No Regrets

Wednesday Rotogravure: Some -isms and Some Suggestions

This weeks Wed. Rot. is a little different from previous rots. There is such a surfeit of interesting topical photos floating around the Interweb, pictures much more intriguing  than the ones I took last weekend at the International Goat Days Festival in Millington, Tennessee.

Clearly I misspent my weekend. I could have been marching on Washington, shoulder-to-shoulder with 2,000,000 (or 65,000—80,000) "informed" and "outraged" fellow citizens, a "cross-section" of Americans (strangely, all white) in a "nonpartisan" (per Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC) protest against, well, a whole bunch of stuff. Senator DeMint declared, "I’ve never been so proud to be an American.” Must've been awesome!

Although I missed the march, I have a few simple suggestions for the Republican lobbyist organizers spontaneously-combusting grass-root tea-bagging patriots that might make their next event even more eventful. I'm offering these suggestions as a communications professional and an elementary school graduate.

Suggestion #1:

Check your spelling before you haul out the poster board and magic markers. I think the word wanted here is "moron." With two os.

Suggestion #2:

Review your "-isms." I know, it's confusing, but there must be Cliff Notes about this stuff somewhere. Short version: Socialism, Communism, National Socialism, Marxism, Fascism, Cretinism etc. are not interchangeable. Who knew?

Not him...

 

...or these folks...

...or this guy.

Which brings us to suggestion # 3:

A brief review of history would also be helpful before you get to the poster-making stage. There were no czars at all in the USSR, silly! The Bolsheviks made a big point of shooting the last one, along with his wife, children and assorted other members of the extended Romanov family. That's right, Communists bearing arms, just like we do!

Wonder where she misplaced it? Girlfriend, I am with you on the issue of forgetfulness. I have the same problem with my reading glasses. I rarely completely forget about punctuation, though.

These nice people good-naturedly left their firearms behind when they were forced (sorry, that's FORCED) to sacrifice their weekend. This time, anyway.

Suggestions #4 and #5

Check at least the very basic facts, and...

 

...keep the message clear and unambiguous. Sister, that sign is simply confusing. Underneath Obama's lipstick he's still a Socialist? Are you sure that lipstick smear wouldn't be more appropriate for...

 

(Where's your apostrophe, big fella?)
...Barney Frank, Representative for Massachusetts 4th Congressional District since 1981? Big-brained gay Democrat widely considered to be one of the most powerful members of Congress and one of the most energetic defenders of civil rights issues? Ol' Barney might as well hang it up on that civil rights thing, because as we are assured, this protest is not about race (or homophobia). No no no:

 

Hint #6:

It's much harder to wave the flag when it's been cut up to cover your ass. Unless you—oh, never mind.

Hint #7:

Avoid introducing topics/comparisons that might generate blowback...

...like this. Ouch!

Hope all y'all find these easy tricks o' the communication trade helpful for your next spontaneous, pride-inducing, grass-roots patriotic event free from subtexts of racism, xenophobia and/or threatened violence. Or reality! 

You're welcome.
Thank you NineTwelvePhotos

Google Plugs a Hole

 

It’s been about 3 months since the Other’s Google searches have shown up in my account, a time span that roughly coincides with my phone audience before a real live Google product manager and a Google engineer. This event was not easy to arrange—Google puts a big barrier between its geeks and the plebe class of users that is impossible to breach without a well-connected emissary. Although I’ve not heard from Kavi or Vlad since then, nothing along the lines of, “Hey, we found and fixed that big security leak you turned us on to,” the tracks of alien searches—rat terrier/Chihuahua mix puppies, unemployment compensation, free porn—are no longer part of my Google experience, so I’m going to assume that the leak has been plugged.
Great! But listen, Googleguys, it’s still pretty horrifying that it happened at all, and it left behind an enduring trail of data. I now know more—much more!—about a stranger’s life and interests than I care to, more that she/he would want to tell me without at least a couple of drinks. And I know where she/he lives. The trail led to an address, and served up a name as well as a search history. I would not want to be in his/her shoes, anonymously observed and nakedly vulnerable. I’ve been harassed online, more than once, and it’s not pretty.*
 So Kelly, your information is safe with me. I've deleted all your searches, and I’m trying hard to forget about the very idea of a “teacup Chihuahua.” But getting to "know" you has made me keenly aware that, even without the occasional Google security glitch, private life as as we used to know it is over. In cyberspace, our personal information is written on a postcard, despite the comforting and entirely false illusion of being able to seal it in a nice password-protected envelope.

