Sarah, How Dumb Thou Art

NOTE: Below is a column I wrote for a local publication in May 2010 that the editor canned because she feared angry calls and letters. I ask you, isn't that the idea behind essays of opinion, satire, etc., to evoke SOME sorta response? Not sure I'll continue to write for the publication, can't deal with censorship. Anyway, the column is below, putting it here though it has nothing to do with travel, cause I gotta link it to Facebook somehow!


I was watching coverage of Sarah Palin’s visit to Boston in April, in a weak moment when I apparently had nothing better to do when in fact even digging out a bad tooth I have with a rusty awl might have been a more pleasant alternative. Not to mention less painful.


Listening to mere moments of her mini-momentous speech to Tea Party freaks on Boston Common made me more convinced than ever that this woman – poised in 2012 to run for the most powerful job in the land and no I don’t mean right-wing talk show host – is truly as dumb as a sack of hammers.


She toddled up the steps on Boston Common looking very fetching in her school-marm specs, trashy red-leather clingy top, huggy blue mini-skirt and spiky black heels, giving her the appearance of a well-dressed Wal-Mart shopper. Then it got worse. She opened her mouth.



“Do you love yer freedom?” she crackled in that voice she uses when she wants to sound angry yet fetching, and the crowd, with a combined intellect of several thousand bags of hammers looking like not-so-well dressed Wal-Mart shoppers, roared their approval which apparently meant “Yes, Sarah! We love our freedom, and gosh darn it, you’re the ONLY one who can give it to us!!”



She continued to talk, sadly, cementing that image I have of her in Alaska looking over and identifying that country across the Bering Sea from her and then she looked up at the Boston skyline and said, “Hey! I can see the Pru from here!!!” OK, she didn’t say that, but gosh darn it, she should have, eh?



I watched clips on line of people in the crowd, including one guy with American flags sticking out of his hat who looked like he just stumbled out of a late-night Sox-Yankees game, declaring his love for Palin, saying in the most heavily accented Boston accent since “The Departed,” “She’s spunky, she ain’t afraid,” which as we all know are the only two things you need to be a Tea Party hero. Oh, and a trashy red-leather top, perhaps.



She also maligned the “B.S. in the mainstream media,” which conservatives love to bash and then pay billions in advertising to, and also said “And look what Massachusetts did in January and shook up the U.S. Senate.” Then, spotting several men wearing barn jackets in the crowd, she shouted, in a tone she uses reading “Are You My Mother?” to grandson Tripp, “Is that you, Scott???” until Brown phoned her to say he wasn’t there and to stop calling his name.



Palin, a half-term governor, actually felt rather at home in Massachusetts where governors are noted for dabbling in gubernatorial waters before dashing off to do better things. She even invoked a time-honored state tradition, when she said “Maybe it feels like we’re running a grueling marathon, like the big one coming up here in Boston next week – but not in these shoes, gosh darn it!” the last part of which I made up but honestly, can’t you see her really saying it?



And all of it made me think: What the hell was McCain thinking? I mean didn’t he actually talk to Palin before making her his running mate in 2008? Wasn’t the giveaway when he said, “Hello, Sarah,” and she said “Hello, Senator McCain..oh, hey, golly, you any relation to Lucas McCain? Boy, I love watching ‘The Rifleman’ reruns, lemme tell ya, he’s like a hero up our way! And, if I’m not too outta line here, sometimes I call my Toddie, MY rifleman!”



I don’t know, maybe Sarah Palin’s not as stupid as she sounds. I mean she attended Hawaii Pacific University. She attended North Idaho College. She attended University of Idaho. And she attended that perennial collegiate academic and athletic powerhouse, Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska, with its fabled battle cry “Moooooo-EEE! Mooooooo-EEE! MOOOOOSE!!!” Attended. And then by 1986, got her bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Idaho with emphasis on, of all things, journalism. Which may have qualified her to not read all those pesky magazines she told Katie Couric she did.



But then again she did finish third in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant, which begs two questions: Any Mensans in that crowd and just how deep could the Alaskan beauty pool be?



I guess it just might be that accent. I mean I don’t speak in Shakespearean intonations myself, but really. That accent. When she says stuff like, “How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?” in that whiny, nasally drone, I just want to chew small poisonous insects until the pain goes away.



That accent was cute when actress Frances McDormand used it to Oscar-winning perfection in “Fargo,” but even though her sheriff character sounded stupid, she was anything but. Palin’s accent wins that daily double every time she opens her mouth. You put a badge on her, you got Barney Fife on The Last Frontier.



Now that Palin’s front and center again, I just ache for her to please shut up and go home and stop riding this impossible-to-fathom popularity wave that has yet to crash mercifully to shore and bubble down to a foamy ending. Good lord, the woman wrote a book, “Going Rogue: An American Life,” making me wonder if rogue to her means going to Wal-Mart in pumps, not heels (the sequel has to be “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Not Actually Have, Doncha Know?”). And she’s a political commentator on Fox News, which I realize is like populating the ESPN desk with retired jocks, but still.



And in an age of everyone having a TV show, she’s also hosting “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” I hope Russian’s prime minister announces his own, “Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” releasing a smirking picture of himself standing on the Russian shoreline wearing an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt with an arrow on it pointing toward Palin’s house.



So Sarah, we apparently will continue to love you while conveniently ignoring the fact that you truly are as dumb as a sack of hammers. And hammers? No offense.