Deciphering Sarah

"The Sarah Syndrome."

There’s a book “concept” but I’m not sure the book's worth writing. Well, I’m certain it’s “worth” writing. It would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Maybe millions.

What is it about Sarah Palin? What is it about us, as a nation and as a culture that makes all things Sarah so intriguing?

When she first emerged nationally as John McCain’s vice presidential choice (giving new meaning to the term “femme fatale”), I wrote a little essay here about her glasses, noting that Sarah punctured the quip (attributed to Dorothy Parker) that “men don’t make passes at women who wear glasses.”

Sarah’s glasses, essential to her trademark looks, invite us to ponder and linger over Sarah — imagining her sans specs. They are, in a way, a visual come-on.

Tagged “sarah,” “palin,” “glasses,” the post attracted more hits than any I’d put up on this blog. (The only one that has beat it was the “Tipsy Beer Truck" post that gained near-mass popularity from someone’s link to it from a porno site.)

The fascination with Sarah’s glasses should be no surprise. Sarah is nothing if not visual. Face it, she’s the best looking national politician since John Kennedy. Eye candy. The smile, a faint deer in the head-lights look, the stray locks of hair, the lingering beauty pageant figure. No fool and surrounded by marketing experts, Sarah is a package.

Content? You betcha! Here it gets interesting. Start with the verbal nuggets. Is there gold or fools gold in Sarah’s Alaskan e-mail lode? Mining for riches, hordes of journalists rush to Juneau.

On the national stage, Palin is a political high-wire act. We gasp at her wobbliness. We are astonished by her contortions to right herself. Paul Revere’s ride reconsidered, Russian policy shaped by staring across the Bering Strait, her avowed love of motorcycle emissions, a gaffe flipping of North and South Korea. The fractured English. A mouth disconnected from mind—at best. Joe Biden in drag.

The improbability of it all. Sarah Palin matches our own improbability as a nation and perhaps even as human beings. Somehow we survive on our own high wire. So far....Somehow we even thrive, as Sarah does. At least so far....

We’ve turned our own cartoonish ignorance and audacity into a strength, so far....

In her eyes, we see our own. There’s no there there, and yet...THERE it is! So far....

Sarah Palin, like us, is magical and frightening to behold. I think we call this entertainment. I often wish that the late Neil Postman (“Amusing Ourselves to Death”), who brilliantly analyzed mass media, were alive to decipher Sarah. Here is a pop figure seemingly created for a mass culture.

Visual, vulnerable, sexy, unpredictable, marketable, opportunistic, frightening, naive and earthy.

Oh, did I mention her family?....

Run, Sarah, Run!

Count me in as a liberal for Sarah Palin.

Mush, Mama Grizzly, mush!

A successful Palin candidacy for the Republican nomination would be Obama's ticket to a second term.

Even better would be Republican challenger Palin up against a strong, successful liberal challenger to the president, who has gone all wobbly on us.

How's President Bill Moyers sound?

Success and the "anti-viral" blog

Recently I posted my 1000th entry on this site. I suppose it was a milestone of sorts. If my site meter is correct, each post averages 46 readers.

The Red Electric clearly hasn’t gone “viral." Anti-viral is more like it.

Also, the average visit numbers are distorted by Sarah Palin.

Or, to be exact, her glasses.

Let me explain.

The day I presented an in-depth analysis of Palin's specs, the site did go relatively viral. If I recall correctly, 700 Palinites flocked to The Red Electric. I’m sure that most of them wanted to emulate the beguiling Palin look. Instead they got references to Marshall McLuhan and Dorothy Parker.

I resist measuring the success of this site by the volume of visitors. Striving to be “popular” for popularity's sake, as we learned in high school, is a fool’s game. Sure, I could make several changes to increase The Red Electric’s popularity. Focus would help. I pretty much write about whatever is on my mind. I like it that way. But I’m told that to be successful I should focus on earthworms or planters’ warts or hubcap collecting.

(Full disclosure: I have a focused site, Backspace Typewriters, devoted to these grand old writing machines. I post there only major developments in my typewriter world. It works out to once a month or so. About as much as one person can take. I understandably get very few visitors, but those I do get, often comment. Alas, not so here at The Red Electric)

No, a subject-constricted, popularity-constrained site would be no fun. I’d rather roam widely: Quakers, my dad’s Buick convertibles, Peace Corps memories, Hillsdale secessionist impulses, “active shooter” alerts on my community college campus, the future of journalism, political mind games and — Sarah Palin’s glasses.

