Caleb Crain

My first lipstick-wearing pig

At the risk of dignifying an absurdity with attention, I happen to remember exactly when I first heard about pigs who wore lipstick. I first came across the turn of phrase in the Reagan-appointed Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Richard A. Posner’s book Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline, which I reviewed for The Nation in 2002. In chapter 6, a reprint of an essay originally published in 1998, Posner discussed the literary criticism of Wayne Booth and why he found it heavy-handed:

To prove the inescapability of the ethical in any final aesthetic judgment on a work of literature, even when it is a brief lyric, Booth does something very strange—I am tempted to say desperate: he changes the end of the second stanza of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” so that feeding on peerless eyes becomes stroking peerless thighs. But this is aesthetic butchery. The imagery of devouring (mostly poison) is pervasive in the poem, and this gives the image of feeding on the peerless eyes a resonance and hint of menace that Booth’s image of stroking thighs lacks. The substitution changes an image of great emotional power—because of the fusion of devouring with seeing—that is integral to the poem’s pattern of imagery into an irruption of soft-core porn that breaks the spell created by the poet. Not that pornography can’t be literature; but the “Ode on Melancholy” is not improved by being made risqué, just as a pig is not enhanced by wearing lipstick. Everything in its place.

To which one today feels obliged to assent, grimly, Indeed. In my review, “License to Ink,” I called these moments of bravura by Posner “highly entertaining” and I wrote of this passage in particular that it contained “a simile that becomes more disturbing the more it is considered.” Lipsticked pigs were new to me at the time, but since then I’ve seen them often in the prose of pundits, no doubt because they all make a point of reading my reviews and Posner’s books. (Kidding! I understand the image has been around for ages. I’m only pretending to be grandiose.) I leave it to John McCain to demonstrate that Posner was actually thinking neither of John Keats nor Wayne Booth nor even Immanuel Kant but only of a certain Alaskan.

John McCain’s Sickening New Ad

In his latest ad, John McCain claims that Barack Obama’s “one accomplishment” in education was “Legislation to teach ‘comprehensive sex education’ to kindergartners.” The voiceover then adds the taunt: “Learning about sex before learning to read?”

It would be difficult to overstate how vile this advertisement is. In fact, Obama supported a bill that proposed to add information about HIV and other medical issues to existing sex-education programs. According to an article by Erik Krol in the Daily Herald of 6 October 2004,

The legislation in question was a state Senate measure last year [that is, 2003] that aimed to update Illinois’ sex education standards with “medically accurate” information. At one point, the legislation included a provision to allow students from kindergarten through fifth grade to be added to the middle and high school students receiving sex education.

Obama was chairman of the Senate committee that voted along party lines to move along the measure, which ultimately went nowhere.

McCain is recycling a scurrilous charge first made by Alan Keyes, when he and Obama were competing for the U.S. Senate. “Nobody’s suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it,” Obama told an audience at Benedictine University in 2004, according to Krol’s report. It should also perhaps be pointed out that since the legislation never passed, the McCain campaign is lying on that point, too.

For the McCain campaign to make a false claim so inflammatory is beneath contempt. “I’m John McCain, and I approve this message,” the ad concludes. I read all of Michael Lewis’s coverage of McCain in The New Republic back in the 2000 election. I did once think McCain was an honorable man. But McCain’s “Obama as Antichrist” ad and his “Celebrity” ad raised serious doubts in my mind, and this ad clinches it. He has become a man without honor.

As it happens, the New York Times ran a responsible story this morning about Obama’s record of involvement in education, which dates back to the 1980s and whose chief principle is that “student achievement is highly dependent on teacher quality.” Compared to Obama’s plan for education, the Times reports in a sidebar, McCain’s is “downright terse.” Evidently McCain feels that slime is the best way to remedy this failure.

UPDATE (Sept. 11): The New York Times this morning has an article by Larry Rohter explaining that almost every word in McCain’s ad is a lie. I’m beginning to feel heartened by the willingness of journalists to call the McCain campaign’s many bluffs. On NPR last night, for example, All Things Considered interviewed Keith Ashdown, who coined the phrase “Bridge to Nowhere,” and he confirmed that Palin is lying whenever says she told Congress “thanks but no thanks” for the bridge.

Joe Biden defines Sarah Palin

While watching the Republicans go negative during their convention, Joe Biden had an epiphany:

They were like the kids, you know, when you went to school and you were very proud of the new belt you had and the shoes you had. And there was always one kid in the class who said, ‘Oh, are they your brother’s?’ Remember that kid? That’s what this reminded me of. ‘Oh, I love that dress, is that your mother’s?’ You know what I’m talking about. [Video here.]

