Writing Boots

 

It's best not to trust people who:

 

• Say “frankly.”

 

• Use your name a lot. "David, as I'm sure you'll agree, David."

 

• Attribute their every fuckup to “a perfect storm.”

 

• Respond to criticism by saying they’ve been “thrown under the bus.” (What bus?)

 

• Describe their strategy (or their coffee or wine or anything else) as “robust.”

 

• Tell you, “I’m being perfectly transparent with you.”

 

• Tell you how “passionate” they are about branding, roofing tile or whatever else it is they’re selling.

 

• Say they want your feedback.

You know why you're getting so badly tripped up at the moment? Because you broke your promise, to try to unite Republicans and Democrats, right and left, on a few meaningful issues we can all agree on. You sold us on your uniqueness with your 2004 speech about there being no red states, no blue states, only American states. You said in your book, "Audacity of Hope," that you think most people agree on most things. You mentioned in lots of your stump speeches this creature called "Obamicans." You derided dividers, you promised to eliminate many enemies by communicating with them.

Now you're trying to outscore the Republicans by promising "fierce" counterattacks. Now your base is shaking its collective head and wondering how the other half of the country can be so stupid as to be fooled by Sarah Palin. Now you're caught between the high road and the low road.

You need a timeout. You need to reread your own book, remember the ideas that gave you that audacity in the first place. You need a big speech, before it's too late, if it isn't already.

Maybe you were foolish in the first place to believe you could sufficiently unite the American electorate. Maybe we were foolish to listen to your audacity.

But I'm pretty sure you need to do something dramatic, something now and something unprecedented to turn this thing around.

How, and what? That's why we donate to you the big bucks.

Faithful Boots reader Joan Hope write a comment to an earlier post that's so totally inappropriately off that topic–and such a sincere howl of pain–that I've decided it deserves its own post.

Joan, take it away:

I am going to go totally off topic because I just want to whine a little. I used to like being an Alaskan. We were different–oddballs, the sort of people you notice but aren't sure you want to talk to. A strange niche of kooks who live where it's always cold and vacation in Hawaii or Mexico (which is so totally backwards, when I reflect on this: shouldn't we live in a warm place and visit the cold ones? But I digress…).

Wasilla is full of reporters. And there's plenty that's interesting in the Matanuska Valley, don't get me wrong: the guy up north of Talkeetna who befriends bears; the legions of dog mushers and their odd culture; the meth labs; the survivalists; the Slopers; the old-timers. Like every community, there's texture, good things and bad.

And then Sarah came along and turned us into what feels like some drugged-out nightmare; it's so unreal, this spotlight on us. Remember how Frodo felt when that big bright eye would stare at him and scare the bejeezus out of him? It feels like that. I don't even want to go buy bell peppers anymore because you don't know who's watching or what they want. This is not fun.

And I'm going to commit the deadly sin and come out and say it: there's no way that woman should be where she is. I thought it was impossible to become more jaded about the political process than I already was, but this has pushed me over the edge. It's all Hollywood, there's nothing of substance. If this is how it works, then it's so broken it's beyond repair. This is so wrong.

I feel as though we (Alaskans) have been made ridiculous. We all know we're a bubble off, but nobody ever cared, because we're all up here, and you have to make significant effort to get up here where you'd notice, and so we've gone along, happy in our obscurity; but now we're cartoons, gun-toting, moose-killing, salmon-smoking nuts who can't tell fact from fiction (probably because we've all been smoking too much of that famous Matanuska Thunderf**k that some among us are so proud to grow) and we've unleashed our governor upon the world–literally upon the world. We have reporters from Al Jazeera up here.

This is too weird for words. Help me.