The result is that about half of the 46 daily visits result from the happenstance of chance search engine surfing.

I once wrote about how my iPod cords get tangled in my backpack as if they were engaged in some surreptitious electronic-device orgy. I tagged the post “sonic sex” and ever since I’ve found sonic sex addicts (yes, they exist) visiting the post. I fear my musings were not what they had in mind.

I recently went on vacation and didn’t post a word for five days. I figured the visits would drop off in my absence. To my surprise, the numbers actually increased slightly. Two explanations: Search engine hits keep happening no matter what I write today or tomorrow, and regular readers wonder about my whereabouts. It’s a stretch to say they were worried, but who knows?

So, curiously, in my absence, the site took on a life of its own. Not to be morbid about it, but I wonder whether web sites continue and even grow in popularity after their authors have moved on to the Big Blog in the Sky.

My soul is strangely warmed by the thought of blog immortality.

Until then, I look forward to composing the next 1000 posts.

Outta Sitemeter

One of the wonders of blogging is having a sitemeter. The "visits" and "views" tracker tells you a lot. Some of it is more than you want to know.

But the “Referrals” feature offers intriguing information. Most folks just visit the site because they know it and want to see whether I still have a pulse.

But a few, it would seem, come here seeking kinky thrills. The best evidence of the intent is a post that I titled “Sonic Sex on a Sweat Towel.” There must be a whole community out there interested in “Sex on a Sweat Towel” because those words suck in an inordinately large readership.

The post isn’t even tagged with “sex,” which is usually good bet for a few dozen visits. The content is about what happens to the wires on my iPod and its headset when I throw them into my backpack on my sweat towel.

I speculate in the post that some audio intimacy takes place in the dark resulting in obscene tangling of the cords.

The actual tags are innocuous: “iPod” and “Steve Jobs.”

Among the other favored referral sites is the famous “Sarah Palin’s Glasses,” which at the time it was posted drew a record number of strangers to The Red Electric. Now, months later, it seems the fascination with the good governor (and her specs and her weird family values) is endless.

Another enticing post is “PCC lockdown,” which isn’t about a particular lockdown (alas there have been a few) but about the bureaucratic memo the PCC administration circulated to tell PCC students and faculty what to do in an “active shooter” situation.

The short answer: Lock the doors, pull down the shades, stop taking notes, and hide.

Posting this little ditty has meant that every time there’s a PCC lockdown (there was one today), Google sends anxious readers to The Red Electric and my parsing of bureaucratic prose.

Clearly I am not meeting news expectations, which explains why the sitemeter tells me that Red Electric visits are brief — a mere 41 seconds.

Then again, if you stare at a sweep second hand, a 41-second interval isn’t all that brief, especially when the topic is Sarah Palin’s glasses or Sex on a Sweat Towel. Web surfers seeking such subjects must be slow readers.

It figures.

America, the isolated

Lizi Zach, our Berlin correspondent, responds to Chris Clair, our Chicago correspondent and his thoughts about dots in need of connecting.

Me? I'm enjoying the back-and-forth.

I'm with Chris - all politics is dirty, and since the advent Bush/Rove, I must admit, I see no evil in the Left (or, rather, what Americans think of as the Left) throwing counter punches. (Let it be known that while registering Americans here in Berlin to vote, another volunteer and I never bothered to put up the "Republicans can also register here!" sign on our booth.)

Just read Chris' post on the Red Electric re Sarah Palin and civics lessons and self-education. Roger Ebert (bless his heart for in this time of great moral crisis, he has put aside his movie reviews and delved into political commentary) opined some months ago about Palin's lack of curiosity. It would seem that indeed that is the crux of the problem, and not just hers, but America's.

The country is so utterly isolated (not just geographically) and, moreover, is purely content that way. Consider one fact along: the overwhelming majority has no more than two weeks of paid annual leave. No wonder so few travel abroad and see how the other half (or 3/4) live on this planet.

The sheer refusal to institute any viable foreign language curriculum in the schools is another embarrassment.

The government has no serious interest at all in having an educated populace. It makes it easier to launch unwinnable wars, fart around with public monies, and pass ineffective legislation that way.

