The sad state of Republican glamour

First it was Nancy Reagan, all '80s lacquered hair and makeup and that Wilma Flintstone, lop-sided, off-the-shoulder gown held in place by a boulder-sized choker. Sort of a Pasadena-meets-Bedrock version of Dynasty for the dowager empress set.

Then, after many, many years in the cosmetics-and-conditioner wilderness--Barbara Bush, Marilyn Quayle, Laura Bush, to name but three--it was Ann Coulter of all people, the Jenna Jameson of the Punditocracy, that caught the discerning, right-wing, horndog's attention. All bleached-blond hair, anorexic-ravaged body, perma-tanned countenance, and overly pneumatic "tires" as it were. I know she makes me feel tired just looking at them.

I mean, her.

But then . . . I don't know what happened. Maybe the craziness of Ann Coulter--the looks of a fast-deflating blow-up doll with the high-pitched screech to match--overstayed its welcome and the Bowtie-and-Viagra set started frothing at the mouth for a different kind of gal. No more of those one-night-stand-and-a-boiled-rabbit-in-the-morning babes like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Instead, we'll have the sloe-eyed and pouty-lipped comforts-of-home honey that is Miss Anne Archer!

So along came the hockey mom and the pit bull combined--ladies and germs, I present to you, the Guns-and-Ammo Playmate of the Year for 1985, Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin and Tall, as it were. More like Sarah Plain and Small. Caribou Barbie (wish I'd thought of that first). The WASP version of Evita Peron, at least if the photo (thank you, Wikipedia) of her waving to the descamisados at the Republican National Convention can offer any insights into her Miss Half-Baked Alaska persona.

It has been challenging for me to fathom the appeal of Sarah Palin. Oh, I get how that tough-talking, gun-toting, Jesus-loving mother/political barracuda plays in Heartland and Hearth. (Sort of.) She's just like us! Except that her opinions are better-defined than ours! Let's follow her!

It's a wasp-waisted George "Dubya" Bush in a pencil skirt, folks. In fact, it's highly reminiscent of the I-could-have-a-beer-with-that-politician mindset, just with a gender twist, brought up-to-date with beauty queen hair and a flattering choice of discount eyewear from LensCrafters. The same mindset that led a significant segment of the population (aka, Joe Six-Pack, as Sarah likes to call them, in her patronizing, homespun way) to think that they would far rather have a beer with Dubya than, say, Al Gore or John Kerry. And realizing what a good drinking buddy Dubya would make, it stands to reason that he would also make an excellent president.

It's hard to fault that sort of logic, of course, but, hey, that reasoning didn't turn out so good, now did it?

As the saying goes, most poor souls are just dying to be told what to do, and I guess Sarah Palin is as good (relatively speaking) a person (relatively speaking) to do just that. She is, if nothing else, more palatable personality-wise (relatively speaking) than Dick Cheney, for example, or even the now soul-deadened, right-wing marionette that has overtaken John McCain's cerebral cortex and voice box. You can only go but up from there, I guess, especially if you like your strychnine candy-coated.

I've never been one, though, who enjoys being told what to do and, in fact, when done so, I often have chosen to do the exact opposite. One too many entreaties to buy a "sensible car" impelled me to buy a Mini Cooper this summer. One too many admonishments to "get with the times" makes me hang onto my vinyl disco collection. One too many recommendations to settle down, buy a house, and get a boyfriend still finds me mortgage-free and unencumbered. It's just my nature to be different, to samba to the percussive tonic of my own drummer, and I think it's served me rather well over the years.

So I question authority and conventional wisdom at all times. It may have taken me ages to invest in an iPod, it may have made me wary of jumping on the Obama bandwagon early on, but I think I'm happier, safer, and saner for it.

Nonetheless, I don't think I'll ever come around to getting Sarah Palin. I simply don't understand the fuss, at least on a deep level (assuming there is one), and I certainly don't fathom her alleged sex appeal.

Granted, I don't butter my toast on the side of the bread that rises up for Sarah Palin. We know this already--and besides I'd prefer a nice imported marmalade, if truth be told. But doing my utmost to be objective, I simply can't comprehend her alleged va-va-va-voominess, the thing that for a while there seemed to bring grown reporters and pundits to their knees--or at least prevented them from standing up from behind their desks while on camera.

These guys keep acting like Sarah Palin is Veronica when she is really more Betty. No, wait. Betty had some good sense and a serviceable wardrobe. Rather, Sarah's got Betty's looks but Veronica's steely determination to sucker Archie into going steady, whether she's expecting his baby or not. Or maybe it's that to them, Sarah is Barbie, when she is so obviously Skipper. Or, worse, Midge. (Cindy McClain is clearly Barbie. All plastic with no moving parts. Duh.)

It was all going quite out of control there for a while, and, thankfully, a few too many deer-in-headlights answers about geopolitics and the inability to name one major newspaper or magazine has allowed heads to cool, reporters to stand, and realities to be pondered.

Still, I knew we'd hit a new low in American culture when mainstream media outlets starting discussing Sarah Palin's "MILF" factor.

For those of you who don't know, MILF is an acronym made popular by that other pinnacle of contemporary culture, American Pie. That's right, folks, a movie that made famous the salving of a youthful male's sexual yearnings through intercourse with an apple crumble is giving us new ways to think about government and politics. And MILF stands for (brace yourself, gentle readers) a "Mother I'd Like to Fuck."

