H-Bomb

One time, not so long ago, back in those darker days when it was still relevant, I said I liked Sarah Palin. This was just after her first speech as the Republican vice presidential candidate. My exact words were, "I like her." When asked to clarify, I responded (to my current chagrin[1]), "I found her to be likable."

Greg, alarmed by the new possibility that he might be dating a self-declared feminist and progressive activist-cum-Republican sympathizer, set off on a dense exegesis about ethics and my "deeply disturbing" lack thereof, launching us into the most existentially perilous fight of our relationship. It wasn't even a fight exactly, but one of those dissonant moments when it occurs to both lovers that what once felt like a stable basis of mutual respect might actually be a tenuous and now doomed balancing act brought off by fundamentally incompatible psyches. This is, after all, the partisan era that brought us the Facebook group "I Don't Hook Up With Republicans."

Sarah Palin's meteoric, Manchurian Candidate-esque political ascent reads like a farce—a farce with real-world ramifications so far-reaching that otherwise likeminded people squibble[2]. It's a farce so unbelievable as to make me wonder if I am actually living in The Truman Show—(The Mellor Show, albeit not quite so PG-13)—and the writers of my life, bored with depicting the quotidian, scripted a political season outlandish enough to imperil their entire conceit. Sarah Palin's undeniable fuckability lends a distinct credence to such solipsistic paranoia: surely it would be the brainchild of some clever little fuck in Hollywood to create and then submit as a candidate for executive office our nation’s first ever VPILF[3].

Sex sells; sex sells with such undeniable success that saying "sex sells" is a rote truism. And the Republican Party, or at least that strategic and rational core of the Party that a.) must exist (right?) and b.) recognizes that things like abstinence-only education are just ineffectual wedge-issue bullshit and c.) isn't preoccupied with juggling the deep cognitive dissonance that comes of publicly denouncing sexual freedom while privately soliciting sex in airport bathrooms and e-flirting with congressional pages, has gotten hip to the reality of this truism and taken to ideo-pimping Sarah Palin's VPILFness with gleeful, shameless frenzy. "Drill, baby, drill!" Good for the bedrock, good for the bedroom!

Before Sarah Palin, we as a society knew, on some level, that our politicians, their opportunism and hypocrisy, had become so systemically problematic that laughter was the only sanity-saving response, hence the addictive nightly catharsis of comedy news shows, where the likes of Stewart, Colbert and Maher made (and make) a living by saying, in very innovative ways: "This shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S!" What I "like" about Sarah Palin is that there is no subtlety to the hypocrisy and opportunism she represents; it's so overt and absurd that she has ceased to be frightening. Attendees of the RNC cheering uproariously for the right of new mothers to return to work? Republican spokespeople harping on the latent sexism of political campaigns? The GOP's endorsement—nay embrace—of a hot, confident, fast-learning woman who can wield a gun but is patently, almost perversely, unqualified for office? This shit is B-A-N-A-N-A-S, and it doesn't take a clever video clip to see why.

Some two months after our epic throwdown over Palin's likability and one week and two days before the election, Greg and I found ourselves, in that don't-it-all-come-full-circle sort of way, at the crossroads of our nation's cultural warfare and the epicenter of human absurdity: the intersection of a Sarah Palin stump speech with a World Zombie Day march in Asheville, North Carolina, a hippy-liberal stronghold in one of the few truly contested states. In addition to crazy-eyed conservative hardcores and immaculately coifed Southern Republican ladies, in town for the day to support their gal, there was a whole new breed of pink-clad, be-lipsticked Republican enthusiasts, cheering "Palin Power!" The atmosphere was one part breast cancer awareness rally, one part Spice Girls reunion tour. In the McCain-Palin campaign's faux-feminist ballyhoo, an array of hot-pink pro-Sarah buttons had been crafted—one a pink, white and blue flag decal declaring "I Like Sarah," one a Wild Wild West cowgirl Sarah shooting a gun and inviting you to "Read My Lipstick: Change is Coming," and the last, my hands-down, mind-blown favorite, the simple "Hot Chicks Vote Republican,"—all of which I was so moved by that I donated a morally questionable $10 to their purveyor for the chance to confuse the partisans. Whispers spread throughout the Democratic crowd: "Is she one of us? . . . I think she's being ironic.. . . "

And this, given that Sarah Palin lost the election, is where it all gets hopeful, now that we can see that her strong performance in folksy fuck-me appeal did not woo enough voters to compensate for her weak showing in content and authenticity—that cheap thrills, even strung together, are not sustainable strategy. Maybe, just maybe, the un-election of Sarah Palin represents a turning point in the will of our electorate, which has become some combination of scared enough and optimistic enough to reject gimmickry and the hot shit that at the core is actually just shit, and instead say We care! We care!, and then put that care into action.

Greg and I care so much that we streaked through Baton Rouge, LA. Sure, we may have an exceptionally hot man in office (Hello, Mr. President Elect), and he may be married to an extraordinary FLILF[5] (pronounced, as Greg so enjoys shouting, Flif! Flif! Let's smoke a flif!), and yours truly may in fact pass time imagining the sex life of one Mr. President Elect and his extraordinary FLILF and all the interns with whom Mr. President Elect will not get his cock wet, but the sexiness of our future president, the one whose victory makes me feel like there is a chance I may one day be comfortable propelling children out of my womb and into this fraught world of ours, is the kind that comes from the purest form of attraction, the magnetism of someone with a smokin' body and a commitment to righteous ideas and ideals. Barack Obama is no indulgence of the carnal and vapid. So goodbye, Sarah Palin. There's cab money in the top drawer. Mr. President Elect is true love. [Greg responds . . .]

_________

[1] I do not and did not, in any substantive way, like Sarah Palin. The dynamics at play in my not-fully-considered declaration are too patently uninteresting to recount in detail here. The simple version is that I spoke flippantly, motivated in part by the predictable rise I knew I could get out of Greg, and in part by a fast-fading excitement about the arrival of a self-possessed female figure in the male-dominated political scene.

[2] Squibble = the combination of squabble and quibble, intended to denote vigorous but ultimately gentle conflict. (See, also, Quabble.)

[3] VPILF = Vice President I'd Like to Fuck (excluding, of course, members of the aforementioned Facebook group—they explicitly do not want to fuck Palin or any of her ilk). According to Dennis Miller, Sarah Palin is so fuckable that lefty women like me just can't stand it. 

[4] Some parts of this post may, I hope, strike you as funny. You may be wondering why I say I'm not all that funny yet all the while am writing funny things. Sometimes I rip a great one, sure, and once somebody even peed their pants. But I have to give complete and total footnote credit here to Greg, whose editing contributed an all-around badass, on-point, delightful sense of humor to this post. It's super fun to be traveling with a natural editor and jokester. And I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you in a footnote to Greg, the resident master of wit for Jenna Does America!

[5] FLILF = First Lady I'd Like to Fuck