THE DEERHUNTERIAN CANDIDATE Part 4

Cut to EXT. WASILLA DOWNTOWN STREET

SARAH and TODD PALIN walk arm in arm past shop windows that are either shuttered, papered over or have crude hand-written SALE signs taped up above cheap Chinese-made goods & sundries.

TODD
(laughing)
That was great. Now they think you’re cool, funny, easy-going.

They continue walking in silence for several seconds.

SARAH
We’ll see how snarky Tina Fey feels when she’s outside in the snow breaking rocks in a concentration camp outside Minot North Dakota.

They continue walking past more boarded-up storefronts, and homeless men gathered around burning oil barrels.

SARAH
And that nasty little Amy Poehler’s going to be lucky if she ends up as an Ice-Road Hooker.

MASQUERADE

September 11, 2008: This Is a Test

Dispatch 10
September 11, 2008: This Is a Test
David Levi Strauss





Lipstick on pigs. Comprehensive sex education for four-year-olds. Sarah’s secrets vs. Joe’s loose cannon. John’s temper vs. Barack’s celebrity.

The high scream of Distraction Culture wrapping itself tighter and tighter around the still turning point of the body politic is deafening, now. We can no longer hear ourselves, let alone others, think. D.C. never sleeps, never takes a breath, never blinks. Its imperative is speed, and it is relentless in its pursuit of . . . fuel. If it ever slows down, as it did on this day seven years ago, its moving parts become visible, and people begin to wake up and look around, beyond the Machine.

That was a dangerous time, and a time of great opportunity, politically. Unfortunately, the Democrats were caught flat-footed, having already walked away from a stand-off in Florida and ceded the field to reactionaries, who turned out to be terrifyingly unprepared to govern, but remarkably well-prepared in Machine maintenance and fuel issues. They advised us to “Get back to work, and your work is consumption.” Consumption and distraction.

The standard excuse for Americans letting happen what they have over the past 7 years is that they were scared, and when people are scared you can get them to do almost anything you want, and get away with it. Distraction becomes a obsession, and politicians who interrupt it risk serious, even violent abreactions.

In this Tortoise & Hare race, the old man who can’t send an email and the past mayor of a sleepy Alaskan town are running on the Speed & Distraction ticket, while the skinny fast forward who suddenly became a global star and the fast-talking senator are running on the Slow Down & Think ticket.

As the clock ticks down, this election looks more and more like a final test of American democracy. If American voters pass the test, nothing will be solved, but the slow work of reconstruction can at least begin. If we fail, time may have finally run out on this noble experiment.

Filed on Friday, Sept. 12, 2008, after Sarah Palin with Charles Gibson, Barack Obama with David Letterman, and the ceremonies at Ground Zero.

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I Never Meta Phor That Didn't Turn Me On.

As skeptical & uninterested in Obama Mia! mania as I am, I am still hoping that the handsome young phenom, the hot prospect from the minors, Barack "Babe" O'Bama can step up and close out this game - before it goes into extra innings - where, as we know from the Florida world series, anything can happen. The other team's equally green* and "hot" prospect, Slammin' Sara Palin**, has been pretty impressive swatting pop flies out to the warning track during batting practice. She's been hitting so many solid base hits that nobody's even talking about "Lefty" Obamayer's "perfect" game*** anymore. And even the Pachyderm's runty little Italian shortstop has been smacking some sizzling grounders through the gap, with attitude. Giuliani's taken to saying something stupid as arrogantly as he can, opening his eyes and hands wide, and waiting for the laughs. It's a page out of GWB's playbook: tell a lie with enough condescension & people will believe you. It's a team we've loved to hate for a lot of years now, and they are the underdogs this season, but don't count them out. They are solid hitters and they make me nervous with the way they have rolled out**** a distinctly American rhetoric of the mundane & cheesy: the moose, the downs syndrome, the pregnant teenager, the bangs, the hockey, the oil, the oil, the oil. Our oil. They have energized their team as much as Obama has his, and more importantly they are hijacking the terms of debate. We are all talking about Sara Palin right now, only a couple days after Obama's "triumph" he has been wiped from the headlines. Sara Palin has finally given me a way into writing about this campaign, she's elicited some incisive thought & writing from Mark NeuCollins, below; she's Danica Patrick with a rifle instead of a car.***** The Republicans may very well have succeeded in snatching Homeland field advantage. They have stumbled, with a little help from dumb luck I think, onto the one approach that can potentially sink the unsinkable U.S.S. Obama deeper than the Titanic: the huge submerged iceberg of American stupidy & cupidity as it latches onto what it perceives as "the proud underdog" standing up for American Values in the face of overwhelming odds. The Democrats are offering us 1960: Martin Luther Kennedy's pragmatic messianism nut to the Republican's it looks like - what - Gore Vidal or Boss Tweed or something vaguely French. Foreign & threatening anyway. Sara Palin is offering us 1897: My oil. My gun. My car. My world. I'm King of the World. (The problem with American Values being, of course, is that so many of them are destructive, self-destructive, unethical, anti-civilization.