I think back to my father, age 80, immigrating to the States from Hungary in 1956, fleeing the Communist Revolution. If anyone should have been a cheerleader for capitalism and the GOP, it is he, and indeed, many, if not most, of his compatriots became card-carrying members of that ilk.

My father waffled, questioned, thrashed about. And then came Watergate and he asked an American colleague how anyone could possibly remain in the Republican party after such an event. It's irrelevant what his colleague answered; my father's conclusion is that Americans like crooks for politicians.

There seems to be no other explanation.

Chris weighs in — Part 2

Chris Clair, who lives and works in Chicago (and is now officially The Red Electric's Chicago correspondent) has been sharing his impressions of the Blagojevich scandal in e-mails. That's a subject to return to.

Here, though, is the continuation of his thoughts about some unconnected "dots" I mentioned the other day.

He takes up with Sarah Palin's demonstrated ignorance during the campaign. I had suggested she suffered from a lack of education. Chris has a different take.


What was her education? I would ask what does it matter? What is education? Jane Jacobs said in "Dark Age Ahead" that today's colleges and universities do little more than grant certifications. Very little "education" takes place. But whose fault is that? Do we blame the professors or the academic programs themselves?

I happen to think education is a personal matter. You choose to be educated. I'm sure her K-12 experience included the standard civics classes, but what did she take from them?

I spent half my time in 12th-grade economics goofing off in the back of the room. I absorbed some information, sure, enough to pass the tests. But what I've learned about Keynes, Adam Smith and bell curves, as well as the Constitution, government and issues like freedom of speech I've learned on my own, by seeking out information, either in college or in books or magazines or online.

The fact that Sarah Palin doesn't understand the First Amendment isn't her high school social studies teacher's fault; it's hers. The same goes for not understanding the duties of the office to which she was seeking election. As individuals we have a responsibility to educate ourselves through a variety of means, including but not limited to, formal schooling.

What about personal curiosity – the desire, or even the need in some cases – to learn more about the world around us? How can anyone else be responsible for that? What about parents? What is their role in fostering curiosity in their children? As a parent, how do you teach curiosity? How do you teach critical thinking?

What's the difference between information one is given (traditional, formal education) versus information one seeks (reading for pleasure, magazine/newspaper subscriptions)? Is the latter somehow more valuable?

Who's to blame here?

We are. Individually and collectively.

What does it mean to be informed…? What does it mean to be aware…? Does a mass of disconnected information block awareness? Maybe seemingly disconnected information only blocks our awareness if we let it. But why don't people employ more filters? Perhaps that's something civics classes in high school should be including in their curricula, and maybe colleges should include "media studies" as a core requirement. Again, you can't teach people what they don't want to learn but you can plant the seed.

Why does the nature of information have to change because the medium changes? Isn't information information? Our interaction with it may change, but does that really change the information?

So many of our problems fall to the schools to solve, but are the schools … up to a task of this enormity? Why is it schools' responsibility? What about parents, other family members? This goes back to the question of who teaches critical thinking skills?

Are our leaders intelligent? Who ARE our leaders? Elected officials? Corporate chief executives? College professors? Pundits? TV and radio talk show hosts? Actors? How do we choose them? I see where Fran Drescher's spokesman has indicated she's interested in Hillary Clinton's N.Y. senate seat. What qualifies her to serve in the U.S. Senate? What does it mean to lead?

What is wealth? Monetary wealth is transitory and based on collectively agreed-upon values. What happens when agreement disintegrates, as with credit? Can wealth disappear or is wealth accumulation a zero-sum game – for every loser there is a winner, for every loss a corresponding gain elsewhere? Who controls our financial future?

Those are a few dots.

More for the "dot list"

Aaron Corvin, a former student, has weighed in on the "dot" list.

More questions (and a thought or two):

What is the difference between information and knowledge?

How does the public become "informed" or "knowledgeable"? How do you know the public is either of those things? By what measure, if any?

Which vehicles media ((the medium is the message))) does the public use to obtain information and/or knowledge? Increasingly the Internet? Newspapers, print or online mostly? Their neighbors? Television? Radio? Video games?

When they obtain information and/or knowledge, do people act? Or just talk? Or forget it? Or ignore it? How do people use information? What information is useful?

