Lessons from an Attention Whore

Today’s avalanche of “news” about Sarah Palin’s deals is not, in and of itself, meaningful.

This picture will make sense shortly

Palin signs with Faux Nooz™, Palin signs for big bucks to speak at the First Annual Astroturf … er TEA Party Convention in Nashville. Palin to speak at, well, consider the gossipy nature of this story: CNN reporter/blogger quotes another reporter at another news “outlet”.*

(* The digital equivalent of “sphincter”). Here ’tis:

Peter Hamby / CNN:

Palin to address alcohol industry event in Las Vegas — Washington (CNN) – Las Vegas and alcohol probably aren’t the first two things that come to mind at the mention of Sarah Palin, but the former vice presidential candidate is about to change that. — At least that’s according to Craig Wolf …

“Book Author” Palin, one of the vapid Barbie Dolls breathlessly noted on MSNBC this morning. Without guile. Without self-awareness of just how monstrous her needlessly redundant lie actually is.

[The proper journalistic usage would be, "alleged author." Faux Nooz even profiled her GHOST writer fer chrissakes. Jeebus on a raft of cheese. Do these creatures dress themselves?]

Er, what OTHER kind of “authors” are there? Shoe authors? Bean authors? Freeway authors? Zeppelin authors? And I don’t mean the subject. I mean the actual bleeping modified noun.

It works, rarely, as a metaphor — as in “the true author of the Wyoming saga was Mountain Man Jim Bridger” — but an author*, by definition, means books

(* Which is why I am precise in my self-classification as an author slash journalist. I’ve written books and written for newspapers).

But our bionic Barbie Doll newsreader spews Beauty-Queen-answer-quality “analysis” of the news that she reads, and tells us that “book author”* Sarah Palin will be on Faux.

Oh, how about moose author, or even tree author? (My personal favorite would be “Tree Murderer,” but no one has the integrity to call it what it really is. Am I REALLY the only author out there with grave misgivings about murdering trees just so that my deathless prose can be transferred to your head? )

Of course, the Ultimate Tree Author would be God, since only he, saith the poet, can make a tree. Or, evidently a Sarah Palin, but that’s ONLY if you’re not a Manichean.

What we have here, chilluns, is a woman becoming rich by becoming famous. And she has become famous because the news media and its viewers cannot look away from the train wreck that Palin has been since she stepped onto the stage, OVERNIGHT, back right before the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2008.

Forget the details. Forget whether you love her or hate her. I cannot help but think of Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction story “The World Well Lost” (1953):

appeared in this collection, daddio

All the world knew them as loverbirds, though they were certainly not birds, but humans. Well, say humanoids. Featherless bipeds. Their stay on earth was brief, a nine-day wonder. Any wonder that lasts nine days on an earth of orgasmic trideo shoiws; time-freezing pills; synaptic-inverter fields which make it possible for a man to turn a sunset to perfume, a masochist to a fur-feeler; and a thousand other euphorics — why, on such an earth, a nine-day wonder is a wonder indeed.

Like a sudden bloom across the face of the world came the peculiar magic of the loverbirds. There were loverbird songs and loverbird trinketrs, loverbird hats and pins, bangles and baubles, coins and quaffs and tidbits….

Alas, Sarah Palin is a “nine-day wonder” in that sense.

And, for the time that the industry that exploits her finds her amusing, she will remain a presence to the bauble industry. Magazines that know her picture on the cover sells magazines will feature her on the covers of their magazines: from Women’s Day and Runner’s World to the National Enquirer and US Magazine.

That’s what they feed on. And their victims … er, SUBJECTS , well, they bask in the glare of phony fame for their nine days.

I put myself in Palin’s place and have to say, well, yeah, grab every bit of whatever you can while the blush is on the rose. As celebrity has become the only benchmark of social attainment (think of Paris Hilton, sex tape and “reality show” celebrity), so, too, celebrity has a hard cash value, if you crank it out by taking every paying gig that you can in the time allotted you.

Speeches for cash.

If she’s going to be a regular on Faux Nooz, that probably means she will have to move to New York, where the Big Apple can watch the Boy in the Bubble, with arch observations in the local gossip columns, with barbs in the Voice and high fives from the Post.

And when they tire of her, when the baubles and bangles and beads no longer sell, she’ll have the Republican Chicken Dinner circuit, and then the Holy Roller circuit. Sarah Palin will be “famous” for the rest of her life.

