Bang The Dumb Slowly

I meant to ask you how you lived/what you believed
With nothing but your heart/up your sleeve
And if you ever/really were deceived
By the likes of me

Bang the drum slowly/play the pipe lowly
To dust be returning/from dust we begin
Bang the drum slowly/I’ll speak of things holy
Above and below me: world without end

“Bang The Drum Slowly” ~ Emmylou Harris/Guy Clark

There is a fundamental (emphasis on “mental”) misunderstanding in the coverage of the putative presidential campaign of Princess Palin: Sarah Palin is not running for president; Sarah Palin is being RUN for president. And that turn of the phrase makes all the difference in the world.

Doesn’t it ever occur to anyone that in the week following the momentous “wave” election of 2010, “Sarah Palin” has dominated the Memeorandum headlines virtually each and every day? Her daughter and “Dancing With the Slugs,” her “Reality Show,” her this, her that, her warp and her weave, her whiff and her poof.

Her “book” (her part ghostwritten, most of the rest of it a slapped together anthology on “patriotism” and nativism) receives the publicist’s wet dream: a lawsuit against Gawker and a preliminary injunction to take down the “leaked” excerpts of Palin’s “book” — more precisely, Palin’s excuse to do another book tour and scribble with her Sharpie® even as she continues to refuse to meet with any media that does not fawn over her. Her publisher? HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Her employer? Rupert Murdoch, via Faux Nooz™. All her interviews, etc? Faux Nooz™. Her pronunciamentos (ghosted, seemingly)? FaceBook.

Her actual interface with legitimate news media (as it has existed since pre-Revolutionary War times)? Zero. (We used to believe in debating issues, not ducking them.)

A gramophony

Does it occur to ANYONE that Sarah Palin is neither experienced enough, savvy enough, intelligent enough, or simply indefatigable enough to engage in all of this media publicity placement? NO FUCKING WAY.

This is, as has it been all along, a very calculated media campaign that takes advantage of “open” news cycles (such as using the slow news Fourth of July weekend to announce her resignation as governor of Alaska) to continually bombard us with Palin stories.

Why, hell, you’d think she was Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Cotton Mather, Evita Peron and Brenda Starr all rolled into one, defusing nuclear terror bombs and conducting self-composed symphonies with one hand, all the while suckling her babe with the other. I mean, from the level of MEDIA coverage she’s given.

Look at the three-pronged blitzkrieg underway this week: Palin’s book, Palin’s TV show, Palin’s DAUGHTER’S TV show.

The giveaway is the timing: constantly, they push Palin to the top via “meetoo” crosslinking, and the “legitimate” media bite, writing bits like this one, or like Frank Rich’s piece in the New York Times, this weekend:

Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You Betcha

By FRANK RICH
Published: November 20, 2010

“THE perception I had, anyway, was that we were on top of the world,” Sarah Palin said at the climax of last Sunday’s premiere of her new television series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” At that point our fearless heroine had just completed a perilous rock climb, and if she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a spa instead, don’t expect her fans to question the reality. For them, Palin’s perception is the only reality that counts.

Palin is on the top of her worlds — both the Republican Party and the media universe. “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” set a ratings record for a premiere on TLC, attracting nearly five million viewers — twice the audience of last month’s season finale of the blue-state cable favorite, “Mad Men.” The next night Palin and her husband Todd were enshrined as proud parents in touchy-feely interviews on “Dancing With the Stars,” the network sensation (21 million viewers) where their daughter Bristol has miraculously escaped elimination all season despite being neither a star nor a dancer. This week Sarah Palin will most likely vanquish George W. Bush and Keith Richards on the best-seller list with her new book.

If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a “Star Wars” bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers … Last week voters in Palin’s home state humiliatingly “refudiated” her protégé, Joe Miller, overturning his victory in the G.O.P. Senate primary with a write-in campaign.

But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success….

Then again, perhaps she’s jumped the shark. According to the Hollywood Reporter:

‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ Ratings Plummet

10:57 AM 11/23/2010
by James Hibberd

After setting a TLC ratings record last week, Sarah Palin’s reality show plummeted for its second episode.
Sarah Palin’s Alaska fell 40% on Sunday night to 3 million viewers.

Not many were in the key adult demo either. Only 885,000 viewers were ages 18-49, dropping 44% from last week.
In fact, the median age of the show is 57 — that’s 15 years older than TLC’s average

[...]

“We are very happy with the ongoing strength of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and it continues to drive big ratings gains for TLC,” said a network spokesperson, who noted Conan had a similar drop.

Tonight, Bristol Palin will be on the Dancing With the Stars finale and there should be no shortage of viewers there given the controversy surrounding her improbable continued success on the show.

Yeah. Improbable.

But Frank Rich misses the point: it doesn’t have a goddam thing to do with Sarah Palin. She’s the show-monkey. She’s the cute little monkey holding the tin cup for the organ grinder, who’s playing the entire media like a hurdy gurdy with as improbable a series of stunts as ever chased through the dreams of that master of humbug, P.T. Barnum.

The whole “Alaska” schtick. Yes. Grew up and lives in Alaska. But lives in the ‘burbs.