My thought: I recall talking with Rick about Sarah Palin (yes, I know, this is a tired subject, but ...). I think his comment was that she isn't stupid. Maybe she's even smart. But what was her education? Rick said he recalls Palin saying her First Amendment rights were being violated because people were criticizing her. Huh? Hello? The First Amendment doesn't work that way.

How is it possible for a major candidate for a major national public office to fundamentally misunderstand the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? (Palin demonstrated this again in her debate with Biden when she remarked that the vice-president presides over Congress !?) What happened where Palin went to school? Or, better yet, what didn't happen?

My guess: No civics lessons whatsoever. No sense of what the country was founded on. No teaching of US history and of the Bill of Rights, beyond perhaps scratching the surface. Do you need these things to become the governor of a state?

To carry this further, go back to "Idiocracy" (the film): If all you're concerned about is where you're going to get your next box of Cheez-Its, and whether Channel 8 will have reruns of "Friends," then why shouldn't media (newspapers, too) give "the people" what they want? Paris Hilton, a slogan or two about America, and a 12-column inch story about a neighborhood shooting with no answer as to whether crime overall is actually up or down.

Who's to blame here? What happened to us as Americans? Why so much candy and so little broccoli?

Or am I off my rocker, and things are better than I think? Sarah is, after all, back in Alaska cooling her Jimmy Choos.

Questions, questions ... perhaps the dots will begin to connect ...

Top Hits: Sarah Palin's Glasses & Oregon's Civil War

Anyone who has blogged has felt the pull between writing you want to write and writing what others will be drawn to.

I abide by the first, but on a few happy occasions I manage to satisfy the second too.

After two years and 851 posts, two topics have attracted far and away the most visits to this site.

The ostensible topics (as defined by my search engine tags) were Sarah Palin’s glasses and The Civil War (the Oregon football rivalry). But the tags deceive because the topics were points of departure to far different content.

Perhaps the lesson is to choose timely, popular topics (and tags) to hang larger, provocative substance to. A kind of blogger’s bait and switch.

In the case of Palin’s glasses, I wanted to pick an argument with Marshall McLuhan and make a point about “cool,” visual appeal. Despite all she wasn't, Palin as visually cool.

In the case of the “Civil War” rivalry, I wanted the reader to consider the unintended power of a sports metaphor.

I got more than 800 visits to the Palin specs post, but I think that most of the visitors were interested in where to purchase glasses like the governor’s. I hope their disappointment was more than offset by a new awareness of McLuhan.

The Civil War post, which is an annual ritual (some would say “rant”) for me in the week before the big University of Oregon/Oregon State game, drew 200 plus visits, which isn’t nearly as impressive as the Palin response. What made the “Civil War” post notable was the unanimously negative response. I clearly struck a nerve.

How dare I question the tradition of calling the game “The Civil War”? For some, my complaint was literally unheard of.

For them, it’s unheard of no longer. Disagree as they might, my view now is part of their consciousness. That’s reason enough to share and disseminate it. I’m pleased they were moved to defend their own.

Press ignores Palin's First Amendment Ignorance

Let the record show that I can find no reference on-line to a major newspaper's reporting directly on Sarah Palin’s frightening ignorance regarding the First Amendment.

(On Friday in a radio interview, Palin suggested that press criticism of her was a violation of the First Amendment. Anyone who has taken middle-school civics knows that the right to voice and print such criticism is precisely what the First Amendment protects.)

I am reminded of the truism that our freedoms of speech and the press only have meaning if we use them. Why is the press refusing to use its freedom to inform the public about Palin’s appalling ignorance of the Bill of Rights?

How could it be that it is no longer newsworthy when a major party candidate for the second highest office in the land twists beyond recognition a basic principle on which the nation was founded?

Could it be that editors believe that most of the public doesn’t care about the First Amendment and whether Palin understands it?

Could it be that the majority of the American people themselves don’t understand or value our very first freedoms?

If that is the case, we are a nation in deep, deep peril. When the press doesn't call our leaders on matters as grave, we all will ultimately pay the price.

It is noteworthy that Palin’s comment is all over the blogosphere. New Media trumps Old. Incidents like this suggest that the death of newspapers may not be that great a loss.

Sarah Palin: First Amendment "Maverick"

Sarah Palin, who graduated from The University of Idaho with a degree in journalism, no less, must have been skinning a moose when they covered the First Amendment in class.