But that kind of attention does something to you. It twists and warps you. It pours the most incredible fertilizer onto minor faults and vices, which grow into the most amazing demonic beanstalks you ever saw. (Sometimes called the “diva” phenomenon.)

But what happens to Sara Palin doesn’t really matter. Did she not exist, it would be necessary for the bloviating class to invent her. SOMEBODY’s got to be on the cover of People Magazine. SOMEBODY’s got to be the target of scathing British ex-pat derision in columns in, say, Vanity Fair, or the Atlantic.

Somebody’s got to be booked as a draw for industry conventions, for phony political parties (Joe the Plumber and Michelle Malkin only have so many hours in the day). Somebody’s got to sit across from Bill O’Reilly, from Rush Limbaugh, from Chris Wallace; from George Stephanopoulos, from Oprah.

Because, in this society, it literally PAYS to be an attention whore.

We need a new national motto to replace the Constitutionally-questionable “IN GOD WE TRUST.” How about “LOOK AT ME”?

On a planet teeming with SEVEN BILLION HUMANS, “Look at me!” seems the operative commandment, else die as the runt of the litter. Suckle at the media teat all that you can, while they suck the life out of you.

I don’t see how they CAN’T demand that the Palins move from Wasilla to Manhattan, an actual honest-to-gosh modern Beverly Hillbillies as Reality Show, with all of New York in on the joke. I hope that, dunked in that hot oil fryer they won’t come out as French Fries, or, more aptly, donut holes.

I don’t particularly like their politics, their morals, their manners or their train wreck of a collective sexual history, which I really wish I knew NOTHING WHATSOEVER about. e,g.: Governor of Alaska conceals pregnancy to give birth to a Downs Syndrome baby named for a branch of mathematics. Daughter is having out of wedlock child with “fiance” (pronounced, a la The Seekers, “fy-ANN-see,” no doubt) in shotgun wedding party on national tv at Republican National Convention.

You know, going back over the memories of that, I am almost certain that it was a dream. It had that same surreal quality of a Magritte or a Dali painting: with poor little rich girl Cindy McCain onstage at the Republican Convention but I kept seeing Carroll Baker as spoiled ranch heiress Pat Terrill in the seminal Western film, The Big Country: “Daddy, I WANT to be First Lady!” in a series of monochromatic fashion statements that seemed to indicate that she believed herself to be the High Ambassador and Minister Plenipotentiary from Mars. Or perhaps Io.

And next to her, this Daisy Mae Yokum from Alaska — no offense to Daisy Mae Yokum, who has the distinction from Ms. “Management” Palin of having exercised decorum in her personal life.

It seems surreal in retrospect. So surreal that I can almost not believe that it actually happened.

But I digress.

Jon Benet Ramseys, O.J. Simpsons and White Chicks Missing in Aruba will always be with us. We have “Kate” — whoever the hell that is — and her eight contributions to that seven-billion human pile glorped upon the planet. For those keeping score, that’s a TRIPLING of humanity in one human lifetime, and a 700% increase since the Jefferson Administration.

Worse, for America, we’ve gone hundredfold from 3 million at the time of the Revolution to 300 million plus. What worked for a small, pre-industrial agrarian civilization then may not work so well for a 300 million, globalized post digital population. Time will tell.

Television keeps us docile, thank goodness.

But in that crush of humanity, appropriately enough, Sarah and her brood will move to Manhattan and she will be on call to be on panels with Britt Hume, morning giggles with Doucey and that intentionally dumbed-down former Miss America, obfuscating with O’Reilly, hayseeding with Huckabee, harummphing with Hannity, and hyucking with Geraldo, wanking with Wallace, kissassing with Kristol, bucolicking with Barnes, alliterating with Ailesand and la de da, la de da, as saith Annie Hall.

Until they can figure what slot to put her show in.

Who knows, she might be the Dr. Joyce Brothers of our age, who turned a stint on the $64,000 question answering questions about boxing into a career as a TV psychologist and cultural ubiquity through the tube.

Or, she could fade like the loverbirds, as some new tabloid train wreck of a life triggers the attention of the papparazzo press and she no longer sells magazines.

But never let it be said that she didn’t do her damnedest to cash in on her nine days’ wonder.

“Book author” — a term that’s not only redundant in that grandiloquent sense of the clueless subliterati, but is a damned and double damned lie, to boot — Sarah Palin.

An apt metaphor.

And, heck, they could have another kid.

Courage.

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