Thursday, July 30, 2009

the language of alaskan loon

I remember John Kennedy saying something like, “I can imagine, on the craggy cliffs of western Ireland, those looking out over the sea and seeing America.”* Sarah Palin had severe difficulty in answering thoughtful, simple questions. She was comically portrayed in her essential essence by Tina Fey. Tina, as Palin, smiling proudly, confidently, and completely clueless, “I can see Russia from my house!”† Kennedy’s language was poetic, Palin’s language is psychotic.

Recently on the Johnny Carson show [I had a friend, whom, always referred to it as the Jack Paar show] it was pointed out, that Palin’s speech, would make sense, if it was treated as beatnik poetry. They had William Shatner demonstrate. Steve Colbert took out pieces of paper from a hat, and randomly generated a palinesque speech.

Her language has color; as logical and rhetorical argument, it meets no traditional standard. The tone is belligerent and dismissive of, even, reality. Who does she sound like? It came to me, the Vancome lady, Nicole Sullivan’s character on the first episode of Mad TV. Sullivan describes her thusly: “says rude things while smiling, just like this boss I used to have, and like the women behind the makeup counter at Skokie Mall.”

“Tchah... you know what? Uh-uh!” or, “Shaaaaah - you know what?”
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*i need to find the exact wording somewhere
†She and Republican staff touted her foreign affairs experience by saying, several times, that Alaska and Russia were neighbours, and Alaska being a bulwark in defense and such nonsense.
“They’re our next-door neighbours and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Dogs return to their vomit

As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is the fool that repeateth his folly. — Proverbs xxvi. 11.
Sometimes these July and August days are remembered as long and languid. Days are slow, for the non-laboring class, and some folks go on summer vacation. Canicular days, dog days of summer are here. In this part of the country, it has been a marvelously cool summer, the sky has been filled with large, voluminous clouds of graphic beauty. But the country's political landscape has been ripe with the agitators of folly.

The Palin circus is packing up its tent and going on the road. Some Republican senators and governors have been exposed in their amorous hypocrisy and degeneracy, others have not found centre ring.

A cop arrests a professor in the professor’s house for being in his house. The charges are dropped, which means―false arrest. Someone asks the president about the affair, and he succinctly and accurately responds. Certainly, the last incumbent never answered questions fluently nor honestly.

But there is another idiocy that will not die. It has been called, by some the ‘birther’ controversy. It is a vehicle of the delusional, the disingenuous, the demented, the dishonest and it has been picked up by the hate filled racists.

Now last night, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, last night on Neil Abercrombie’s, (D-Hawaii), resolution about the fiftieth anniversary of Hawaiian statehood, 378-0.
...Whereas August 21, 2009, marks the 50th Anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's signing of Proclamation 3309, which admitted Hawaii into the Union in compliance with the Hawaii Admission Act, enacted by the United States Congress on March 18, 1959;...
Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii;...
Barack Obama is 48 years old on Tuesday, 4 August 2009. Now, his birth certificate has been available online from the State of Hawaii, for some time. Yet, the crazed and the corrupt will blither their rubbish.

I remember reading the histories of late mediƦval Britain. The scots claimed that the english were born with tails, and the english claimed that scots were born with tails. I grew up hearing, some say, that negroes were born with tails. How many centuries will it take for individuals, to recognise that men are not born with tails, and those whom say they do are of only two categories: liars or mentally impaired?