Memo to our would-be vice president: that’s the one that says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the press or freedom of speech. It also guarantees your religious right to be blessed and protected in your church by a witch hunter — should you feel the need.

Sarah got the First Amendment terribly, frighteningly wrong in a radio interview on Friday:

Here’s what Sarah told the conservative radio host:

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Hello, Sarah! The First Amendment guarantees the media, and anyone else for that matter, the right to criticize government officials and political candidates who are engaged in fear mongering, praising Boy Scouts, defending torture or extolling apple pie.

Alas, Palin, who is clearly no dummy, is astonishingly ignorant. Talk about a child, student and American citizen left behind.

While this little radio episode is all over the Internet, it will be interesting to see how the “mainstream media” cover it, if at all.

It’s an embarrassment to the political system and American education that a politician so ignorant of the First Amendment could have risen so far — even to be governor of Alaska or mayor of Wasilla, let alone candidate for the vice presidency of the nation.

Meanwhile consider, in full, the First Amendment, a cornerstone of our democracy.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Palin pick sorely missing from debate

As I listened to John McCain sounding more or less presidential in tonight's debate, I wondered how on earth this guy, who proclaims his devotion to this country, could have chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate?

Why didn't someone among the panel of undecided voters call him his choice. Ask him how he squares the value he places on his own depth of experience with his politically driven but dangerous choice of the grossly inexperienced. cartoonish Palin.

And why didn't Obama invoke the name of Joe Biden as a tacit reminder of McCain's recklessness?

In this campaign, the wildly different choices of vice presidential candidates should be made exhibit A in any debate. The contrast says volumes about who has a "firm hand on the tiller, " as McCain put it, and who has the wisdom to do what is best for this country.

A "spectacular" agreement

Earlier this week Gov. Sarah "Heartbeat" Palin and Dr. Henry Kissinger, legendary Vietnam and Cambodia expert, agreed to disagree on whose glasses frames were sexier.

Kissinger also pointed out to Palin where Vietnam and Cambodia are and noted they can't be seen from Alaska, even on a clear day.

A gallery of “Nows”

Weary of the financial crisis, the drumbeat of campaign news, the latest depressing poll results from Joplin and Fargo, and the most recent indignant Internet tract purporting to drive a stake into the evil hearts of McCain and Palin, I strode around the Fairmount Boulevard loop on this brilliant Indian summer afternoon.

I walked the tree-canopied, three-plus miles with the city at my feet, a compact camera in hand and an Eckhart Tolle audio book murmuring in my ear, urging me to BE IN THE NOW.

I don’t know whether taking photographs gets me into the “now” or not. The “now” of composing, focusing and snapping seem eroded by the prospect of downloading, viewing, cropping and sharing.

That said, I came back with a few select “nows” for you.

Misspelling snags "specs" visitors

Here’s the latest on the strange ways of search engines and Sarah Palin’s glasses.

Here and here, I’ve noted how hundreds of visitors came to the Red Electric after I wrote about Sarah’s specs.

I would have thought that, like Sarah herself, the novelty would have worn off by now.

Strangely I’m still getting a few dozen daily visitors seemingly fascinated by the governor’s rims.

Suspicious that something might be amiss in cyberspace, I checked my site meter’s source references. The listing tells me what’s bringing visitors to the Red Electric. In the past few days most of visits have resulted from a search of “Palen” (note the misspelling) and “glasses.”

That was curious so I searched “Palen” and "glasses” and found myself staring
at a Red Electric post’s headline “Palen (sic) glasses hunters swarm to web site" (see above).

I had inadvertently misspelled Palin’s name. Google searchers had too. One misspelling deserves another. If you search “Palen” and “glasses,” the Red Electric is at the top of the listing. For reader-hungry bloggers (I’m not one of them) that’s like being on top of the mountain.

I’ve fixed the headline now. My guess is that the visits will drop off significantly. But then with cyberspace you can never be sure. Besides, because this post is about “Palen,” I’ll tag it that way.

If you end up here by fluke, you might be interested in the post that started it all. It makes for interesting reading, if I do say so. Where else can you see the names "Dorothy Parker," "Marshall McLuhan" and "Sarah Palin" in the same paragraph?

Two views from abroad

One of the many joys in my life is hearing from former students. Some, like Stanislaus O’bul, go back more than 40 years to when I was a Peace Corps teacher in remote western Kenya.

