Frictive Federal Fan Fiction
10 November 2008 | 12:06 PM
Now that the election’s over and the nation has been saved from the prospect of having the dude who wants to bomb Iran and the woman who thinks charging sexual assault victims for their rape-kits is acceptable as the tag team in charge of things, liberals like me can finally take some time to reflect on the campaign a bit. While the conservative pundits continue the finger-pointing game, trying to pin their loss on this quarter of the Republican party or that one, I choose to look back at the good things that came out of this election. By my measure, the best thing to come out of this campaign was Sarah Palin. Not “best” as in “fit to govern”, but rather as a cultural phenomenon and a cult of personality.
For a while now, there have been rumblings on the right that Governor Palin would be a great pick for the top of the ticket in 2012. While the citizen side of me cringes at the thought of her being the nominee, the gawker in me can’t help but watch. President Bush has spent the past eight years leading from the gut rather than the head, and while I think that most level-headed people would agree that this spells disaster for us as a republic, at least it’s been entertaining at times. Sarah Palin holds the same promise, I think. Let’s face it, the woman is a ticking time-bomb, waiting to explode in a white hot flash of grammatical and factual mis-statements and nationalistic hooey. She lacks the intellectual curiosity to ask important questions, nor the critical thinking to process any of the answers she might get if she did. In short, she’s a dullard. However, she’s a dullard who, for some reason, resonates with a great many people, so to my mind she warrants my attention. To quote Sun Tzu:
“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”
Anyway, because this is me, rather than someone who actually takes this shit seriously, my version of “knowing my enemy” involves reading Sarah Palin erotica. To paraphrase Linda Richman, it’s neither Sarah nor Palin nor erotic, but that’s beside the point. I mean, come on, does it get any better than this?
“She rarely knows what city she’s in and she likes that sense that she’s really nowhere at all. When Todd is fucking her, and her thighs are pressed against his hips, and her hands are tearing at the skin on his back he’ll say, ‘I’m fucking the next president of the United States.’”
Sure, it’s not even remotely erotic. And yes, it’s actually even a little icky, if you were to close your eyes and actually visualize it. But to me it’s great, especially since the stories ascribe a sense of existential angst and emotional turmoil to the woman, which is funny since this is a person who’s so empty and cynical that she glibly called people “unpatriotic” merely because they lived in Boston or New York.
If we imagine that Sarah Palin actually has inner conflict (not to mention kinks involving sex with strangers and a thing for religious dirty-talk), then we can humanize her a bit more. And that will be important if and when she does run for office again, so she can be discredited on the merits of her inabilities and intellectual shorcomings, rather than merely for being a vapid trophy wife with a flair for riling up a crowd.
Although, to be fair, this similar experiment has yet to humanize Ann Coulter in my eyes, so maybe it’s all a fantasy. Then again, I guess that’s the point.
Posted by Andy in Politcally Incoherent