VIEWPOINT: A Mighty Wind blows through UPDATE #45 - CBC APOLOGY

[Catty1]

Apparently a number of folks in the US are really angry about this article written by Canadian CBC columnist Heather Mallick (it's been on Yahoo News for a couple of days now ). So I will post and THEN read it.

Any thoughts?
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http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/...p-mallick.html
VIEWPOINT
Heather Mallick
A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention
Last Updated: Friday, September 5, 2008 | 8:48 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News

I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

So why do it?

It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a woman. They're unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously.

But do they not know that women have been trained to resent other women and that they only learn to suppress this by constantly berating themselves and reading columns like this one? I'm a feminist who understands that women can nurse terrible and delicate woman hatred.

Palin was not a sure choice, not even for the stolidly Republican ladies branch of Citizens for a Tackier America. No, she isn't even female really. She's a type, and she comes in male form too.

John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I'd had the wit to come up with it first. It's safer than "white trash" but I'll pluck safety out of the nettle danger. Or something.

Doyle's job includes watching a lot of reality television and he's well-versed in the backstory. White trash — not trailer trash, that's something different — is rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush himself), suspicious of the urban, frankly disbelieving of the foreign, and a fan of the American cliché of authenticity. The semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave.
'Turn your guns on Levi, ma'am'

Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi "I'm a fuckin' redneck" Johnson prodding his daughter?

I know that I have an attachment to children that verges on the irrational, but why don't the Palins? I'm not the one preaching homespun values but I'd destroy that ratboy before I'd let him get within scenting range of my daughter again, and so would you. Palin's e-mails about the brother-in-law she tried to get fired as a state trooper are fizzing with rage and revenge. Turn your guns on Levi, ma'am.

Palin has it all, along with being vicious and profoundly dishonest. Just hours after her first convention speech, the Associated Press did a good fast listing of her untruths and I won't dwell on them.

I did promise to watch the entire convention so you wouldn't have to, but I discovered a neat trick. I switched between the convention and the 2003 folk music mockumentary A Mighty Wind on Bravo.

They were indistinguishable. Click on a nervous wreck with deeply strange hair doing a monologue on society today and where it all went wrong. Are you watching Christian belter Aaron Tippin singing Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagle Fly in the Xcel Centre in St. Paul or the actors from Spinal Tap remixing the 1966 version of Potato's in the Paddy Wagon?

Who delivered this line: "To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will." Was it Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family talking about Bristol Palin's shotgun wedding or was it a flashback to the Kingston Trio?

The conventioneers are nothing like the rich men who run the party, and that's the mystery of the hick vote. They'd be much better served by the Democrats. I know Thomas Frank answered this in What's the Matter with Kansas?; I know that red states vote Republican on social issues to give themselves the only self-esteem available to their broken, economically abused existence.
Lie works for Palin

But surely they know Barack Obama is not planning to finish off the ordinary hillbilly when he adjusts tax rates. He's going to raise taxes on the top 2% of Americans and that doesn't include anyone at the convention beyond the Bushes and McCains and random party management. So why cheer Palin when she claims otherwise?

Is it racism? I'm told that it is, although I find racism so appalling that I have difficulty identifying it. It is more likely the dearly held Republican notion that any American can become violently rich, as rich as those hedge funders in Greenwich, Conn., who buy $40-million mansions unseen and have their topiary shaped in the form of musical notes.

When Palin and Rudy Giuliani sneered at Obama's years of "community organizing" — they said it like "rectal fissure" — the audience ewww-ed with them. Republicans dream of a personal future that involves only household staff, not equals who need to be persuaded to vote.

So I'm trying to imagine the pain of realizing, as they all must at some point, that it is not going to happen for them. It's the green light at the end of the dock. It's the ship that never comes in, gals, as Palin would put it. But she won't because the lie works for her. It helps her scramble, without compassion, above all those other tense no-hoper ladies in the audience.

American politics isn't short of smart women. Susan Eisenhower, Ike's granddaughter, who just endorsed Obama, made an extraordinary speech at the Democratic convention (and a terrific casual appearance on The Colbert Report as Palin was speaking). The Republican party has already consumed nearly all of its moderate "seed corn," she said aptly. Time to start again.