Stanislaus lives in his native Sudan where he has managed to survive the country’s turmoil through a number of managerial jobs. He recently wrote to say that he is looking for work as an English teacher.

Lizi Zach, living and working in Berlin, was in my classes in the early ‘90s. My classroom stories about my Peace Corps experience contributed to her decision to become a PCV in Poland.

So without knowing each other, Stanislaus and Lizi have one thing in common — me, their former teacher.

They also turn out to have something else in common, and I believe it reflects how much of the world views our presidential campaign.

I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Here’s Lizi on Sarah Palin: “If this woman comes even close to the White House, if the Republicans win this year, I am so done. It will be time to go native: burn the passport and take up German citizenship.”

Here’s Stanislaus on Barack Obama: “As democrats, we all send Barack Obama our greetings and pray to God to guide him for the benefit of society and lasting peace in the world.”

Feeling it

I’m finally learning how this blog site “visits” thing works. And it is confirming, in strange ways, a lot of my suspicions about this presidential campaign.

All the “visitors” in the past week aren’t reading about Mount St. Helens or my motor scooter diaries. No need to “warn” them that I’m going off their topic of choice: Sarah Palin’s glasses.

Alas, they never even see the posts about what E10 does to two-stroke engines or how I walked away from Mount St. Helens a wiser man.

And they will never see these words either.

No, they are coming directly to the “spec-tacular” Sarah post.

Yesterday when I googled “Sarah Palin” and “glasses,” the Red Electric came up something like eighth on the list. No wonder I had 800 visits on Saturday, up from the normal 40 to 50. It’s still running around 150.

As the glasses freaks mellow out and go back to doing whatever they do, the visits will drop.

The rush to read about Sarah’s glasses is a reminder that it’s not what Sarah (or any politician) says that will get her or him elected. It’s not what she tells Charles Gibson; it’s how she looks — how she “feels.”

Yes, television is a tactile as well as a visual medium.

Tactile is a concept, first applied to our “Teflon president” Ronald Reagan. Nothing stuck to him because he was just such a “feel good” guy with a sunny personality,

And nothing is sticking now to Sarah with her intriguing marmish glasses and her “frontier fundamentalism.”

Not Bristol’s baby
Not Troopergate
Not Bridge-to-Nowhere flip-flops
Not hubby’s secessionist streak
Not state per diems on her own house
Not bravely shooting fish (wolves) in a barrel (on the tundra) from an airplane.

Why isn’t it sticking? We don’t live in a rational, thinking times. We see, relate and feel. That’s why the Christian Right us so excited about Sarah. Religion and reason don’t mix. It’s all about “feeling it.”

How Sarah looks and acts trumps what she has (and hasn’t) done, and certainly what she merely says.

Memo to Barack Obama: Look and act presidential and pissed as hell! Let’s feel it!

Don’t quietly lay out your education policy in front of a bunch of kids, teachers and administrators assembled in a school library, as you did the other day. (Shhhhh!! This is a library.)

Take it to the streets, Barack. Put it to throngs. Large ones.

Whip them up. The streets are where drop-outs end up. Tell 'em that if they “get back in school,” the Obama administration will make the schools worth getting back into.

Go after the plutocrats, the politician with nine houses, the “bubble” politician who thinks you aren’t rich until you make $5 million a year, the oil barons and the Gucci Gulch lobbyists.

Do it, do it fast and do it with feeling!

Sarah, pigs, lipstick and overhead wires

Memo to Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt huddled in the McCain Campaign War Room/pig sty looking for targets and churning up muck:

At recent neighborhood meetings I, an ardent Obama supporter, have said that you can do everything you like to spruce up stuck-in-the-Fifties storefronts in Hillsdale, but until you underground the utilities on SW Capitol Highway, you will be just...

putting lipstick on a pig!

I was not, repeat, NOT, commenting on Sarah Palin, tabloid celebrity candidate for the second highest office in the land.

If you want a comment on Sarah (and John), try this:

John McCain’s motto is “Country First.” So what’s the most significant decision of his “Country First” campaign? Choosing as his running mate — and, alas, it seems our next vice president — someone who two years ago was mayor of an Alaskan community with a population the size of our neighborhood's.

You can call that “experience” if you like, Karl, Steve and John, but it sounds a lot like putting our country last and, from the looks of the polls, John’s candidacy first.