*Touched by madness
The first incident was relatively low-impact: some whack-job harvested my email address from one of the Pleistocene-era networking sites and let loose a barrage of obsessive emails, some of which strongly suggested that he was familiar with my daily routine. I blocked him, and forgot about it.
The second time was deeply creepy. Soon after Answerjack and I got together, one of his former dalliances got my work email address and every few days would anonymously send copies of their ancient lettres d’amour, an act so patently pathological that I worried about coming home one day to find a bunny boiling on the back burner. 

I got the office manager to screen my emails (blocking was beyond the capacity of the IT department); he was a drama queen and enjoyed the intrigue, a bonus. My harasser eventually got bored, or found another diversion—she was in an open marriage, although I gathered it was considerably more open for her husband than for her. A philandering husband, no family, no career, and plenty of time to cultivate extreme meshuganoses; a sorry and scary mix. I was very glad there was a continent between us.

Mad Science: Muting Mnemosyne

The New York Times reports that a group of researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, have mapped the mysterious regions where Mnemosyne dwells deep in our minds, identified the substance that jeeps her going, and developed a drug to block her activities. The idea is that life could be improved by tweaking specific memories—making us forget fears and bad habits, say, or eliminating the emotional aftermath of trauma. SUNY scientists have already accomplished this for the usual gang of early adopters, lab rats, with a single dose of an experimental drug to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills. The drug works by blocking the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. The substance—the “memory molecule”— can be also be enhanced, thus possibly staving off dementias and other problems. Researchers are pretty sure it's going to work on people, too.

It’s an audacious idea with obvious potential for benefit. Unfortunately, humankind never met a scientific advance it couldn’t figure out how to abuse, especially if there is power to be gained, profit to be made or lousy judgement to be exercised. Think of Botox, developed to relieve crippling migraines and now Hollywood’s most-abused injectable substance, a Draconian cosmetic. Or IVF technology, for decades a boon for infertile men and women that recently resulted in the spectacle of a seriously deranged unemployed single mother of 6 neglected kids whelping an artificially implanted litter of 8 premature babies.

No easy answers about what tinkering with memory at a molecular level would mean for humankind; Mnemosyne's gift, both a blessing and a curse, shapes our perceptions and reactions to the world. Who decides which memories just have to go? Who controls our recall?  Medical ethicists will be working on the issue of selectively edited memory for a long time—hey, kind of like defense lawyers have been doing all along.
Read on: Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

Springtime for Murphy

It is an exceptionally beautiful day in Marin County. Here on the frontier—beyond our back yard is 10 miles of open space, all the way to the Pacific—creatures of the earth and air are stirring to life in the mild spring sun. On the deck outside my study, a serial killer is waiting for them.
Murphy's count today, so far (the afternoon is still ahead of us):

• One very large irretrievably unattractive Norway rat, expired, left in the yard, discovered at dawn.
• One medium-large blue-bellied lizard, maimed and spitting mad. Rescued from inside the house. Did you know lizards bite? Hurts, too.
• One small-ish coral-bellied ring-necked snake, mildly venomous and mortally wounded, removed from my study with alacrity, under the adrenaline-spiking misapprehension that it was a baby rattlesnake. Click on the link to how it coils the very tip of its tail.
• One common finch. See below:

 


I can't open the doors without Murphy bringing prey inside; I am a prisoner in my own house. After I finish using my iPhone to take photos, I can use it to call for help!
I think fame has gone to Murphy's head. The cat's out of control. Murphy, Minx, and Jessica and John's cat Poo (who is truly famous) are all immortalized in a saucy about-to-be-released Adidas Slap Pals shoe:

Addendum, 5 p.m.-ish. Another bird:

Which brings the count to five: one mammal, two reptiles, two birds. All in all, quite a productive Wednesday for Mr. Murphy. Wish I could say the same for my day.

The Art of the Feel

Playmobil Security Check Point
Isn't this a delightful toy? I wish I could take credit for conjuring it up in Photoshop but it's the real deal, manufactured by Playmobil and obtainable online and at brick-and-mortar toy stores. It's, you know, educational, intended to help our youngest denizens of a police state travelers learn about the ways of the real world. Adorable as it is, I'm afraid it falls a bit short of the mark as a tool to prepare the little ones for the excitement of airport security. What is wrong with this picture, boys and girls?

