Barack Obama may be a better dancer than John McCain, but neither of them can hold a candle to sister Sarah rockin’ out to Red Neck Woman in blue jeans. No more Niemann Marcus for her.
And Elaine Lafferty (yes, the Elaine Lafferty who used to edit Ms. Magazine) thinks that Sarah Palin is a “brainiac.” Really:
…these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.
I’m a Democrat, but I’ve worked as a consultant with the McCain campaign since shortly after Palin’s nomination. Last week, there was the thought that as a former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine as well as a feminist activist in my pre-journalism days, I might be helpful in contributing to a speech that Palin had long wanted to give on women’s rights.
Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.
I’ve never been one, but not because I didn’t want to be (at least when I wasn’t in a relationship). I am, after all, a guy. But other (attractive) women have always governed my urge for promiscuity. It might be because I was never the “bad boy.”
I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she’s powerful. Her politics aren’t my politics. But you can see that she’s a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she’s had a huge impact. People connect to her.
There’s also this, on how monolingual so-called liberals are:
…something dawned on me today, and Palin crystallized it. You see, I “get” Palin. And I “get” why my liberal friends don’t “get” Palin. But my liberal friends just don’t “get” why I “get” Palin — and they never will.
…John Podhoretz…once said, “All conservatives are bilingual — we have to be. We speak both liberal and conservative. But liberals are monolingual — they don’t have to be anything else. They speak liberal, and are completely ignorant of the conservative tongue.”
I’m not a conservative, but I’m bilingual as well. But I sure get a lot of monolingual commenters at this blog.
But I probably will, if only out of morbid fascination. And the dim hope that the team that played the second half of the Wisconsin game will show up.
[Evening update]
Well, they showed up for the first quarter, but it was all downhill from there. They couldn’t even beat the point spread. It’s going to be a long season.
I met her as a child growing up in Flint. She (and, I think, Kovacs) performed in one of the A.C. Spark Plug concerts that my father produced in the sixties, and we always got to meet the stars back stage at the IMA auditorium afterward, and often went to Luigi’s for pizza (still the best pizza in the universe, IMHO). The place has autographed pictures of the stars that dined there on the wall. I think hers is still there.
The Wolverines just lost to Toledo, at home. It’s going to be an ugly season. Clearly the Wisconsin game was a fluke. And while it was expected to be a rebuilding year, I don’t think that anyone expected it to be this bad. Probably alumni are already calling for Rodriguez’ head.
[Update a little while later]
Unsurprisingly, it was a pretty ugly game for Michigan. And the first time they’d ever been defeated by a MAC team.
I thought it was a gag (in multiple senses of the word) when I heard that Annette Bening was going to play Helen Thomas in a movie. But it’s twue, it’s twue.
On the other hand, it’s probably a lot easier to make Annette Bening look like Helen Thomas than vicey versy.
There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.
But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater–as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel–it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.
Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.
Other than that I think Hemingway is vastly overrated, and ample fodder for parody, I agree. The Peace prizes have been a joke since Arafat and Rigoberto Menchu (not to mention Jimmy Carter), and I think that the literature prizes have gone the same way, decades ago.
. Or go rent