Eisenhower, a scholar and journalist, has a point. Or am I only saying that because she's part of the thoughtful demographic that I'm trying to reach here? Think, Heather, think like a Republican! The Skeptics, shall I call them, are my base, and I'll pander to them as ardently as the Republican patriarchs tease their white female marginals.

This Week

Mad Men is scaring me (AMC on Sunday nights). What has Matthew Weiner, a writer from The Sopranos, created, a period soap opera about reality and façade or a horror series on a localized war between men and women? Was Episode 6 of Season 2 a costume drama about the Madonna/whore complex or the operatic rendition of one simple thing, human cruelty?

Or maybe I'm seeing too much into it and it's just a sexed-up version of the Republican convention.

[RICHARD]

Two things to really be angry about.

I'd be bitter if I was stuck in between The Lower 48 and the Alaska-billy group. One can kick her arse and the other could, well, Kick her arse.

The other thing? How does she get the little tail on the 'c' in facade...

See, I can't do it!

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I hope this poor "feminist" gets some help.

You know the difference between a Pitbull and an angry feminist is?

You'd rather try to put lipstick on the Pit, And you wouldn't chance rabies.

IF anything, now more than ever, I want to see JM and SP win for one simple fact.


I want to watch people roll up into little balls and roll around on the dirt. The efing hatred that some people have in their hearts must be toxic. And I hope it is.

The feminist who wrote this piece must be sucking on pennies to get such a bad taste in her mouth.

It's very funny to watch and read some of the shenanigans that people will write about others, I wonder if they could stand up to the same scrutiny?


The object to writing a good smear piece is to be witty, clever with words and able to convey a amount of 'dirty prose' that is fit for the reader.

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Watch!

Heather Malick might want to check her seat for her next airplane flight.
It seems that Heather wanted a first class seat on the broom she took last time she traveled. I understand her anger now. I'd be upset if I had a broom stuck in my bum-I mean where would you sit? That would make any feminist an angry one...

See no need to name call when you can insinuate bad things about people.
She's not even classy enough to be sly and funny.


If she is a Canuckian?

If she was nice we would let her be a U.S. citizen.

Now?, she's still welcome here.
We have better health insurance so she can get a shrink and maybe work out some of that hate and agression.

You know? I'd be mad if we had to try and pick from alllllllllll the candidates they have up there in their next election. It's hard enough to choose from the two dopes we have down here.


I don't see any harm in her piece, It's just words and sometimes words have two meanings, like the word feminist is code for "I hate everybody".

[Puckstop31]

LOL

Angry? Not in the least. Surprised? Not in the least. I've know for a long time that people like the author of this joke do not understand people like me... The "white trash", the "hick." I see it a good thing that she (and people like her) under estimate "us".

"Reality" TV is her source? BWHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAA!

She is also wrong about Mrs. Palin shoring up the "white trash" vote. She brought a lot of people like ME, back to McCain/Palin. I was going to vote for Bob Barr until she was chosen. She is the closest thing to a Libertarian running.

If I were Canadian, I would be ashamed of this "piece". It's rather, sad, ya know?

[Medusa]

No matter how well educated, when a person resorts to name calling and/or vulgarities, it reveals their lack of vocabulary and intelligence and, sadly, their upbringing. She apparently lacks the intelligence and originality to phrase things any other way. Misogyny is not limited to males.

[Catty1]

Thanks for the feedback. I just wouldn't have the perspective from a US point of view...and when I read in Yahoo news that quite a few folks were upset with this - and there was no name mentioned - I thought it might be one of our TV or radio commentators.

I was a bit surprised to see it was Heather. She writes some very intelligent and great articles. Why she got her knickers in a knot over this is beyond me.

Also - it seems it was written right after the Republican convention where Sarah's VP candidacy was announced. I wonder if Heather would change her tune now.

If she writes and comment or etc in response, I'll post it.