Well, our androgynous traveler is about to be taken into the custody of Homeland Security, just as I am every time I go through the metal detector. In my (recurring!) case, it's because the big hunk o' titanium where my left knee used to be sets off alarms in American screening machines. Little plastic Pat here is in trouble because of failure to remove shoes, jacket and scarf, despite instructive signs, TV monitors and the example of fellow travelers in that long, long line leading to the security checkpoint. Also, Pat's not holding a boarding pass. Oh-oh! The TSA person is going to have to make a judgement call about whether to shout out "female assist" or "male assist" for Pat's special screening. And we're a bit concerned about that scarf. Could it perhaps be a keffiyeh? Pat does have very dark hair.
OK, female assist. While we're waiting (and waiting!) for the TSA lady, we'll put Pat in a little booth of bullet-proof glass so she can watch her carry-on as it trundles out of the x-ray box. Don't take your eyes off your stuff, Pat! If someone else grabs it, you won't be able to do much about it because you are now In Custody, and if you try to bust out of that little booth you will be in Big Trouble.

When the TSA lady unlocks the door, Pat should look her in the eye and ask her firmly to take the suitcase off the conveyor and put it where Pat can see it during her screening. No, Pat, no! You can't touch your belongings! Not until you've removed the offending articles of clothing and been wanded front, back, and between your legs. Also, TSA needs to feel your breasts, insert a gloved hand between your navel and the snap on your jeans and compel you assume various stylized modern-dance positions. Ready?
As a frequent flyer with an alarm-activating fake body part, I'm in a position to offer useful airport security tips to Pat and other occasional travelers. I've been felt up by security personnel across the US, in Europe and in Asia. My favorite feel, hands down (as it were), is by black security women anywhere. In my experience, they are friendly, matter-of-fact about the intrusive aspects of their jobs and vocally appreciative of a smacked-down stick-straight 'do like mine. TSA personnel in the heartland of the US tend to be so goldurn nice it's easy to ignore the fact that one is running her hands up your thighs; at MSP a TSA lady gave me a genuinely sympathetic Fargo-esque "Aw, Jeeze"  when I was explaining about my gimpy knee.
Pat should be prepared for some pretty tough questioning if she connects through Germany: "And why were you in Italy? Yes, and what was your favorite painting at the Uffizi? Who was in your room with you when you packed your bag? What was your favorite painting at the Uffizi? Why were you in Italy?" The Teutonic feel-up itself is thorough, dour and dead silent.
Listen, Pat: if you're traveling with a husband-type, get a couple of things settled in advance. Make him promise to back you up if approached by a guy with a gun (Answerjack once challenged me when I told an armed National Guardsman at Newark, one week post 9/11, that I was born in Chicago; he mis-heard and thought I was being asked my destination, which was SFO). In a related vein, get him to agree not to insult anyone with a badge and a weapon; as foppish as those carabinieri look in their powder-blue caped uniforms, their Uzi are real, as we found out when Answer called one an asshole under his breath at Fiumicino. Consider traveling alone, Pat.
Make sure that you're OK exposing to the world whatever you've got under your jacket; no filmy camisoles unless you've embraced your inner exhibitionist and are not prone to goosebumps.  And for god's sake don't engage in chitchat about the safest part of the plane, particularly if you are a person of color.
I, for one, am keen to find a Playmobil Guantanamo play set for hands-on learning about another aspect of Homeland Security. I'd pop for rendition action figures, too. Until then, we'll have to augment our Security Checkpoint learning center with this educational toy:

Hey, a traffic cop with a radar gun and a sidearm! Don't speed on your way to the airport, Pat. And really, I'd re-think that keffiyeh. Have a good trip!

The Philistine in the Machine

 

 Photo by David Zentz
Quite by accident, I've discovered the existence of a shadowy Other whose Google wanderings are mysteriously—and inappropriately—showing up in the web history of my Google account. His passage  is marked by a trail of cyber-crumbs leading to searches for free pornography, dachshund/rat terrier puppies and unemployment benefits in Tuscon, Arizona. I got a minor frisson of amusement speculating on the back story that might be revealed through these searches— teacup chihuahuas and pit bull-rottweiler blends also figure into the mix, along with Debbie doing Dallas—until I realized the only story in which I should be interested is the one that explains just how in hell the Internet searches of an out-of-work, self-stimulating Arizonian aficianado of bizarre dog breeds wind up documented in my Google account. 

