Ye Gods!

I watched the debate between Palin and Biden. It was a mix of a sermon to the converts and a folksy barn dance.

Palin is Betty Crocker dressed up as a politician. She’s McCain’s mannequin dressing up the Republican window. And she’s one of the walking wounded for dead words. She was chock-full of them. “Around the kitchen table.” “Joe six pack.” “Surge.” Aw, say it ain’t so, Joe.” “Walk the walk, talk the talk,” “Doggone it.” And the list goes on like coffins to graves.

Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, has a great editorial about clichés:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-avoid-clich-like-the-plague-never-889296.html

Now he would make a good leader.

“How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” Thoreau.

It’s plebby the way Palin’s credentials of soccer mum, mother, everywoman with a smattering of provincial politics, Gap girl platitudes, Norman Rockwell affectation can be taken as VP material. She’s just a protocol droid.

Jesus, there’s more rigor in choosing the US Poet Laureate. Imagine a laureate being chosen because he or she attended a few slam poetry nights, dropped hot butter from a crumpet on his or her collection of Longfellow, and believed that clichés, ballads, and iambic pentameter are the future of poetry.

I want someone who is a leader, who has authority and expertise, someone who inspires. What ever happened to people we looked up to, people who awed us with the potential of the human spirit and its humanity? But I also don’t want some cold analytical automaton, either, devoid of his or her humanity. I want someone who can use what’s in his or her skull as well as feel what’s in the ribcage. I don’t want a leader who dilutes the brain to a watery organ or the heart to a system of sentimental valves.

What I worry about Palin is that she is the bellwether of a whole flock of people who are distrustful of ideas (unorthodox or not), intellect, science, doubt, imagination, dissent, other points of view.

Government should be about the collective will of the people in the hands of those who are Darwinian fit and strong to rule. It should not be about those who are all equal in the eyes of God and approved by the aggregate’s fear.

Maybe I have a conservative streak after all and am not all bolshy and Molotov cocktail, but I think we need a strong, resourceful, bright, sophisticated, cultured, imaginative, and spiritually bold (not pious) leader.

I want a great man or woman (cliché, I know, but Nietzsche’s superman is too erudite).

I’m going back to the world of books where life isn’t reduced to clichés and where every word is weighed out and has to be contained by periods and commas and where each word means what it is saying and not saying one thing but meaning another or preaching what nobody lives by.

And I’m going to walk the beach, close to where I live, with my daughter and gather windfall apples then take them home to bake in a cake.

And if Obama loses, I’m going to find a shag’s rock and live out the rest of my days there surrounded, as it may well be, in guano.

On the Razzle-Dazzle

The Caterpillar and the Politician looked at each other for some time in silence. At last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and addressed the Politician in a languid, sleepy voice. “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

“Always write and work at the edge of your ability. If it isn’t two words away from falling over, it’s not worth doing.” M. John Harrison

I can’t believe that the mastodon Bush is still trying to get Congress to pass a, what is it, 700 billion dollar bailout plan? The US  is a nation of debt — my family included — and now it’s gone big time with flashing lights and slippery poles. Why should the taxpayer — and that’s the middle class — come to the aid of big business when our pockets have already been fleeced while this government, like a slick conjuror, diverted the American people’s attention with the war in Iraq? The Bush regime has already spent 10 trillion! And I’m sure dogsbody Bush threw this bone to the Senate because he hopes to lick the senators where they like to be licked the best.

Why can’t Wall Street save itself? Why not go to the moneybags, banks, instead of empty purses, taxpayers? And what kind of profit can the taxpayers expect to receive if this bailout plan works?

It’s a shambles. It’s like we are watching the US government slurping up a plate of spaghetti noodles in the hopes of being satiated when all it will create is a distended belly of more debt.

Margaret Atwood has written a non-fiction book about debt and the art of thrift, it’s called Payback, and she has an interview in the London Times and  talks about a phrase spoken of the dead: “He has paid his debt to nature. It means you’ve borrowed something – the physical part of yourself made up of natural elements – and you’re paying it back by dissolving into nature.” This has some wisdom in it for what’s going on now. I just wish I could see it.

The BBC has a good scrub down on the dirty laundry: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7631321.stm

What we need is more of this: “The rebirth of wonder.” Ferlinghetti.

Something is rotten in the state of Mammon.

I just can’t figure why a country’s leader, in this case Mandible Bush, would want to cripple a nation he espouses to love with the same fervor as his God. If you’re in your lover’s bed, why would you want to defecate in it?

McCain is for the gobblers of this society, the ones who want to lick the trough clean and then regurgitate a pea for the rest of us and call it a feast.

I don’t know if there is a quick fix, like the bailouts, or a slow one, like the taxpayers getting squeezed like lemons until the juice runs down the politicians’ legs.

What needs to happen, I think, is some major heart surgery. But it can’t be clean. The heart, which is rotten, needs to be yanked out and left to beat out the torpid blood of a nation engorged on debt. (And my family is part of this problem, too, and part of this world, also.) Let’s sink so we can rise. We are all the landsknecht of a feudal government that demands we spend in order to thrive.

The pagans had the right idea. In order to ensure another harvest they would make a human sacrifice. But instead of the taxpayers being the oblation, what the American taxpayers need to make happen is that it’s the financial world that goes into the bog with its belly full of dollars.

And what’s with the Palindrome? She reads backwards as she does forwards, in my opinion. And she’s dangerous. Just look at her. She dresses like a 50s woman with a Betty Crocker cookbook in her heart, a McCarthy spook in her head, and a gun for a mouth. Why has she been foisted on the voting public — it’s demeaning. We should be able to smell a rat now when we smell one.

The United States of Lethargy and Lassitude, that’s what we have. I just wish everyone would snap out of it and see that they are being made fools of, mocked by cretins.

Why can’t Americans stand up like Americans do best and knock the stuffing out of the hollow men of greed?