In politics, "It's the media and us, stupid"

Note: In order to return life to normal here at The Red Electric, I am no longer adding to "Sarah Palin" the tags "glasses" or "sex" just to see what might happen. If you are interested in Palin's relationship to those topics, you will not find comment about them here.

I know that the hundreds of you who have visited because of those tags in the last few days will find satisfaction elsewhere on the Web.

So Sara Palin made it through last week without excusing herself to deal with her “personal problems.”

It remains to be seen whether the other shoe will drop in the next eight weeks. Drug use? Alcoholism (there seems to have been a touch of that)? Black sheep (remember the former brother-in-law? Phony college transcripts? Christian values hypocrisy (where to begin?)?

Or maybe “The Base” is so enamored with Sarah and her “just-like us” family values that nothing would matter. Whatever is under the carpet, once exposed, would just add to her “just-like-us” credentials. “Let him who is without sin etc.”

So far the tabloid readers and the God, Guts and Guns groups are loving the minutiae of Sarah’s “just a hockey mom” story.

And, of course, the Christian Right, whom we can thank for two Rovian elections of George W. Bush, are back in the hunt. “Energized” as they say.

McCain’s strategists are clever (some prominent of their colleagues have called them “cynical”) to join Palin and McCain at the hip. They are appearing in tandem on the hustings and attracting throngs.

McCain basks in the media stardom of his tundra “Cinderella.” Walled off from probing questions (does she know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites? Does she know where Iran is?), Palin projects personality and a contrived maverick image.

The ticket conflates opposites in ways that only the influential visual media can accentuate. Old/Young, Male/Female, Doughy/Attractive. Mix in the non-visual but very much proclaimed heroic vet/Military mom-to-be. Unspoken but palpable are insider/outsider, wishy-washy religious/red-meat fundamentalist, obscenely rich/just-folks working class.

Never mind what they believe or would do about the environment (whatever happened to global warming?), the economy (meltdown anyone?), Iraq (it’s still about oil).

Never mind that The Old One may not be around for four years.

For now, it is all about story and its telling — the plot, the setting, the arch of the story, pacing, the characters.

McCain, Palin and the True Believers are right: It’s the media, stupid — but not in the ways they would have us believe.

It’s the media AND the voting public’s relationship with it. The media have so dumbed down political discourse in this country and we have so bought into it that we are in mortal danger.

As noted before, politics is all about entertainment. We, the People, have complacently embraced the fun. It consumes our time and our lives. It’s so easy to be entertained. Attractive candidates. Compelling story lines. Stage sets. Neck-and-neck horse races.

Republican media manipulators have chosen a candidate/actor to fit the desired plot line. Palin has been cast not to be vice president, but to fill the role of a running mate who can offset the stiff persona of old what’s-his-name.

Media moguls know that successful casting creates “para-social” relationships between members of the audience and the character. This is the staple of soap operas. Viewers often identify more with the travails of media-concocted characters than they do with members of their own families. When candidates forge the same relationships with voters, the voters end up caring more about the candidates than they do about the state of their nation or the world.

We will never see real change in this country until this media manipulation and a complacent public’s surrender to it end.

Palin glasses hunters swarm to web site

My site meter went ballistic last night after I posted my little ditty about Sarah Palin’s glasses.

The Red Electric lopes along with between 40 and 50 visitors each day. The count consists of 30 of my nearest and dearest friends and relatives as well as a pack of search robots sniffing out tags (“McLuhan,” “glasses,” “Sarah Palin”) and product mentions.

At first I thought the ‘bots were out in force last night (and today) or somebody spotted something they thought worth linking to a better-read site than Red.

Since the post 23 hours ago, I’ve received 650 visits.

I should have known something was up when, oddly, no one has posted a comment. Not a single one.

Then it was brought to my attention that the site meter has a “references” section. What we have is nothing more than good old American consumerism run amok. Folks are gaga over Sarah’s frames and are searching “Palin” and “glasses” in droves. (Gee, what would have happened if I’d tagged the post “sex” and “Palin”? I've tried it with this one as an experiment. What happens if ANY post is tagged “sex”? Whole industries are built on the answer to the question.)

Frequent Red Electric reader Steve Brannon was the first to raise the possibility of the consumer connection and even pointed out press documentation of the consumer craze for Palin’s specs.