 The obvious explanation is that I must've logged into gmail on the computer  being used by the Other and didn't sign out. The argument against this is that I could count on one maimed hand the number of computers I've been on in the past few months (the Other made his debut in early November), and they're private, squeaky clean and non-networked. I don't know anyone in Tuscon, have not been anywhere in Arizona for at least 2 years, and am careful-to-obsessive about signing out of accounts while on the road. The only other person who knows my account password is Answerjack. I do use an iPhone  to check my email in airports and other public places.

I'm not completely freaked about this particular breach of the integrity of one of my accounts. There's a membrane of security protecting access to Google web history and email, and the Other appears to be a dolt with a very narrow range of interests, unaware, I think, that his (or her) Internet searches are being monitored,  judged and now blogged about by a stranger. But the big picture is troubling. Darting along the shining surface of a vast ocean of information, we're all vulnerable: what's looking up at us from its unseen depths? A lot about the motion in this ocean is unknowable to the recreational surfer. Am I an Other on another machine, providing  amusement about the nature of my searches and puzzlement about how and why I'm there? Are you? As I said, I found out about my Other inadvertently.

My chum Cliff has substantial tech creds and access to the high end of the Google food chain. He's on this, and I'm deeply interested in what Google might have to say about it. I've harvested an address in Tuscon (web history shows map searches, too) that may or may not be the location of the computer being used to research odd canine matings and even odder human sexual constructs. I'm not really interested in who the Other is, much less where he physically resides; I just want him out of my machine, and soon.

 

Bicoastal Bigotry

I live in the heart of a famously liberal county just north of San Francisco, but because I have an ailing mother in Florida and a husband who consults in Memphis, I've spent most of the past month in the South. It's been an interesting spot to ride out the electoral upheavals that have re-shaped the nation’s socio political landscape. The cultural divide between the Left Coast and the New South, once very wide, now seems much slimmer in ways that are good, bad, and flat-out ugly.
The good: Florida—comedian Rush Limbaugh's home state, bristling with McCain/Palin signs and bustling with pickup trucks bearing state-sponsored anti-reproductive-rights license plates—was carried by Barack Hussein Obama. The bad: back home in California—you know, that bastion of secular humanism and laissez-faire tolerance—The Church of Latter-Day Saints successfully re-cast a key state proposition to align with the Mormon agenda, and convinced the electorate to deny constitutional rights to a minority population.
 Now the ugly: in suburban Memphis, I was party to a casual display of racism so naked and extreme that even after hearing the phrase twice I had to Google it to believe it.
Answerjack was buying a used computer, dirt cheap, from a real-estate broker/substitute teacher who had bright burgundy hair and a shiny Christian cross around her neck. She met us at the door of her house, a tschotke-and-fake-foliage preserve steeped in the reek of cigarette smoke and plug-in air fresheners, and started yammering the instant we stepped over the threshold.
One of the hazards of Answer’s line of work is the sort of perfect stranger who feels compelled to Tell All about her or his experience in The Hospital. This good old gal was definitely that sort of stranger. She regaled us with the tiresome details of her inpatient detox from a 300-pill-a-month Xanax habit (“Doctors got me addicted”) as Jack disconnected the computer and I wrote her a check. As we inched toward the door, this sharp little pebble bounced out of the avalanche of verbiage: "weekends at the detox center were the absolute worst, because of all the jungle bunnies."
 “That’s odd,” I thought. “Didn’t 'jungle bunny 'used to be a racial pejorative?” In the context of her rant, I figured it was some unfortunately named drug reference. Then, incredibly, she said it again. There could be no mistaking that she was referring to humans, not pharmaceuticals.
Answerjack and I traded stupid white people looks. “Hey, you’re the one who’s been working in the New South,” my puzzled frown said to him. “In 2008, does anyone here really say words like ‘jungle bunny’ and mean it?”
“What the fuck?” answered Jack's stricken stare, quite clearly. We left in a hurry without smiting the stupid bitch, which I deeply regret. In the car I pulled out my iPhone and Googled the words, just to make sure their meaning hadn’t changed in the 50 years since I’d last heard them, on a grade-school playground. Yep, only one meaning.
My thought then was that the woman’s crude bigotry had to be some regional by-product of the notoriously unstable mix of religion and ignorance that we Left Coast types like to think is confined to the historically benighted South. Then I came home—to freakin’ California, people—and stepped into a state-scaled illustration of exactly the same sort of intolerance that I had found so horrifying in one dumb cracker a couple days before. In 2008, does anyone here really listen to words like “faggot” and "dyke" and vote in support of discrimination? Apparently, in 42 of California’s 58 counties, they do.
 