In other words, Sarah Palin is the underminer.

P.S.: Here are the facts about how she treats her friends, if you’re into that whole reality-based, reading-writing-and-empiricism thing.

Palin on the environment

Greg of Hermits Rock points out that Columbia Journalism Review is urging the media to examine Palin’s environmental record and providing a primer. They quote Thomas Friedman’s observation in yesterday’s New York Times: “Palin’s much ballyhooed confrontations with the oil industry have all been about who should get more of the windfall profits, not how to end our addiction.” And they point out that she supports creationism, mountain-top-removal mining, the shooting of wolves from airplanes, and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve; doubts that human actions have caused global warming; and opposes trying to save polar bears. Oh, and, as you may recall, last night Palin said, “Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America’s energy problems—as if we all didn’t know that already.” The Obama campaign points out that this summer, Palin told Investor’s Business Daily that “I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem.”

Dreaming of the queen

I dreamed last night that I was brought into a room containing two upholstered chairs on raised platforms. “These are for Bristol and Levi,” someone told me, and I realized the chairs were thrones.

The alarm felt by many people by the advent on the national stage of Sarah Palin is not easy to explain. Objectively considered, she hardly seems threatening. She is uninformed and inexperienced, and her political past is riddled with costly errors, which it will be easy to expose. She has been compared to Dan Quayle, because of the speed with which humorists have pigeonholed her, and to Clarence Thomas, because of the heavy-handed tokenism behind McCain’s choice of her.

But I’m afraid that the better comparison is to George W. Bush, whom Palin did not mention in her speech last night. Bush, after all, was a governor when he was first tapped by the Republicans for nomination to the presidency. He had failed in business over and over before falling into politics, and like Palin, he had scandals in his past so embarrassing that most liberals assumed he would be easily discredited. (And in their eyes, he was.) Like Palin, Bush speaks in a thin voice, and his face is always tightly, thickly controlled when he speaks. When challenged, he has a peevish manner, suggesting that he hasn’t been appreciated, that he has been underestimated. And Palin toyed in her speech with a very similar chip on her shoulder. Eight years ago, Bush’s induction was very much a laying on of hands; there was a dynastic feel to it that transcended the mere fact that his father had been a president. And so with Palin. It is a neat trick—claiming to be an outsider when one’s presence on the national stage is owed to an anointing.

It succeeds, because underlying the intellectual contradictions is myth. In the case of George W. Bush, the myth was Prince Hal. He repudiated his Falstaffian past of drinking and unaccomplishment. But according to this myth, it was exactly his long history of having achieved little that was to make him great—he knew what it felt like to be for a long time someone dismissed as a loser but who senses within himself unrecognized power. He would remain one with the little people, among whom he had dwelt for so long. He would carry their hatred with him to the top of the world, and there he would launch war.

Sarah Palin comes with a slightly different myth. She is the princess, whom the aging king has chosen for his own and the nation’s rejuvenation. Her accomplishments, too, needn’t be scrutinized. As with Bush, her hollowness improves her political function. Accomplishments aren’t essential to the myth. More relevant are her children, whom she held to herself last night like a cornered bank robber taking a series of human shields. She was living in a small village in a remote corner of the kingdom, and the great king saw her and brought her to the palace. There he put her on the throne, and as queen she rewarded the little people who had been good to her when she was among them and she punished her cruel step-mother and her wicked ex-brother-in-law.

The appeal of Sarah Palin isn’t merely reactionary. It’s feudal. She was sour last night because feudalism, beneath the fairy-tale sugar coating, is sour. The mafia is the modern survival of it. It is about putting personal loyalties over principle and about rewarding that loyalty with spoils, seized from the weak. Palin’s Alaskan past suggests that if she were to become president, the betrayal of the public interest to private profit and personal vendetta, brought so far by George W. Bush, would go even farther.

UPDATE, 12:30pm: The Obama campaign has itemized some of the many lies in Sarah Palin’s speech accepting the vice presidential nomination. No one will be surprised to read that Obama has serious legislative achievments under his belt, or that Palin loves to raise taxes. Elements new to me: In addition to firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan without cause, Palin improperly hired one of her fundraisers, Tom Lamal, to a state job. And there are actually two bridges to nowhere, and Palin still supports one of them.