As Jon Stewart so ably pointed out last week in clips from Palin’s “Alaska” show she hasn’t DONE any of those things.

The whole fake cowboy meme, which has been a staple of American humbuggery for as long as there have been Americans. The “wild west” man, wooly, mysterious and fabulous. Old William “Buffalo Bill” Cody played it as well as anybody, for several years in the beginning, he would live and work out West, and then go BACK East and PLAY a rugged frontiersman/buffalo hunter on the STAGE. Later, he’d even bring Sitting Bull on tour with his “Wild West” show, and it was no more “Wild West” than it had ever been, but was what Eastern audiences WANTED the Wild West to be.

Ditto the foul-mouthed breeder from Wasilla.

But it is a triumph of stagecraft and the Publicity Agent’s handicraft. They have her sotted away as surely a movie studio ever deep-sixed the misadventures of their stars, and manufactured a “public life” that they relentlessly pumped into the fan magazines, like PhotoPlay, and Life, and Look.

But they never let the journalists backstage, lest she reveal herself as something other than the public persona they’re crafting for her. Somebody figured that out a week into the campaign, after her disastrous interviews with ABC, NBC, CNN and, notoriously, Katie Couric of CBS.

She’s still extremely pissed off about that one. MSNBC:

Palin says she will ‘clean up’ journalism

Domenico Montanaro writes: Sarah Palin is vowing — in a FOX interview that will air later today — to “clean up” journalism, and says she will not speak to CBS’s Katie Couric again, calling her “biased” and won’t “waste my time.”

Couric conducted the interview in 2008 in which Palin tried to defend her foreign policy credentials. Of Russian President Vladimir Putin, she said, “It’s very important, when you consider even national security issues with Russia, as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border.”

Palin said of journalism:

“I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us.”

Palin got a journalism degree from the University of Idaho in 1987, after which she briefly was a sportscaster in Alaska [video]

One wonders what language that journalism degree was in. Seriously? “I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism.”

Not sure am making sense order of I words speaking are.

No wonder they’re keeping her under wraps.

Yeah, but it’s all PR for the rollout of the book. And, of course, for incisive, deeply-penetrating journalism, you just can’t go more wrong than Sally Quinn in her “religion” column in the Washington Post:

On Faith
WASHINGTON POST REPORTER Sally Quinn

The unholy (s)election of Bristol Palin

I feel for Bristol Palin. Here’s a plucky young woman who signed up for “Dancing With the Stars” knowing she had no chance to win but thinking it might be an adventure. Bristol had never danced and was up against some world-class dancers. That takes guts. I know. I’m a ballroom dancer myself. Dancing is my religion.

My secret fantasy is to be on “Dancing” but of course I would never dare. I can see Len saying in a caustic British accent, “That was absolutely the worst Paso Doble I have ever seen in my 11 seasons on this show!” And Bruno, standing up, tearing at his hair, “What are you thinking?! Where is the passion? The sexuality? The character? That was PATHETIC!” And Carrie Ann, regretfully: “Sally, you’re a good journalist.* Why do you want to put yourself through this?”

[* Etiquette note: One ought to avoid complementing ones' self in one's articles, lest one appear arrogant and/or otherwise suffering from insufferable hubris.]

Ms. Quinn then goes on to have the vapors. CHEATING! CHEATING! on a network game show!

[...]

Sarah Palin’s detractors point to the Christian right as the culprits here. The say groups organized voting schemes to game the system and were telling each other how to cheat when voting at ABC.com.

Commenters on the conservative blog Hillbuzz.org said they had figured out how to enter more votes than the rules allow by creating fake e-mail addresses. One person posting on Hillbuzz said “Lord have mercy, I voted for three hours online! I got 300 in.”

And though ABC says it is weeding out votes cast by cheaters, it only proves that there are groups trying to rig the voting.

I never remember all Ten Commandments off the top of my head, but there should be one that says, “Thou shalt not cheat while voting on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’” Polls have shown that the majority of tea party members are conservative Christians. Are these Christians who are voting 300 times and not using valid email addresses? Doesn’t it offend their sense of fairness, if not ethics and morals?

And, finally, the kind of deep-thinking analysis we’ve all come to expect from Ms. Quinn:

Are these the same people who voted for Sarah Palin, for many of the candidates she endorsed this past election, and will be voting for her candidates in 2012? They may well be voting for her for president.

BY SALLY QUINN | NOVEMBER 22, 2010; 11:46 AM ET

The additional slugline is the Post’s idea, not mine. Evidently her name featured prominently at the beginning might have been forgot by the end.

And this is the end of my tale, because if you don’t get it now, you never will.

Roger Moore and the Health Industry whistleblower were on Keith Olbermann last night, and the former “spokesman” told of how, with their completely made up “astroturf” group, they’d planted their talking points verbatim in the biggest media outlets in the land.

Land-O-Fakes

When advertising’s all that matters, what better than a political construction as phony as the “Land O Lakes” indian maiden on your butter, or the “Alaska” girl, Sarah “You Betcha” Palin. Our newest singing cowboy.

Or reverse cowgirl. Something like that.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Or his army of press flacks.

Sarah Palin is not running for president; Sarah Palin is being RUN for president.

Now, ask yourself: By whom?

Courage.