Here Phyllis Lyon, 84, and Del Martin, 87, gay rights pioneers and partners for nearly 60 years, threaten of the sanctity of marriage at their wedding in June 2008. Del died a couple of months later. If proponents of Proposition 8 have their way, this marriage, along with an additional 18,000+ marriages performed in California, would be rendered null and void. You can sign this petition if you think that's wrong.

Too Much Confusion: A Geriatrician Looks at McCain's Performance

McCain, Reagan, and Mild Cognitive Impairment

Mild Cognitive Impairment, or MCI, is a diagnosis usually made in retrospect, after someone has already developed Alzheimer’s disease. In its early phases, the characteristic memory lapses of MCI can look a lot normal brain aging. Forgetting someone’s name, where you left your car keys, or where you set down your reading glasses last night is normal as we get older – and these lapses get worse when we are anxious or depressed. In screening for MCI one is asked to repeat and then remember the names of three objects (e.g. book, apple, table) after a brief distraction – this is a standard part of the “mini mental state examination.” Missing one object is not diagnostic, but it is a bit worrisome especially when an object is not recalled after a clue is given (“a piece of fruit”). Another characteristic of MCI is variability of mental performance. We all have our good and bad days, but wide swings in mental function without an explanation (stress, fatigue, medications) may be a sign of MCI. Men who develop Alzheimer’s are more likely to be crabby or aggressive than women, and some gadfly geriatricians have even tried estrogens as treatment (dumb idea).
Now this is not breaking news. We all knew that before people become demented, there are premonitory (or, as we say in medicine, “premorbid” – love that word) indications. The problem is on the front end – not all who seem like they have MCI actually have it, and at least half of those who do have MCI are not actually slipping into the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Seasoned observers can often intuit the differences between real MCI and just normal forgetfulness of aging with careful observations – it’s called clinical judgment. Clinical judgment is fallible, but often on target because it is a highly integrative cognitive function that rapidly takes all sorts of information into account and creates a pattern. A doctor can use it to make a brilliant diagnosis (or not), and maybe it is how Rome taxi drivers can go 60 miles an hour on medieval cobblestone streets without killing very many people.
Lots of my geriatrician buddies and I concluded that Reagan had early Alzheimer’s in his first term, and it was clear in his second-term debates with Mondale. That avuncular, grandfatherly joking was all too familiar to us old-people-doctors. And truly, in retrospect there was no doubt that he had developed MCI within the first few years of his first term.
Some unpleasant thoughts occurred to me during the second Obama-McCain debate. McCain’s “that one” remark was not a sign of disrespect – I think McCain temporarily forgot Obama’s name! The (as my wife termed it) Elmer Fudd-grumpy behavior of McCain triggered a worrisome diagnostic pattern recognition for this geriatrician, who is not-very-young himself. The rather dramatic change that I have observed in the way McCain thinks and processes information over the past four years is troubling. Does he have MCI? The fact that he is 72 years old makes this a lot more plausible concern. If so, by the end of the first term of a presidency, there is about a 30-50% chance that his cognitive impairment would advance, and a more than 10% chance that he would have developed clinically-evident, nursing-home-grade Alzheimer’s disease. After having barely survived 8 years of an idiot in the White House, I am not sure we can afford to run the risk of having a grumpy old man with MCI running our beleaguered country.

Jack D. McCue

Answerjack is a Fellow of the American Geriatrics Society, and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco

Credit Where Credit is Due

Interesting link—What is flag desecration, anyway?
Turns out that not watching the Republican National Convention in real time is a lot like not actually going to my high school reunion: no need to, because my email inbox is stuffed with lavish after-the-fact documentation. I’ve been viewing, at my leisure, recorded installments of what appears to an extended infomercial pitching a tardy-to-market brand of the red-hot commodity that’s in such high demand across the nation: “Change.” It’s left me mildly confused—I’m positive that the core brand being touted as "new" has dominated the market for the past 8 years.  And, um, isn’t there pretty much global agreement that the brand did not perform as promised—did, in fact, do a lot of damage when applied as directed? Didn’t the lead pitchperson himself take a significant, decades-long role in developing and implementing the failed brand?

I’m wonderin’ about other stuff in the program, too, like how long did it take to prune out the “g”s in words ending with “ing” in speeches delivered by well-educated plutocrats hailing from all corners of the country? I can see the logic behind the effort: eliminate proper pronunciation from the Republican public vernacular, et voila! We have now here before us the champions of the working class! Yes!