*not in the environmental sense.
**I'm thinking she has some Tammy Faye Baker in her, and a little Jane Curtin.
***the first one pitched since the days of the Kennedy brothers. (ps. Hillary as the new Ted Kennedy? I wonder how Diane Feinstein feels about that. In that she would get bumped to the Walter Mondale spot.)
****via Bush speechwriters & Palin's mouth.
*****Walked into Safeway or Long's the other day & saw the most perfect example of co-branding: Harlequin's Nascar series. Absolute genius.

ICE ROAD SUCKERS

The sinking feeling I have watching the videos of excited Obama supporters is making me wish that katie grace mcgowan were here to hold my hand or pour me a shot of bourbon or slap me a few times till I come out of my stupor. She seems to know how I am feeling right now: like I've wandered, jet-lagged & hungover, still wearing yesterday's clothes & maybe possibly not completely down off those two hits of windowpane, into a pretty scary church service. I think that everyone's chanting in English, not Latin, but I'm just high enough to not be sure. And high enough to feel like it really matters, and that I better figure it out or my soul's in grave danger. This is no metaphor. I once took far too much mescaline & watched an episode of Marcus Welby M.D. about Christian Scientists who would rather have their kid die than have Dr. Welby treat him. That deeply confusing & disturbing viewing experience turned into a many-layered philosophical onion that never got fully peeled; thank god I was saved by tequila & coke. What I mean is I've been this paranoid & confused before but dammit I don't think this is my fault. Maybe it's more like the Day of the Triffids or something. Everyone wants Obama to win, he's so great, and I mean the people around me in my daily life, not the people in the videos, "he represents change," "we have to change our country," and yeah god knows we have been savaged by our leaders for about the last - oh - since FDR maybe. And don't give me that Kennedy crap. Great speeches make for good video clips but money, guns & pussy run the show. I swear I am trying to find my typical comfortable snark level but I am too deeply disturbed at the moment. Maybe we can figure this out together, katie grace mcgowan. David Levi Strauss. Maybe I just need to use my middle name. Then it will all make sense. And of course what makes incredible sense, a stroke of genius, is the GOP suddenly becoming the plucky underdogs. This is the party of people who should be tried for war crimes, criminal stupidity, treason & barbarous inhumanity, and now all of a sudden here they are: a gimpy old grandad war-hero & his plucky, earthy, ribald, SPUNKY red-neck, white-trash, blue-something beauty-queen running mate, so inexperienced & inappropriate & small-town & ice-road trucker that (a) they couldn't have made her up, and (b) you just gotta be pulling for her. (I'm thinking a young Katy Sagal for the biopic) And here the poor Republicans are all beating little paper drums in their sodden little state-fair of a convention, so OBVIOUSLY bound for a sound whuppin' in that thar' eee-lection up agin that slick-talkin' skinny guy from Chi-town and his legions of weird goggle-eyed teenagers leaping up and down all EXCITED about being EXCITED, and his running mate Paulie Walnuts - er - Joe Biden, well gosh darn it those people make me nervous, I think I'll vote for the plucky, down-on-their-luck underdogs. As Paul Shaffer & The Weather Girls once put it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaP9eiWuX3s