supposed to be hotblooded. I definitely grew up with a lot of people yelling at one another.

Then I see where Gov. Easy Column had to apologize for saying it’s the Puerto Ricans and Cubans who are the really fiery ones because they’ve got black blood mixed with Latino, which makes for sangria that’s muy spicy.

“Anyone out there that feels offended by these comments, I just want to say I’m sorry,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday in Santa Monica, with Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia (R-Cathedral City) by his side. “The fact is that if I would hear this kind of comments in my house, by my kids, I would be upset….”

By his kids? They’re not the problem, Arnold, but you and your chief of staff might need to be sent to your rooms without supper. I’ll get to her in a minute.

I was a little surprised Schwarzenegger didn’t make the apology on “Oprah,” with Maria at his side, but it might have been tough to explain his theories on the science of racial cross-pollination.

As for Garcia, she did not look like a woman who felt insulted by the governor’s symposium on ethnicity, which he delivered during a recorded high-powered meeting last spring in Sacramento. Garcia said she had an inside joke with the governor about being a “hotblooded Latina,” and this is likely to be good news for her El Centro and Cathedral City district.

It’s only a matter of time, I’m betting, before we see massive state investment out there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a new Puerto Rican (or Cuban) museum before the end of the year.

Newsmakers in this state never disappoint, do they? The same week that Arnold makes the nightly news, Paris Hilton gets pulled over in Hollywood on suspicion of drunk driving and says she was cruising for an In-N-Out Burger because she “had not ate all day.”

Not too smooth, but throw her in with Mel Gibson and Schwarzenegger in the celebrity faux pas derby and she’s the one who comes off like the sophisticate.

But getting back to Arnold, am I the only one who wondered whether the governor meant something other than hot-blooded, as in temperamental? Is it possible he simply meant hot? He is who he is, after all.

“I mean, they are all very hot,” he said at one point in the recording.

Hard to say exactly what he might have had in mind. Let’s go to the transcript.

“Bonnie Garcia is great,” Chief of Staff Susan Kennedy says at one point, and Kennedy, let’s keep in mind, is supposed to be the brains of the operation. “She’s a ball-buster. She’s great. Is she Puerto Rican?”

“She seems to me like Cuban,” the governor responds.

“She’s not Mexican,” Kennedy says.

“No,” Arnold says.

“But she said something, and I thought, I thought she was Puerto Rican,” Kennedy says.

“She maybe is Puerto Rican or the same thing as Cuban,” the governor says.

I hate to break up the summit, but let’s pause here for a second.

Do Arnold and Kennedy, whose appointment raised eyebrows in both the anti-gay and anti-Democrat crowds, often sit around talking about saucy cross-breeds?

If so, I’m kicking myself. Not long ago I had a one-hour cigar chat with the governor, and we spent most of the time talking about campaign finance reform. Am I that dull? And what were we smoking, anyway, Cubans or Puerto Ricans?

Come to think of it, what does the governor mean by “the same thing as Cuban?” You are or you aren’t, unless I’m missing something. I mean, Lucy wasn’t married to a Caribbean. Ricky was a Cuban, and no matter what else you think of him, he probably offended more real Cubans than Schwarzenegger.

And why is Schwarzenegger on the hook but not Kennedy, who seems to be an expert on Mexicans? I didn’t see any evidence that she objected when Arnold said, “I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.”

This is quite an interesting peek behind the curtain in Sacramento, wouldn’t you say?

And whatever you think of him, you’ve got to give Schwarzenegger points for the way he handled the apology. He wasted no time, stepped right up, faced the cameras and said that when he read his own comments in the paper, they made him cringe.

If only Bill Clinton had been that smart.

Poor Phil Angelides, the Democratic challenger. He can’t get traction on anything. Just after he put out a statement saying Arnold had embarrassed the whole state, there was Arnold on TV with Garcia standing by her man like a proud Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican.

Look, I can’t remember what the heck she is. But she’s definitely hot.