The good news that while the large majority visited the site to read about where to find Sarah’s glasses, more than 100 nosed around here and looked at other posts.

So, for those of you in the hunt for the Palin-look, look around. You aren’t likely to find what you were looking for, but you may like what you find.

If you actually are here for more thoughts about “cool” and the campaign, here’s one more observation grounded in McLuhan. I also should credit George Lakoff, who rightly takes metaphors seriously — very seriously. (He also writes a lot about frames — political, not optical, ones.)

The political metaphors for the past three decades have all been unabashedly about war. “Hot” war” not “cold war.” So we have “Attack ads,” “War rooms,” “Frontal attacks,” “Counter attacks,” “Air wars,” “War chests” etc.

If he were around, McLuhan (he died in 1980) might argue on behalf of a “cool war.” It would be absorbing and coolly nonconfrontational. It would certainly entertain and not take itself too seriously. Sure, it would take the issues seriously but never lose sight of both the sublime and the absurd.

John F. Kennedy was the first to master “cool.” His press conferences managed enlighten, inspire and, most importantly, engage. He was comfortable with his topic, with himself and with us.

Sarah Palin is no John Kennedy. But she does seem to bring to the podium some of these same qualities. For one thing, she is comfortable enough with herself to wear those marmish glasses. And she may just know that they draw us in to her persona and ultimately into what she is saying.

Whether we agree with her or not, she, unlike her running mate, old what’s-his-name, gets our attention.

Barack Obama shares a few of these qualities. For starters, he too is comfortable with who he is. He, at least, seems to have transcended race, something most of us, if we are honest, have not done but would like too.

How does he do it? And how does Palin get away with wearing those glasses? Of course in her case, she can simply take them off. That she doesn’t seems contrived yet curious.

Obama, with no choice about his skin color, has reached acceptance and moved on.

Would that we all could. This election may tell us if we can.

Understanding Sarah Palin's glasses

Advertising Age has polled its market-savvy readers about which of the two campaigns is doing the better job of marketing its candidates.

No idle question, that. Marketing is what presidential campaigns are all about. Like soap, deodorant, video games and the Iraq War.

With Advertising Age’s spot-on query and Sarah Palin in mind, I was reminded of one of Marshall McLuhan’s barrage of disconnected observations in his classic “Understanding Media.”

But before moving on to McLuhan, let it be noted that of the four candidates on the two tickets, Palin is different in one obvious respect: she wears glasses.

Oh, and she is a woman.

Wrote McLuhan in his chapter “Media Hot and Cold,” “The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly embodied in the folk wisdom: ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ (The quote is also attributed to Dorothy Parker.) Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine image exceedingly, Marion the Librarian notwithstanding. Dark glasses, on the other hand, create the inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a great deal of participation and completion (by the viewer).”

Before we get carried away with off-target connotations of “hot,” (as in “hotty”), we need to be reminded that, in McLuhan’s words, “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, ‘high definition.’ A cartoon is ‘low definition,’ simply because very little visual information is provided….”

There’s more, of course. With McLuhan there was always more — a LOT more. And a lot of it was contradictory or sheer bunk. For instance, in recent years, we’ve seen plenty of high-definition cartoons and low-definition photographs.

Back to vice presidential candidate Palin, who is being marketed to a demographic that worships “cool.” With her glasses, Sarah, according to McLuhan is unfashionably hot and “exceedingly” well defined, at least until she replaces her specs with shades, at which point she becomes “cool” and compelling.

Sadly, I have to disagree. Palin has the appearance of models you see in the designer “eye apparel” ads. She is clearly so good-looking that not even glasses can detract from her looks. And you immediately wonder how that could be. In an instant you are trying to figure out what she would look like without glasses on. She is, in short, visually undefined and involving — the very essence of McLuhan’s “cool.”

Remember, this is all about marketing, getting your attention, attracting your interest, stimulating desire (I find myself mentally wanting to see her without her glasses on — and yes, with her hair down) and to commit to her personally (never mind that she doesn’t believe in global warming, evolution or sex education.)

From a marketing perspective (is there any other?) my fear is that Palin’s appearance has transported hordes of cool-crazed voters down the road to buy-in.

And Joe Biden (and John McCain, ne “dead man campaigning”)?

You’ve got to be kidding.

And Barack Obama?

Stay tuned.