Tuesday night at the gym I exhausted my reading material (a printed out chapter from my ongoing novel) while still on my warm up session on the stepmill. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover a copy of the current issue of Rolling Stone sitting neatly on the very elliptical machine I was planning to spend the next 45 minutes grinding away on. I grabbed it, and hopped on.
I've never regularly read Rolling Stone, not even back when I was 20 and thought I had a responsibility to care about new bands, but I've flipped through copies often enough in doctor's offices and car repair waiting rooms that I figured I could get half an hour's amusement out of this issue. Especially since it had a cover article on Metallica, whose new, supposedly-super-heavy album I'd just
downloaded obtained that afternoon.
I disregarded the table of contents and just started flipping through it, a decision I began to regret around page 30, when I'd not yet seen anything I was interested in reading about. Plus it's not so easy to turn pages while doing 200 strides per minute on the swinging arms elliptical. I did at last get to the Metallica article, and read it, but came away unimpressed. They were my favorite band in the world in like, 1990, I still think
Justice for All is the best metal album of all time, and I've got all their other albums (most on actual CDs, though 99% of my music listening is to ripped versions on my computer, tracks on my ipod, or burned CDs in my car), but I haven't found much to like on the last few. A good song here or there, and the heaviness can still move me, but nothing that catchy.
My last conscious thought about the band Metallica was when the
Some Kind of Monster documentary was out. I never saw it, but the reviews all talked about how crazy and dysfunctional the guys were, how they had to see a therapist to resolve their band anger issues, and how they might break up at any moment. I hadn't processed the fact that that was more than 4 years ago, and that they were still together and releasing a new album, so obviously they'd worked things out to some degree. The Rolling Stone article covered that, and talked about how they do intense jam sessions in closet-sized rooms before every concert to get themselves in synch and charged up. After the shows they all travel separately, flying on their own planes, jetting back to Paris or Norway between the shows in their European tour, etc. Not a bad life, for the proverbial blister on your little finger and/or thumb.
That article exhausted, without greatly adding to my information about the world or reducing the remaining time in my elliptical session, I flipped back to an earlier piece in the magazine, about Sarah Palin. I don't go out of my way to read about her, and I can't watch her talk anymore. Just the 2 and 3 minute clips of SNL's Tiny Fey channeling her incoherence are more than I can take, and only the fact that she could soon be an irregular heartbeat away from the presidency compels me to push out some old football trivia for long enough to contemplate her existence.
I've blogged in the past (too lazy to find a link) about how humans judge intelligence, and how we're clearly biased towards our own strengths, or at least our own aspirations. For example, I greatly admire people who can speak extemporaneously and remain coherent and literate. I'll listen to Christopher Hitchens discuss almost anything, just because he can do it real time and keep his words and concepts as clear and intelligent as a well-written essay. Even when he's
defending the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the most misleading, obfuscating, goalpost-shifting terms, he's so erudite doing it that I'm almost seduced. (Seduced into believing that he's being sincere, rather than making a coldly-calculated argument.)
This, I think, explains (which I just Freud-ulently spelled "expalins") a lot of the revulsion I feel for Palin. She's not qualified for her job (current or aspiring) and she's unable to speak clearly about anything. Why her inability is particularly galling to me I'm not sure; she's not articulate and doesn't seem to be very bright, but neither was Bush, and listening to him never annoyed me that much. I didn't agree with many of his ideas, and thought he was entirely uninformed about the actual results of his policies, but he seemed sincere about them, and did his best to explain them. It was like he had enough information to justify what he was doing; he just wasn't able to spit it out. It seemed like he was doing the best he could, and sort of knew he was in over his head, but was trying to rise to the challenge. Like he took the responsibility seriously.
Palin seems very different. She seems to feel entitled and smug and cynical. I don't get any humility or humbleness from her; she's all brassy surface growl. She seems like the wound-too-tight
hockey soccer mom whose smile never reaches her eyes, who relentlessly spoils and estranges her children, and who drives her husband crazy with an endless litany of hateful gossiping and bitching about anyone who (in her twisted world view) dares to cross her. In the real world, she'd terrify any teacher who tried to tell her the truth about her mediocre, underachieving children, then scream at her kids all the way home, before suffering a breakdown when some little old lady took "her" parking spot at the mall.
Pop psych aside,
I read this blog entry this afternoon and thought it was fairly brilliant on the whole, and in its summation of Palin's question answering "ability."
My initial reaction to the “in what respect, Charlie?” moment was that it was like watching a student try to fake a term paper in real time: “well, the Bush Doctrine, Charlie, is a doctrine developed by George Bush. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘doctrine’ as ‘a: something that is taught; b: a principle or position or the body of principles in a branch of knowledge or system of belief,’ and the Bush Doctrine has taught us much about the body of principles in George Bush’s system of belief, which is to defend America and never blink, Charlie.”
Doesn't that sum it up just about perfectly? She's an undergrad, faking a term paper in real time. Unprepared for the issue, without the intelligence to segue into something she does know about, she just spits out catch phrases and talking points without any real connection to the question at hand. "Don't blink. Keep America strong. Tax relief. Win the war in Iraq. etc..." Whether this makes you feel sympathy for her or horror for what she might become depends primarily on how much agreement you have with her alleged political leanings. I thought Tom Tomorrow's comic take was pretty funny too, if less accurate. If only I could think of
an appropriate analogy for her speaking style!
As for the Rolling Stone piece, it's worth a mention just for how lacerating it is. It was written after Palin's triumphant debut speech at the RNC, when she read an angry, cynical, sarcastic speech that was almost entirely an attack on Obama. She threw verbal red meat to the crowd of aging carnivores, and was greeted rapturously by the faithful. Literally and figuratively. The RS article isn't so much about Palin or her speech, but more about what her popularity says about Americans. The author is neither impressed, or forgiving. A couple of quotes that had me laughing and shaking my head at the gym.
Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore. And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket.
...
Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
Ouch? Well, it made for some decent gym reading, at any rate.
In other news, blog posting will (continue) to be light and erratic for the foreseeable future. I'm going to be in San Diego on semi-vacation for the next week, before driving up to Anaheim next weekend for BlizzCon, where there had better be playable D3 machines on the floor, or I'll be one unhappy attendee. Even if I'm there on a free ticket and even Blizzard's dime for the hotel. They're still excessively secretive, but they're PR has certainly become more supportive of fansites in the years since we covered D2 and had to get everything directly from Blizzard North, since Bliz Irvine PR was Dilbert's pointy-haired boss-esque in virtually their every (in)action.
Labels: diablo iii, politics, sarah palin, vacation