[Catty1]

The Alaskan who went 'outside'

Sarah Palin's Wasilla is beyond small-town. The woman who could be president is someone with no grasp of the wider world

Heather Mallick
Guardian Unlimited
September 5, 2008

I was born in a northern Canadian settlement so small it was accessible most of the year only by a Bombardier, a sort of huge military tank built for passengers. It was like a transport plane, a big iron bulb with caterpillar tracks. I swear we had a paddle-steamer for supplies in the summer.

Take that, Sarah Palin. The place was six times smaller than Wasilla, Alaska, the town that birthed John McCain's strange vice-presidential "soulmate", as weird as that disconnected eerie smile that floats on his face as he stands next to her.

My credentials are solid; Palin cannot out-hick me. Until I fled at 18, I never lived in a northern town of more than 12,000 people. My towns were full of Sarah Palins. These types are fine, such as they are, until they leave town and turn fraudulent. They label themselves "the salt of the earth". It's when they try to make that a qualification for a greater glory that things turn unpleasant.

I never claimed a higher moral standing for coming from a great big empty on the map. Small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home.

Canada has lots of hockey moms. They're called Fran and Nancy. They have cruel haircuts and their voices shake the rafters of the rink as their rink-rats play. How can I translate the hearty, jollying-along Palin for British audiences? She's a working class Joan Hunter Dunn. It's those volleyball shoulders and field-hockey thighs, the energy, the bullying, and the utter self-confidence in every lie she tells.

Salt-of-the-earthers don't lie! But Palins do. I watched Palin last night, my mouth open, my eyeballs drying out, my hand making shaky notes. I read them aghast.

Did she really joke, "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick."?

Did she just blow kisses to the audience?

Did she just say, "We need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope. We've got lots of both."?

Yes, she did lie about billion-gallon slurps of oil and gas available for Americans to blow, about her support of Alaska's notorious pork-barrel "bridge to nowhere", about which particular citizens will see tax increases under Obama (only the richest, and she knows that).

She also lied when she slobbered over small-town folks (an American version of British farm life, except British farmers have a point). The granite honesty of hicks is a cliche, a fantasy, a meme of American life, as much as the working-class solidarity of Tony Blair was in 1997, and where did that get anyone?

But most of all, she lied about the north and the virtues it supposedly confers on citizens. Canadians watch this with horror. To us, Alaska is the back of beyond. Americans feel the same way. Alaskans are a bunch of Ted Stevens, that enraged screaming old senator who explained that the internet was not a big truck, it was more like a "bunch of tubes". He was arrested and charged with taking bribes, but handily won the August senatorial primary.

We love our own north to the point of covering our eyes and humming as it melts (yesterday the BBC headlined the collapse of Canada's ice shelves; Canadian papers and websites missed the story) but Alaska is different from our north. We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built structures bring to a glorious landscape. Canadian firms invest billions in the place and mine its ores. One hundred thousand Canadians visit Alaska every year, and we like to pass by in cruise ships. But it never goes further than that. Alaska is our redneck cousin, our Yukon territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line.

Palin got her first passport last year. (Americans didn't need a passport to enter Canada until recently). She seems to have visited us precisely once, not surprisingly since Alaskans regularly refer to the rest of the world as "outside". We are so foreign to her, this woman who might become US president.

What is native to her is smugness, her certainty that what's good for Wasilla is good for the world in all its infinite variety. It's a variety that Palin will never begin to grasp.

[RICHARD]

This is off topic but I have to post this...

Some hackers hacked a Shiite website run by followers of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani.

They posted a piece of video from Bill Maher, troll and comedian, making fun of the GAAS and an edict concerning personal behavior.

A spokesman for the GAAS said the edict was BS and never happened.

So, here's the rub.

Suppose some goofball sees this clip from Bull Maher and decides to exact some kind of revenge? BM is a idiot, who often speaks about the government and their interest in internet 'bad guys'. He definitely doesn't like any gov't. involvement in HIS internet dealings and especially is critical of the Patriot Act.


If BM gets some death threats because of this hack job, who is he going to call? The police? The feds?

THat is the phony, make believe attitiude of the people who do not want to Big Brother in their lives-They talk a tough game against the system, until THEY need some kind of assurance that they will be protected from any militant religious nuts that may want to kill him for making fun of their religion.

This should be interesting.