Things, as always, are changing.

Yesterday morning I went with brnmsc37 to Way Farms to pick apples and pumpkins. Turns out the fruit farm was a popular destination, since Sarah Palin stopped by with her daughter on the way out of Pennsylvania.

The write up in the local paper included interviews from locals who gushed about Palin, especially after she bought a pumpkin for Max, a local kid. “We were floored that she was so down to earth,” said Mike Theuer, Max’s father. “She paid literally out of her pocket.”

My friend Greg commented on the story, It's incredible! She buys pumpkins like the rest of us, with money she pulls out of her pocket! I've made up my mind. I'm so voting for her. She's so much like us. Not part of the "let your servant buy pumpkins for you" crowd.

I thought I saw another student in my program in the parking lot, so I asked her if she saw Palin. She was there, but missed Palin. But that led her to make the following comment about Palin: I just heard that some people are calling her Caribou Barbie. And while I find that hilarious, I think it's insulting to Barbie who doesn't actually have a brain and can't help that the men at Mattel.

I get her point, but I'm not sure I like it. I dislike Palin very much, do not think she is qualified to be Vice President, and I find her rhetoric and policies abhorrent. However, I have been unhappy with how other people supposedly on "my side" talk about her, mocking her accent, calling her dumb, and making extremely gendered comments. In thinking about my discomfort, I decided to respond this way:

I do think Greg has it right that we should be insulted that we are supposed to judge her on relatability, and that the standards for sharing something with "us" are as low as using actual US currency to purchase a seasonally symbolic fruit for a child.

I'm no Palin fan. But I think gendered and regionalized criticisms of her like "Caribou Barbie" --regardless of how much she's camping up her performance to play those roles-- end up reenforcing feelings of marginalization for persons who have aspects of their femme or regional identities align with parts of Palin's "folksy" persona.

Greg chimed in, I agree with Hannah on the regionalism. I'm already sick of people talking shit about Alaska, and it's not like I've ever been there or anything, but there are better ways to criticize her than mock the state.

By keeping crticisms at the level of style, jokes like "Caribou Barbie" distract from the more substantive beefs one could have with her as a vice presidental candidate, like:

1) her inability to seperate personal and political roles
violating Open Records laws by using private email to keep activies hidden; labelling her family the "First Family" of Alaska and mixing personal and government budgets; the whole Trooper Wooten debacle... or

2) her fringe beliefs and connections
"palling around" with her husband other secessionists--including attending the AIP convention; her radical Pentacostalism which leads her to ask people to pray for the gas pipelines of God's will, seek protection from witches, and imply that her work as governer will be hampered "if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God" or

3) her unblinking ambition and hypocrisy
claiming maverick status for occassionally bucking the powers-that-be when it's politically expedient to do so but ingratiating yourself to the old-boys-network the rest of the time; subjecting your 7-year-old to a potentially abusive crowd in an attempt to defuse hostility and/or to be able to rebuke them afterwards for subjecting a child to booing--"How dare they boo Piper!"; mocking politicians and journalists while she is a career politician with a degree in journalism, and last but not least

4) her unashamed use of divisive, xenophobic, othering, and yes, racist appeals
I think this one's been well covered elsewhere, but everyone knows what she means when she says that Barack Obama is "not like one of us", and we've all seen that the crowds have responded with all the cries of Muslim! Terrorist! Kill him! and Sit down boy! they were meant to.

In light of all of this, making fun of her accent or her beehive is a cheap shot and completely misses the point.

But since she is selling her persona, rather than mocking it I think a better approach is to show that it too is a put-on. Like the observation that average small town folk don't have a million $$ in assets.

I'm writing an article on the finer things in life, and i was wondering if i could cite you...

I am officially an early Americanist now.

Wednesday Addams hijacks a Thanksgiving pageant.

Brief expression of pain.

Interest Rank

1. Historian

2. Anthropologist

3. Criminologist

4. Professor

5. Technical Writer

6. Special Effects Technician

7. Religious Worker

8. Community Worker ( more )

Rice and Bean (yes, hilarious), own a home together and have a line of credit together.

Last Tuesday morning, after a terrible evening ordeal involving a flat tire, Wal-Mart, and towing, Greg drove me to Pittsburgh to catch my flight to the Midwest. I spent most of last week in Omaha. Highlights included the Henry Doorly Zoo, intense wind, and an Elvis tribute fireworks display. I also ate at Cracker Barrel with the folks from the retirement community where my mom now works.

I’ve been in Lawrence since Saturday night. As soon as I got in, Lauren and I headed to MC’s for drinking, desserts, and singing. I’ll probably stick around until my plane leaves on Wednesday.

I've decided to take up hiking, since I live in a place with great hiking.
Yesterday I hiked the James "Jimmy" Cleveland Memorial Trail.

( click for pictures )

Heather! How are you?

I suppose I am uninterested in signing for two main reasons.

1) Context.

I don't want to minimize the pain and suffering of the victims and their families, and I agree that the event was sad and tragic. But...

I feel that to be able to operate under the assumption that the world is a fair and safe place-- untouched by random violence and injuring only those who deserve/provoke it-- is a privileged framework. Many well-off white Americans don't confront and don't have to confront the world's horrors, except in shocking and anomalous media-hyped events, like this, or like Columbine, or when poor little Natalie Holloway disappears. I am sad and horrified by VT, but I'm perhaps just as or more upset by other things going on in the world right now. I suppose I'm concerned that people who are so upset or touched by the VT incident aren't upset or willing to do anything about tragedies in the neighborhoods of St. Louis or the genocide in Darfur. And it's not that I don't want a fair and safe world, because I do. I just don't think that we can get there by selectively reacting to violence and injustice, especially while turning a blind eye to more salient and persistent problems.

I also wonder: what does it mean that "we" have reacted so strongly to an event that was truly random--unpredictable and unpreventable--while ignoring violence and injustice that we have caused, are causing, and that could still be prevented. The same number, twice as many, three or four times as many Iraqi citizens die each day, a direct result of our invasion and destabilization of Iraq. I feel that as American citizens, we are culpable for this ongoing violence. Yet, the same students talking about VT, organizing events to commemorate VT, observing moments of silence over VT don't seem to care about the fate of Iraqi citizens, when they bother to think about them at all. It really does, in the end, demonstrate whose lives "we" value.

2) Methods.

What does signing a poster or wearing VT colors do for anyone except the signers or the wearers, who can feel good about demonstrating how compassionate they are?

---

"Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts." MLK

"For as long as we have seen and felt objects among our existence, there is but one word that defines soft and fuzzy together. This is none other than the word furry. It has been around our culture since man first learned how to speak."
- from an ENGL 15 student's definition essay

I don't mean to be callous, but no, I won't sign your poster for Virginia Tech.

mk: they really don't care about the names of the types of writing
mk: they want to say something

I find exhortations to live an authentic life somewhat...inauthentic.

Can the movie 300 be a better example of a 21st century fascist aesthetic?



(see also Arno Breker)