Joe Six-Pack 4, Cunning Chinaman 7

'The Common Man' sounds too nineteenth century. 'Everyman' sounds too medieval. 'Working Class' sounds too Marxist, and 'The Average Man' sounds boring and vaguely insulting.

Enter 'Joe Six-Pack.' (And exeunt all those of us with weak stomachs.)

I reason that it's because there are not as of yet literal corporate Presidential Campaign sponsors; otherwise 'Willy Wal-Mart' would have been employed and a special logo created. But while I am uncertain as to how ballot-happy the Ralph Cramdens, Fred Murtzes, Hank Hills, and Stanley Kowalskis of the world (the nearly-extinct demographic of typical-blue-collar Americans I believe Ms. Palin is attempting to evoke) actually are, I do know that however few remain of their species, owning a foam-fronted John Deere cap does not perforce make one a beer drinker nor, conversely, is beer drinking diagnostic of familiarity with power tools.

This makes it a stupid thing to say.

Let us breeze through Prohibition and run headlong into the First Great Depression. In 1933 a grape farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, mired in debt and no longer able to sell his grapes, shoots his wife and then himself. Two of his sons, Ernest and Julio, with less than $6,000, rise from this tragedy, start a winery and change drinking in the United States. The Gallos were successful from the start, owing as much to their complementary skills and temperaments as to their mutual willingness to devote all they had to the enterprise.

The Depression ended, but the 'misery market' remained. In 1957, Gallo introduced 'Thunderbird,' a sweet, fortified, citrusy white wine sold at a low price and, at 17.5 alcohol by volume, rather more tailored toward rapid intoxication than slow savoring. Legend has it that after sales took off, Ernest Gallo, the business and marketing wizard of the pair, would assess the brand's fame and success in its target market by being driven to bad parts of town and yelling out part of Thunderbird's slogan to people drinking from paper bags on the street. 'What's the word?' Gallo would yell, to which the legendary happy hobo would shout back, 'Thunderbird!' 'How's it sold?' 'Good and cold!' And thus arose the first chink in the elitist-wine-snob vs. earthy beer drinker binarism: it doesn't get much more earthy than strong hooch with a screw-top in a paper bag being drunk by a guy with toenails longer than my hair.

But the Gallo revolution didn't end there. Nor were its effects confined to their brand. By the 1970s all sorts of jug red wines, and sweet wines like the Gallos' fruit-flavored Boone's Farm (with real plastic fruit around the neck!) and Ripple were drunk happily all over the US by millions of (often heretofore beer-drinking) middle-class citizens wanting something 'special' with dinner but fearing tannins, texture, and strong flavor. 'White Zinfandel' emerged, as did peach-flavored wines, strawberry-flavored wines, then 'wine coolers' in bottles, and the 'wine spritzer' in bars. Anyone could drink wine -- and it could go down smooth like a soda pop, too!

Meanwhile, as wine lost its elitist status thanks to the foresight and hard work of the Gallos, two other things happened: California emerged as a world-class center of serious viniculture and winemaking, and artisan beermaking took off. Most American supermarkets now have reasonable wine selections, and a US consumer can walk away with a brilliant bottle for under fifteen dollars (or stick with a Mondavi 'White Zin' at probably half the price). Likewise there are now millions of beer bores and beer snobs whose soporific conversational tendencies and level of affectation could rival that of any beret-wearing oenophilic epicure.

So: may we please let Joe Six-Pack rest in peace, along with Scarlett O'Hara, Rosie the Riveter, Ward and June Cleaver, the Femme Fatale, the Simple but Wise Peasant, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, the Lazy Mexican, the Crafty Jew, the Cunning Chinaman, the Effete Englishman, and the Drunken Paddy? Please??? And someone hand me my Gueuze, please: I can't stand young hops, and I can't bear anything but wild-fermented beers, you know.

Politics for Grownups

This autumn night
Dawns, yet unaware
An insect sings on-
Just as am I,
Is he sunk in sadness?

Another thing that struck me in the brief Jon Stewart-Peggy Noonan interview was Mr. Stewart's visceral frustration at politicians' meretricious use of slogans, catch-words, and symbols as stand-ins for defined terms, argument, truth, or clarity. I believe two examples he gave were Conservative pack-mules 'legislating from the bench' and 'strict constructionist.' These could mean all sorts of things, but in practice are code for rather specific anathemas and goals. As Stewart pointed out, rather than risk alienating some groups of voters by railing against gay marriage, a candidate can remain in good stead with both his more Conservative core and moderate voters by espousing his distaste for the first and his fondness for the latter. A major point in Noonan's book is that the bulk of the American populace, regardless of political views, is as angry at being talked down to in this fashion as is Stewart.

And I think this is part of Sarah Palin's appeal. Unlike 'managed' and 'handled' long-time 'insiders,' she says what she thinks. She may get flustered, she may not always make sense, but until recently, when her logorrhea and lack of self-censorship became blunted by those same managers and handlers, she could be relied upon at least part of the time to say what she meant. I don't mean to say that she any more than the rest of us always acted in accord with her values, but she was largely upfront about them and the extent to which they informed her decisions. Nor do I mean that she was entirely unsophisticated politically or did not sometimes choose her public words judiciously, but her back-country candor, her physical expressiveness, and her fitted pink jackets undoubtedly do seem fresh, and more 'real' than the blandly and painstakingly contrived 'brands' of other national figures.

Perhaps tonight in the VP debate, with Palin's recent intensive training and the 90-second limit on responses, she will say as little of what she means as anyone else. She may even have a new more 'professional' haircut and style. Perhaps those ghastly faltering interviews with their exaggerated expressions and gestures and the incoherent strings of 'talking points' were a necessary intermediary step between her original shoot-from-the-hip/ take-no-prisoners/'Joe-Six-Pack' upfrontness, and she will now be ready to respond to any and all questions in a perfectly-clear and meaning-bereft coherent iteration of the same populist 'talking points' minus the nose-wiggle and the finger-licking, but with added 'y'alls' and more consistently dropped terminal G's. Should she remain on the national stage, whether the point is reached tonight or later, she will eventually be able to say as little in as many words as anyone else -- but succeed in doing so with appropriate punctuation and breath stops.

I enjoy subtlety in the right places as much as the next person. But this isn't Edo Japan, and foreign policy can hardly be confused with a lone heron on a foggy marsh. Evocation is not called for: clarity and direct speech are. I don't want synechdoche or stand-ins; I want facts, actual positions, and exposition! It doesn't matter to me in the slightest who pulled whom up by whose bootstraps -- or whether there were bootstraps involved in anyone's 'narrative' at all. I am not a medieval Japanese, and neither are you, so a symbol-ridden terse tanka is of no use to me whatever in parsing your actual stance on a specific issue. God help me, I, as much as anyone else, support 'freedom,' 'democracy,' 'democratic values,' 'rights,' and wish the best for the 'American taxpayer' and the 'American Dream' - but from my espousal of these abstract concepts here you still have no idea in what way I believe they are to be defined, pursued, implemented, or served. Like a bugling stag weary in the browned bush-clover, or a departing goose calling a distant farewell, the autumn mountains echo with my mournful cry: Say something, one of you, any of you, that isn't fully, patently, abhorrently inane!

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.

I Can Has Cheezburger

But let me say this: whether it is McCain or Palin - de facto, de jure, (de la subida más alta es la caída más lastimosa, de haut en bas, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum, or de gustisbus non disputandum, or de la O, the great mixed-martial-arts trainer and fighter) - who ends their arranged marriage, and no matter what I think of Mrs. Palin's political views, historical knowledge, or geopolitical vision, and regardless of how dirtydirtydirty I think it is to just plunk AWomanAnyWoman into a vacant hole,

Because I am a dork, and because I am a woman, and because I think that, whatever her weaknesses, she was used callously and nastily, and then left to the wolves like an overeager bush pilot in a moribund and cranky Land-O-Matic,

I do hope her exit or concession speech consists of this and nothing more:

All Your Bases Are Belong To Us.

[BTW: Fail.]

(As though 'women' were indeed the monolithic voting block some chucklehead McCain Campaign Advisor advised McCain.) (Or maybe one didn't; maybe these people do not consult the candidate but act unilaterally, in 'the best interests of the Party.' I really have no idea. I no longer understand any of this. Ever.) (Although I did make venison pizza the other day at the soup kitchen, which seems somehow postmodernly ironic.)

(And then, okay, that from that solipsistic defiance emerges someone on the conservative side who isn't totally ill-equipped to convince those legendary 'Bases' that it doesn't totally suck, or prove cowardice or a moral lack, occasionally to recall that the U.S. is situated on the same globe as {what should be} a rather cautionary amount of other more-or-less confirmedly sovereign political entities.)

(That would so rock.)

(And then we can forget that whole Paraguay thing. K?)

Like Lipstick on Schadenfreude

I don't know how people like Andrew Sullivan or Ariana Huffington do it, how they write opinion about the state of politics day after day after day. I can still get my head around the idea of a print - including electronic print - reporter amassing and distilling facts from wire services and colleagues in the field to come up with 'Polls Show Prohibition Costing Hoover Crucial Votes' or 'Hearst Deal Likely to Solidify Roosevelt's Lead.' But as truly insane and lamentable as things (what things? nearly all of them! pick one, and just see if it's not insane and lamentable!) are now in this country, and this election, I am incredulous that anyone with an analytical, rational, or even humane bent can be calm enough to render opinion on all this obscenity. Admittedly, I don't get paid for it, which might well be a great tonic for wordlessness, but I'm verklempt. Vollständig. I can't begin to think about it properly in its entirety, let alone take an opinion.

That being said, as the Sarah Palin circus grinds on twenty-four hours a day, the one thing I am absolutely certain of is that I feel sick for her, and I also feel sorry (although more mitigatedly so) for McCain. When her nomination was announced, my first reaction was that it was patently a slick and dirty tactical move: the Democratic Convention seemed very successful, galvanizing millions of exhausted and angry voters. So the Republicans timed this bizarre announcement to take a bit of that attention away.

And that succeeded. She was a crazy pick, an unknown who had figured nowhere on McCain's short list. Plus, unlike those (Above-) Average White Guys McCain was considering, she was a woman, a (rather fertile) mother, a hottie, an elsewherian, and politically quite distinct from McCain. Like Reagan or Bush II, and unlike McCain, for Palin there is a set of ideas on which she will not compromise, and which undergird all her opinions, and which must always be beyond discussion or negotiation. We have seen that there are plenty of voters who can relate to that, if, admittedly, sometimes in the 'I don't know nothin bout art, but I know what I like' manner.

My first reaction was that, being ostensibly a tactical move, it would be short lived. It would serve its purpose of notoriety, exultation, hairstyle commentary and scandal, and then when the attention had died down in a couple weeks, the McCain campaign would find a way to release her back into the wilds of Alaska and settle down with a more predictable, truly marriageable partner. Rural grassroots support for Palin would carry over to the new VP candidate easily, provided a convincing exit narrative had been contrived and managed adroitly. The new candidate would continue to mention Mrs. Palin and her values, and she would continue to be a presence in the campaign, heroic, lionized, as though she had actually died for the struggle. He would promise to uphold her - and 'the American Public's - ideals as he took up her mantle. She would live on as a Photoshopped patron saint, her all-too-human imperfections fallen away effortlessly in post-mortem hagiography and cable-news apathy.

But that didn't happen. Or it hasn't happened yet. And while I do not for a second believe McCain should have picked her (nor that it was McCain who did), nor that she should have accepted, her precipitous rise to stardom based, apparently, on looks, maternity, domestic oil production, and an antagonistic relationship to northern fauna, has, in addition to showing how little news is actually possible to unearth on a 24-hour news station, catapulted this very average madonna-executive into the vicious world of international sarcasm. Every aspect of Sarah Palin to which we have access has been vilified ad nauseum. Even her pregnant daughter and her jock boyfriend/sudden fiance are global laughing-stocks. I may find the boyfriend an atrocious little boy personally, but that is of course irrelevant for very many reasons (just to start, neither of them are running for anything except cover, and neither are responsible for the choices of their elders, let alone the Republican Party), and I would have known nothing about him, his (18-year-old's) stance on matrimony, his sporting preferences, his measurements, his academic record, his misogyny, or his apparent willful ignorance had McCain's handlers not proposed this wild scheme to Palin, nor she accepted. We are all idiots, sinners, bad friends, worse enemies, and only cautious good-doers: that two average rural high-school students are now in the position of being lampooned and excoriated globally for being two average rural high school students is disgusting, and something that should trouble us all.

***Break in the middle of this long post: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Atlantic said something similar and different here, so if you are tired with my position, or my crappy way of expounding it, you can go there, and have a different exposition of a different argument which comes out to a similar injunction: to not be so bloody mean. Or something. Close.

Part of my point is that we're all imperfect, and we all do stupid things, immoral things, and tasteless things. The majority of us are fortunate in that usually only about twenty other people know about them. And while I do not think Mrs. Palin is without culpability in any of this - she is an adult; she could have said no - whatever it is that motivated her assent does not mean that what she is experiencing now, as arguably the most famous person on earth, is to be relished. It is as lamentable as the rest of the heretofore unimaginable crap which daily assaults us.

For me, it was terrible to see her with Katie Couric. She looked at times like she was going to cry, and she was so nervous that even with her notes she frequently couldn't form complete sentences. Instead, she strung together repetitive dependent clauses and catch-phrases that had nothing to do with the question asked. For me it wasn't sport; it was rather like canned hunting. She may be a nice lady, or she may be an execrable human; she may be bright, and she may be utterly incurious; she may be both, always, at the same time. And it may be the case that it was nothing but hubris and a thirst for self-aggrandizement at any cost that drove her to accept the nomination. Manifestly, however, whatever her innate and cultivated aptitudes, and however much one agrees with or loathes her values, she is not ready for Vice- or real Presidency.

McCain is old enough to have said,' What, wait: --who??' and insist that the Party let Palin's family, her political experience, and her global curiosity mature a decade or so before inviting her into national politics. And McCain, as the Presidential candidate for the Party, the person who would have to work with the Vice-President for up to eight years, would, under ideal circumstances, have been able to, expected to, and insistent upon, personally vetting all potential candidates. She, likewise, could have reiterated the famous 'thanks but no thanks' and gracefully suggested that she had a few years more of study, and a few family matters to attend to, before taking the national stage. But, as fame now consistently outscores looks, smarts, and likability in polls of what Americans would prefer to have, her acceptance of the nomination is well within the bounds of normal American behavior. It may be sad, but it is hardly counter-cultural.

And it is because of that fact, the fact of her more strident, obvious, palpable, and less Photoshoppable humanity (especially as versus 30-year political veterans) - not because I agree with her on international or domestic issues, not because I see myself in her womanhood or motherhood, not because I, too, have a complex family, have made mistakes or misjudgments, have succeeded at some things at the expense of others, or have neglected to cultivate parts of myself - that I deeply empathize with her and her family right now, being the brunt of jokes no normal person (even a gorgeously postmodern, outlandishly cynical, Liberal one) could ever have never imagined, every detail of her life scrutinized in absurd fashion, her sartorial choices alternately mimicked and lampooned, her marginal, symbolic, token, silent role as envisioned, extrapolated to its (not entirely illogical) end as potential Ruler of the Last Great Empire.

I hate the whole thing. She shouldn't be there. She is suffering, her family is suffering, friends of friends of her family are suffering. And the country, all the millions and millions of us who are doing no-so-very-well-thank-you-at-the-moment-already will suffer tremendously should someone of so little curiosity and rationality end up as head cook, let alone Captain, of this blighted Narrenschiffe. -- Look, Margaret Thatcher was unique. Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Tansu Ҫiller, and Megawati Sukarnoputri were unique, and I'm only picking up the notable notables. There doesn't have to be a woman, or a black guy, or a gay guy, or an ex-bishop, or a prole, or relative of a prole, or a person with a disability, or a person with a large family, or no dependents, or a preference to baklava over awamat -- or a Poodle-studding business or a temporary obsession with lapidary. There just has to be a truly exceptional, historically grounded, ethically centred, utterly visionary, multiply capable, unfailingly prudential and unwaveringly calm individual of whatever genetic or gonadic makeup.

Do I think it was a brilliant cynical move? Sure: it got them what they wanted, which was attention. Do I think we all suffer when those in power think tactically rather than strategically, and of Party rather than country or world? You bet. And I'll see you in Paraguay!

Swearing in French in Guerrero

We'll get back to Marie de l'Incarnation soon, I hope, because her story is nuts. She was a powerhouse, a dynamo, a great teacher, a prolific letter-writer, and a nun-scholar-philologist in the wilds of old Canada. In the meantime, here is a story about swearing like a (Québec) Frenchman while wintering south of two borders.

Québecois swearing is justly famous for its outrageousness. If the offense or inconvenience you are suffering is not too great, you can of course just mutter a clipped 'marde' under your breath and have done with it. If, however, the flurry from your neighbor's souffleuse just blew your tasty string of tire d'érable (I remember loving that as a kid; thank God those teeth were temporary) right into the bits of hair sticking out from under your tuque, your ire is unlikely to be fully vented after a mere monosyllable (we think our four-letter-words are handy stress relievers: imagine having ten or fifteen syllables to let off that steam). Instead of a tiny clenched fistful of choices and one short puff of air, Québec Francophones have at their disposal the vast vocabulary of four hundred years of North American Catholic history from which to fashion not merely obscene, but elaborately, flamboyantly, nonsensically obscene multi-part jurons/sacrés combining every religious term conceivable. In English, people sometimes murmur 'Oh, God,' or 'Jesus,' (whether knowingly/deliberately or completely unconsciously) whereas in Québec the would-be swearer has the entire Mass, the Old and New Testaments, two thousand years of saints, all entries main and sub- in the Catechism, and every last detail of ecclesiastical vestments, architecture and ornamentation from which to choose his sacrés.

Now, baptism records notwithstanding, no one is actually Catholic anymore in Québec. That stopped in the 60s, but it doesn't change the fact that it is still objectionable in polite society to yell a series of religious words interspersed with terms alluding to the body's copulatory and excretory functions. So there are euphemisms. Plenty of them. Calvaire (Calvary) and câlisse (chalice) can become calette, calvette, caltour, calvasse, calverasse, câlif/caliphe (caliph or qaliph), câlique and, with a dig at reference to the Huguenot Protestant portion of the province's settlers, Calvin, Calvinasse, Calvinisse, Calvinouche, and so on.

In order not to offend old ladies by saying 'tabarnac' which is what you would say if you were a Québecois trying to mutter 'tabernacle' while frustratedly searching for the nearly invisible

Rue Calvin in Québec City,

you might instead grumble tabarnache, tabarnouche, tabarniche, tabarnane, tabaslac, or even tabarouette (= ta barouette).

(Sa Barouette.)
(Jean à de longues moustaches. Je répète: Jean à de longues moustaches.)

If, however, you were less worried about people overhearing and being offended by your swearing because you were somewhere no one would understand the polite words, either, such as frustratedly searching for the nearly invisible Calle No. 2 in Acapulco, you might be less inclined toward restraint and let all three real syllables fly, giving yet another reason for Mexican resort workers, street vendors, and taxicab drivers to continue to refer to loud Francophone Quebeckers as 'tabernacos,' via analogy to 'nacos'

NaCo T-shirts

which is the Mexican version of 'chav' and 'joual' and just as classist as these, but with the advantage of having a fair bit of racism mixed in, as well.

('There is no racism in Mexico. -Said this câline of a tabarname of a calvénousse of a baptême of a naco.')

But, just as other vicious words have been retranslated and refurbished in the past few decades as emblems of pride rather than vehicles of derision or hate, so, too, has naquismo as an identity been reclaimed and self-consciously turned on its head in all its garish glory. For the past decade there has been a NaCo clothing company (which was even quite trendy a couple years ago in distinctly non-naco circles with t-shirts such as the designs in this posting and 'Ser Naco Es Chido' and 'M is for Mojado' ['wetback']), with outlets in both Mexico and the U.S., not to mention online.

According to cultural critics such as Carlos Monsiváis and others, however, the word is simply too nasty from its very origin to merit rehabilitation. Most agree the word comes from 'Totonaco' or, possibly, 'Nacohuatl/Nahuatl,' and thus always contains a racial element when used by comparatively cultured, educated and light-skinned Mexicans to refer not only to those with less refinement and schooling, but more indigenous blood. 'Naco' for Monsiváis is 'proletario, lumpenproletario, pobre, sudoroso, el pelo grasiento y el copete alto, el perfil de cabeza de Palenque, vestido a la moda de hace seis meses, vestido fuera de moda. Naco es los anteojos oscuros a la media noche, el acento golpeado, la herencia del peladito y el lépero, el diente de oro. Naco es el insulto que una clase dirige a otra.'

Now, I for one am about as sick of feigned folksyism as I could be, but it is one thing deliberately and inconsistently to drop one's G's from the present progressive in an attempt to get the lumpenproletariat to vote for you ('Guysngals, our regulatory system is outdated...there's somethin that's goin on in our world, in our nation...that needs some shakin up and fixin') and another altogether to be at ease with and proud of all the sweat, callouses, and disapproving looks your naco or joual heritage has earned you. Had someone suggested to me a few years ago that there would be a Democratic presidential candidate of African ancestry, to which the Republican response was going to be Class War, I would have suggested to the speaker that he perhaps 'didn't inhale' a great many more times than Bill Clinton - and quite possibly didn't do that inhaling very, very recently.

I'll Just Have a Salad, Thanks.

It used to be my custom to order a nice blue/saignant petit filet about twice a year, but due to the current subprime perfect storm of red meat in battleground states between enemy combatants on the ground, at the end of the day I think it will likely be some few years before I have the stomach for another one.

Thanks for ruining my diet and my hairstyle, guys.

-'Red Meat with a Side of Mean'
-'Sarah Palin: Red Meat for the Masses'
-'More Red Meat'
-'Minnesota Delegation Gets Red-Meat Talking Points'
-'No Red Meat from Warner Speech'
-'McCain's Ex-Rivals Throw Out the Red Meat'


Et cetera. And just so we're on the same page, that was only the first one of a search for 'red meat campaign.' We still don't know if John McCain hit it out of the park with his Hail Mary Pass when he threw a bone to theoconservatives in an effort to energize the base which may or may not steal Hillary's thunder should the chickens come home to roost.


And, because I do care about the state of your palate but can't pour you a glass of Brunello from here, here's a bit of Myles to take away that bad taste:
''Keats's Irish terrier, Byrne, failed to come home one night. Chapman found the poet playing the violin, and remarked on his composure. "Keats smiled . . . 'And why should I not fiddle,' he asked, 'while Byrne roams?'''

Sarah Palin's Hairstyle: Leave It Alone!

Sarah Palin as VP candidate may or may not prove to be a brilliantly maniacal move. We will see what happens; in the meantime, riveting though her story is, and as complex a figure as she may be, I am sad that my own most-favored hairstyle (see above; way, way above, up in the header) is being pilloried ceaselessly by cosmetological hatemongers.

It is not a beehive,

as journalists, bloggers, editorialists, and other such ill-informed numbskulls continue to call it. It is, however, a hairstyle that adds a little height, which some of us can benefit from. Additionally, being an updo, it conveys slightly more sophistication, and the weest soupςon of gravitas when necessary, than long, loose hair does,

while not suggesting the prudery that people seem to read into tightly-pulled-back chignons.

Mind you, I can pull off the archest of chignons and ballerinabuns, but I have eyes the size of pancakes, so it is only with extreme effort that I can manage to look 'hard' or severe under any circumstances.

Nonetheless, I resent the fact that every time henceforth I hastily put together a French-Twist-with-a-Pouf with nothing but hope, two bent bobby pins, and a rearview mirror to guide me, I run the risk of being accused of sporting 'A Sarah Palin.' It is a sad year for grooming indeed.

Lipstick and Pitbulls

I am so speechless about The Whole Sarah Palin Thing that I can't even finish a post about it I started a few days ago, let alone write about more recent developments, such as her speech tonight. But I reiterate, that a candidate for a national office (or in more populous areas, state or even municipal office) seems like someone one would like to have a beer or Barolo (or hunt moose or go to the symphony) with is truly insufficient grounds for a vote in his or her favor. Nonetheless, it does appear to me that this vote of the 'common man,' with his presumed demonstrable less-than-vigorously-cultivated critical-thinking skills is precisely what McCain was informed that Sarah Palin could deliver, and which his preferred vice-presidential choices, meanwhile, would preclude. Sarah Palin's positions on some issues may yet remain a mystery, some other positions may be objectionable or ideal to one side or the other but, if it is indeed true that what motivates the Common Man most in an election is the candidate's life's resemblance to that of the voter, Mrs. Palin, despite her 'extreme' attributes like moose-hunting, midnight suns, and marathons, takes 'common' to dazzling, giddy new heights:

--mother
--new mother
--working new mother
--small town
--blue-collar, steelworker husband
--child with disability
--married high-school boyfriend
--PTA member
--husband in labor union
--son in military
--hunting, fishing, snowmobile racing
--no passport for most of life
--pregnant teenage daughter
--mispronouncing foreign words as proof of patriotism
--beauty queen
--big hair
--wacky and whimsical children's names
--believes religion and science are at odds; chooses religion
--anti-intellectual; Obama's education/Constitutional expertise disqualify him

Surely her life story has many aspects with which an 'average' American person can relate. It's a compelling narrative of a strong, opinionated, charismatic, attractive woman. And, like the majority of American citizens, she was not born into inherited wealth: in her sudden rise to the national stage, she embodies the long-cherished image of the United States (or 'America,' as she would say) as the Land of Opportunity: that anyone can make it here and that hard work and tenacity matter more than pedigree. It is a great story; I just wish it had built slowly to a climax rather than suddenly to a punch line.