How to Field Dress a Donkey

Dispatch 8
How to Field Dress a Donkey
David Levi Strauss

So a hockey mom carrying her special needs child walks into a bar, and says to everyone in and outside the joke, “What are you laughing at, asshole? Here’s what I think of your European Ideas.”

Hillary Clinton must be wondering what she did to deserve this. John McCain has, with one deft stroke, made a mockery of her campaign and everything she stands for. You want a woman tough enough to be Commander-in-Chief? Sarah Palin is so tough she doesn’t need to wear pantsuits to wear the pants. She can stand by her man and stand up to the terrorists, while her lily-livered opponent is standing around “worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” And as she marches into history, Palin has picked up the fallen banner of Hillary to use as her own petard.

Unlike Hillary and Joe Biden, she’s “not a member of the permanent political establishment”. . . yet. She’s just been a small-town mayor, which is “sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” and a big-state governor. Voters like governors, especially of big states. She sees this as a race between “a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single law or even a reform” and the “only man in this campaign who has ever really fought for you.” The sound of Styrofoam Greek columns falling was deafening.

Even Palin’s youngest daughter is so innately media-savvy that she turned Paul Wolfowitz’s telling rough gesture of licking his hand to smooth out his hair (in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11) into an endearing image, using hers to straighten out her baby brother Trig’s. Bristol and Levi looked independent, unrepentant, and fierce, like they could eat the whole Washington Press Corps for breakfast, even without the help of brother Track, who’s on his way to Iraq.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden suddenly have a tremendous problem on their hands. Sarah Barracuda is the new fresh face of revenge and resentment politics, and if enough white evangelical blue-collar and middle-class voters buy it again, things are going to get very ugly. It will no longer be about ideas, European or otherwise. Making sense, telling the truth, and being right just won’t cut it anymore. John McCain has, at least for now, turned the tables, back to a Karl Rovian image- and symbol-storm, in a skirt.


Filed on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008, after the third night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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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.

Country First

To be honest, I'm a bit in awe of Governor Palin's ability to field-dress a Moose. I imagine her as vice-president reaching up with a survival knife inside the still warm body of a placid animal, shot with a high-powered rifle that was, moments before, standing knee-deep in a lake munching on plants; reaching up to sever its trachea and spill its guts on the ground --and simultaneously with a satellite phone in the other hand, conducting intricate foreign policy negotiations that affect the future of mankind-- and there is a certain awful poetry to this image. Having grown up in rural America, I am privy to the practice of "meat processing" (that is, watching the trusting look in the cow's eyes being replaced by fear, being replaced by eyes rolled up in the head, with the sound of the substantial body falling to the ground). I cannot look in a cow's eyes and do that, hence, my vegetarianism. It takes a certain type of person who can put all empathy aside and make the killing cut.

While watching the Republican convention coverage, I could not help thinking of the VFW post in Solon, Iowa. Solon is a small midwestern town like so many others. The names of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country are engraved on a concrete monument in the center of town, and their names are familiar. In the VFW post, there is a photographic mural that covers one wall. It shows a deer (actually a prime buck) silhouetted in a misty forest. We, as viewers, are the first-person-shooters in this picture. It is not the misty forest, but stalking and killing that buck that matters. Surrounding me in the VFW post are ghosts from wars that were fought, purposes unclear, for which youth and dreams and bodies were sacrificed. They are drawn here by the light of the fluorescent sign outside, to drink and smoke and talk of other days. Theirs is a commonality of experience that excludes all others. They pull themselves from their chairs and into the bright sunshine to march in the Independence Day and Memorial Day parades, carrying flags and guns that shoot only blanks. And I am left with the with the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with the slogan "Country First." Countries have neither reverence for life nor empathy for those that they roll over.

The Other Side & Their Friends in the Media

Dispatch 7
The Other Side & Their Friends in the Media
David Levi Strauss

When the Bush/Cheney regime seized power eight years ago, I would not have predicted that they would prove to be so adept at the deployment and control of images to shape public opinion. In fact, they turned out to be better at it than any previous American administration.

Watching the first (delayed) night of the Republican National Convention on TV tonight, I was struck by how different the image rhetoric in St. Paul is from what I saw first-hand in Denver last week. The images projected behind speakers tonight were more subtle and yet more iconic than anything I saw in Denver. Joe Lieberman stood before a clear blue sky broken only by a flag waving from a single pole. The film narrated by Gary Sinise was less mawkish and more moving than any of the Democrats’ films. Only George W. Bush’s visual broadcast from the Oval Office was substandard, and that may very well have been by design. For McCain to win, he must distance himself from the Bush/Cheney image.

The verbal rhetoric of each party is less distinguished and less distinguishable. Like John Kerry, Fred Thompson gave a great speech, much better than anything he did on his own behalf as a candidate. Did he have access to better speechwriters tonight, or does he just perform better in a supporting role? “John McCain knows about hope. [When he was a POW] that was all he knew.” “This is the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of our history have sought in their leaders.” “Character you can believe in.” “Not because of a teleprompter’s speech designed to appeal to America’s critics abroad.” “The Democrats present a history-making nominee for President; history-making in that he’s the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee ever to run for President.”

The overall message was clearer in St. Paul because it was less complicated. Fred Thompson painted a compelling portrait of the candidate and threw out partisan red meat, and then Joe Lieberman appealed to disaffected conservative Democrats and Independents by saying partisanship isn’t enough. It is strange to see both campaigns running against their respective parties. Both McCain and Obama realize that they cannot win with only traditional party loyalties, that they must extend their reach. And they’re both reaching toward the same undecided voters, from opposite ends of the spectrum.


Filed on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008, after the second night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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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

What's happening outside the convention center?

Anyone able to weigh in on what's being talked about via link below? - ie. arrests of journalists etc. (I'd write more but I just heard two gunshots coming from the vicinity of my backyard...)

http://www.alternet.org/rights/97194/

The Calm of the Storm

Dispatch 6
The Calm of the Storm
David Levi Strauss

So far the meeting in St. Paul is the Unconvention, and that may be the best thing that possibly could have happened for the Republicans. Bush & Cheney couldn’t make it? Fantastic! The Republican delegates are, after all, the only people left in the world who still think the current Administration is competent (71% of them approve of Bush’s performance). Much better to have Cindy McCain and Laura Bush (decked out in gold and white, respectively) show up only as fundraisers for hurricane relief efforts, although that line about how it’s time to “take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats” begs the question: are the two mutually exclusive?

The reason for the postponement of the convention was succinctly stated by David Brooks: “They couldn’t afford that split-screen image” of party-hearty Republican celebrations juxtaposed with homeless hurricane survivors recalling Bush/Cheney’s criminal neglect during Katrina. It just wouldn’t look right. Some lobbyists couldn’t help themselves tonight, and threw lavish meet-and-greet-and-bribe parties anyway, but they at least tried to lock out the press.

To fully capitalize on their good luck, the Republican ticket should disappear for the next 68 days, perhaps to Wasilla, or South Assetia.


Filed Monday, Sept. 2, 2008, after the first night of the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

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