Invoking images of lipstick-wearing pit bulls and moose during a formal address struck me first as odd and then oddly brilliant—as a former marketing ho, I have to admire the ballsy decision to send in colorful but tough critters to deflect awkward questions about the specifics of the pitch. It worked—putting those chuckle-inducing fangs and hoofs out front obscured the absence, over a 3-day change-a-polooza, of even one stated idea about how to haul the country out of its current sorry state which is, after all, largely the result of the policies promulgated by the same team now pitching “change.”

Also have to cop to a certain awe at the bold unblinking attempt of the Republican Party to appropriate the overall “change” concept itself, and the extraordinary recasting of Senator John McCain’s public persona, forged over more than a quarter-century of loyal inside-the-Beltway service to the corporate aristocracy, to that of a maverick change agent, an everyman’s outsider.

Same sort of gape-jawed wonder, too, at the re-jiggering of the definition of what sort of experience qualifies one to run for the highest offices of the land: apparently, serving as mayor of a town of less than 5,500 is about the same as being mayor of New York City—Rudy Giuliani says so, and hey, he of all people should know (I didn’t). Tangential aside—d’you think that Rudy gets royalties based on the number of times he mentions 9/11? Anyway, 2 years as governor of a frontier state now trumps a combined 58 years of experience in the United States Senate.
I've read lot of  after-the-convention editorials focusing on McCain’s famed impulsiveness, but I'm equally intrigued by the decisions he does think through. Take his choice of Phil Gramm as co-chair of his presidential campaign and prime economic advisor. Remember Phil? He was anointed as McCain's presumptive Secretary of the Treasury right up until he put his cloven hoof foot in his mouth a couple of months before the Republican National Convention. McCain's handlers keep him well under wraps now.

Gramm's that typical Republican friend to the working man who said, during a July 9, 2008 interview about the tanked U.S. economy,  "We have...become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining..."
Notice that he pronounces, quite clearly, the final “g” in "whining."

While I Was Sleeping

The Rapidity of Sleep  Yves Tanguy, 1945
I wasn’t literally sleeping, of course; just sort of metaphorically dream-walking through the parts of my day that did not advance the imperative of getting everything unpacked and put in place in time for Jessica and John’s wedding here at the house on September 20th. Hey, I’m awake and engaged now, having recently received, along with the rest of the nation, a strident wake up call that has my ears ringing.
Bang off the bat, let’s stipulate, as has Barrack Obama, that the kids involved are off limits. Exercising questionable judgment is, after all, one of the signature behaviors of adolescence. Failing at impulse control is another. These are normal developmental issues—life-skill deficits we’re meant to overcome as we acquire experience and a sense of responsibility to our personal values and our community, which most of us do, in time. Some don’t, and then it becomes a question of character. When displayed by adults who hold positions of great power—positions in which an individual's bad judgment can have grave consequences for the collective—such character deficits demand answers and actions.
Pundits on both sides of the aisle are struggling to frame the overarching question of why a politician with a whisper-weight résumé has been presented as a candidate for the second most powerful position in the world—the understudy for a 72-year-old who has already endured four bouts of a highly malignant cancer. I’ll leave that one to the big brains; I have no doubt that attempts to answer the inquiries of an astonished world will provide the basis for doctoral theses as well as tabloid fodder for years to come. Some of them will be right.
I’m wondering more about the peripheral questions, the notes in the margins of Governor Sarah Palin’s gossamer résumé. Here’s one: what kind of values, family or otherwise, encourage one to tout returning to a full-time job 72 hours after giving birth to a special-needs infant as an accomplishment of which to be proud? Here’s another: what depths of ambition are required for a parent to be willing to expose a vulnerable 17-year-old to the scrutiny of the entire world in exchange for a shot at the really big time? More: what sort of grasp of the responsibilities that an individual in public office owes to the commonweal makes it OK to take that shot at the really big time, knowing that the racket raised as the skeletons come clattering out of her closet is likely to drown out serious discussion about substantive issues? And, finally: can deep, profound cynicism alone be responsible for Senator John McCain passing over vastly more qualified Republican candidates of both genders to nominate a poorly vetted, grievously inexperienced running mate solely because she’s an anti-abortion female, or does his previously documented poor impulse control have to factor in, too?
I was just kidding about leaving the big question to the big brains. We all need to grapple with that one. And we all need to vote.