Logovores Unite!

For various reasons I hate to make this blog a blog about Sarah Palin but, God help me, she is genuinely frightening as a candidate for national office. It is equally frightening that there are people -- millions, it would seem -- who find her not only not frightening but a good choice for the office. Millions who would put their lives and their futures partially (or fully, should McCain's age or health become relevant) in her hands. And, more shocking still, millions who find her inability to answer simple questions appealing, and comforting rather than disturbing.

I am currently obsessed with her refusal or inability to name which papers and magazines she reads, which periodicals she feels have helped to shape her worldview.

Katie Couric: ''When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this, to stay informed and to understand the world?''

Sarah Palin: ''I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.''

Couric: ''Like, what ones specifically?''

Palin: ''Um, all of them, any of them that eh, have been in front of me all these years.''

Couric one last time: ''Can you name a few?''

And Palin: ''I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, it seems like ‘Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking and doing when you live up there in Alaska?’ Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.''

Or, at least a microcosm of the part of 'America' that can't recall which newspapers, journals, or magazines it reads. My problem with this is that it sounds an awful lot like she doesn't read any. I can recall five titles for myself from yesterday, some local, some national, some international. Now, perhaps it is not true that Ms. Palin never reads any media at all, but that the reticence was a moment of panic: she simply wasn't sure if the Anchorage or Matanuska Valley papers would make her sound too provincial (although lack of worldliness, sophistication, or knowledge of foreign affairs has not seemed a concern thus far, so I find the theory not terribly plausible), whereas to quote national or international papers would endanger that same perception of provincialism and make her seem like an elitist egghead - -like the rest of 'em, sittin' up there in their political insider machine in Washington and readin' their elitist newspapers (through monocles, no doubt, while they sip espresso or sherry with upturned pinkies and debate whether the Camerata Fiorentina proves that Conservatism is either ultimately conservation or innovation).

But whatever may prove to be the explanation for her inability to be specific I am inclined to doubt that it will have anything to do with her being accustomed to reading 'most of them, any of them,' nor, assuredly, 'all of them.' I am fairly certain that, well-informed and well-read though he was, even the late Conservative William F. Buckley did not, in fact, come anywhere near to reaching Palin's claimed print profligacy.

She even had an easy out: she is an executive, as she repeatedly reminds us. As such, she could well have said that her position keeps her far too busy for as much reading as she might like and necessitates a focus on regional issues, such that much of her reading is taken up with official documents and Alaskan newspapers. Maybe she really can't see Russia from her porch, but she most assuredly can see Alaska, and simply asserting a single-minded focus on the concerns of her constituency would have saved her from the embarrassing absurdity of claiming to have read 'all' of the periodicals that 'have been in front of me all these years.' I don't even think it would have been a lie -- at least nowhere near as big a one as claiming to be the world's most voracious print consumer.

"'There is no man,'

[Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'" (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)


I pray to God it is not that I am 'growing accustomed to,' or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one's coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you'll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world's ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it's not still dismal where you're heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes -- and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, 'denial,' as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn't care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose's interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such 'fatuous or unwholesome incarnations' as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot Jesuit-schooled, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians...