Poetry please

Julian Gough celebrates an exciting new voice in poetry. This a sentence of Sarah Palin's that he has transcribed into the free verse into which he thinks it naturally falls, word for word. He has given this haunting piece the title 'The relevance of Africa'.


The Relevance of Africa

And the relevance to me
With that issue,
As we spoke
About Africa and some
Of the countries
There that were
Kind of the people succumbing
To the dictators
And the corruption
Of some collapsed governments
On the Continent,
The relevance
Was Alaska’s.

Says Gough, 'She could be the most natural, visionary poet since Blake.'

Via.

Post-election thoughts and questions

1. Anybody else feel really quite deflated that it's all over?

2. Currently it looks like Obama got just over 64 million votes to Mccain's 56.5 million. Impressive, yes, but didn't you get the feeling from the coverage both in the run-up and during that McCain would be more adrift than that? At times it seemed impossible to imagine that anyone apart from a few rednecks in Alabama would vote for him.

3. A similar feeling re turn-out. it seems to have been around 64%. Considering the hype of the huge numbers voting and massive queues, this seems a pretty ordinary figure to me. How would they cope if they had a genuinely really high turn-out of, say, 80%?

4. Anybody understand what it means to be a 'registered Democrat/Republican'? Don't think it means you're a member of the Party. In its familiarity but unfathomability it's a bit like mysterious talk of being a 'sophomore' or 'in 9th grade'.

5. Thank goodness that la Palin continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Firstly, there was the excellent prank call* in the run up to polling, and now we have the Republican infighting starting, leading to these excellent spilt beans on Fox News (via the Daily Kos, which in common with many left-leaning blogs is very sweet in not quite believing that it didn't all go wrong at the eleventh hour):

Reporter: I wish I could have told you more at the time but all of it was put off the record until after the election. There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lack the degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency. We’re told by folks that she didn’t know what countries that were in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, that being the Canada, the US, and Mexico. We’re told she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent rather than a country just in itself...

Textbook, absolutely textbook.

*During the prank call she told 'Sarkozy', in response to a comment about how she would make an excellent President, 'Maybe in eight years.' Sarah, honey, I'm not sure the world can wait that long...

Update: an interesting take on turnout here (h/t Andrew Sullivan).

Black is white. War is peace.

And, in other news, Sarah Palin is "very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity there". This in relation to the Moosegate [TM] report that found that she 'abused her power' by violating the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

This isn't spin, it's mental illness.

You know what's in the corner of JM Towers

Yes, at last, we can all own an almost life-size cut out Sarah P with fabulous accessories.

Price List
12 Inch $19.99 - (4) 12 Inch Images
48 Inch $49.99
60 Inch $69.99

Loving the gun/lipstick/hockeystick combo.

Go to WallMonkeys.com now!

Update: the 48-inch one has got to be good value: perfect Oompa-Loompa-size.

Look, sorry, but she is...kinda...scary

Sam Harris in Newsweek is required reading on The Subject Of This Blog's Obsession. He brilliantly points up her bizarre self-confidence in this imagined exchange between her and Charlie Gibson (to whom she's given her only TV interview since the pick):

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

And he's good on her church, the Assemblies of God, and what her membership means for her likely beliefs:

Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather.

McCain wins - or 'wins' - in November, a year later has a heart attack, and this woman is leader of the free world and has hundreds of nuclear weapons at her disposal. OMFG, as I believe the young people say.

Left wing women and Sarah Palin

My God but it's easy to get obsessed about Sarah Palin. Part of her fascination is the reactions she causes in others. What strikes me is how she particularly angers some women on the left who focus on her in peculiarly gender and sexual-specific ways. 

My favourite example Professor Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, who denied, in a piece in the Washington Post, that Palin is a woman:

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

On Salon, Cintra Wilson goes to the other extreme and sexualises her, making her a slut -remember, this a leftwing woman making these comments about another woman because she doesn't like her politics:

Palin may have been a boost of political Viagra for the limp, bloodless GOP....she is their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread.... this Republican blowup doll  does this ideological lap dance. It is a kind of eerie coincidence that Sarah Palin is being sprung on the public at the same time as the bimbo/frat-boy titty comedy "House Bunny," which features a poster of a beautiful young lady with Playmate-style bunny ears, big, stupid eyes and her mouth hanging open like someone just punched her. Sarah Palin is the White House bunny....Sarah Palin may put out to be popular....

And of course she can't be forgiven for not aborting her last child:

What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right.

The de-feminising of Thatcher, especially by Spitting Image, was to her clear electoral advantage. This furious feminist assault on another populist rightwing woman is likely, it seems to me, to have a similar effect.