Charming, no? A mother one would like to fuck. But then, if she's a mother you'd like to fuck, wouldn't that make you a mother fucker?

A MILF. I don't think even at my most unbridled and horndoggiest I could ever imagine saying that to another human being--even if I were a heterosexual teen with raging hormones, Stacy's mom has got it going on and all that. Every now and again I see an attractive father out with his kids and I think to myself, hmmm, I wish you were my Daddy. But I don't mean that in a literal, parent-child way, of course, just a lascivious one. (Which I guess would make me interested in, appropriately enough, some FILF.) Nonetheless, I'm certainly not walking up to one of his kids to share that information.

However, our pundits and reporters are secure in themselves enough to share this feeling with us. We are indeed blessed!

Yet I guess the situation with Sarah is not much worse than when early on in this interminable presidential race the Pundi-tards tried to make a shirtless, frolicking-on-the-beach Barack Obama an International Male catalog pin-up. And I'm still haunted by that postcard during the 1990s of the heads of Bill Clinton and Al Gore photoshopped onto buff, surfer bods, hugging each other, and smiling brightly for the cameras, as if that tag team was about to usher in a new era of gay love--at least right before Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act.

Which begs the question, at least for me--do countries that have parliaments or dictatorships have to go through this much psycho-sexual meshugas to elect a new leader?

Is anyone north of the border working up a sweat over a photo of a tight-jeans-and-plunging-neckline-down-to-there Stephen Harper?

Did heterosexual Cambodian women and homosexual Cambodian men dream of a page 3 layout in the Phnom Penh Daily News of a six-pack-abs-bedazzled Pol Pot?

Did British men in the 1980s fantasize about a hyper-shellacked centerfold of Maggie Thatcher?

Does anyone really want to see Venezuelan bully boy Hugo Chavez posing in a cowboy hat, fringed vest, and buttless chaps? Or German prime minister Angela Merkel in full dominatrix gear?

Or is this all too much of a Maxim-um overload to consider?

Somehow I can't imagine any of this political porno happening anywhere but in our own little fair-to-middlin' republic. The land of the freak, the home of the bored, with libertines and cheap thrills for all. Oh man.

I figure it must all come down to dissipation and decadence. At least that's the only way I can explain to myself the appeal of Sarah Palin. That or there's just so much Viagra in the water supply these days that most of the country's gone blind.

Not to mention deaf. As well as just plain dumb.

Where the rubber meets the road

These days, I don't think that I'm that easily shocked, at least not by matters sexual and sensual. One doesn't get to be almost 47 without some of the shine being rubbed off the ol' doorknocker, as it were.

Nonetheless, one thing that never ceases to give me pause--and bring a little color to my whiter-than-white cheek--is finding a used condom left unfurled on the sidewalk where anyone (and, per usual, yours truly) can stumble upon it in broad daylight.

Oh, I don't mean to go all family values on your medieval self, this being an election year and all. Still, I was surprised to discover not one but two used rubbers in flagrante near my office building today.

Granted, I don't work in Shadyside or Squirrel Hill or "dahntahn" even. It's not a neighborhood nearly as nice as other places in Pittsburgh, chiefly being a "pre-loft conversion" warehouse district stuck smack in the middle of some ol' robber-baron (rubber-baron?) mansions--Henry Clay Frick's Claymore is just around the corner, for example--and what might be generously described by a Democrat as a disadvantaged area--and by a Republican as a slum/investment opportunity.

It's a little bleak, but I've seen worse, although apparently not lived worse, if I'm taken aback by a little lust's labor's lost.

Still, the prevalence of two tugs of fun, evidence of the quickie that dare not speak its name (but does at least plan ahead and wear protection), makes me think twice about staying too late at work on a moonless night. I'd hate to round a corner in a hurry, lest I get smacked in the face by a flying prophylactic. Worse, I'd hate to slide into home (as it were) on a farflung French letter--ribbed for your protection but perhaps not intended to provide safe traction on, uh, slippery surfaces.

Spending my time making good employ of some petroleum products of my own--gas for my car, for example, to drive myself to work--is seeming like a far more attractive proposition. And better for the environment. Mine, at least.

If only . . .

Fresh from today's entertainment headlines . . .

Jessica Simpson: Why I Almost Quit Singing

Sometimes even *I* won't kick a dog (too hard) when it's down. After all, with all that's wrong and venal in the word, Jessica Simpson's use of invaluable natural resources to fill whatever gaping need for attention she has in her soul seems a relatively minor offense, when compared to, oh say, anyone who might proudly and unironically attend the Republican National Convention this week.

Here's hoping Jessica does for country music what she did for Robbie Williams' "Angels."

Enter screaming.

No foreigners allowed

Well, so much for my vice presidential politicking and armchair dream-team quarterbacking. How could I forget that someone not born in the good ol' U.S. of A. cannot become president?

Article II of the U.S. Constitution states

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Thus, my choice for Obama's running mate, Madeleine Albright, is about as big a public goof-up as choosing a one-term governor with a slash-and-burn management style, who only seems in favor of two things: More babies and more drilling.

See, it really does all come down to the psychosexual, doesn't it?

I've always thought that that little constitutional stipulation of "no foreigners allowed" was provincial, xenophobic, and hypocritical in the extreme, especially for a country that prides itself on being a nation of immigrants. But whoever said Americans don't have a strong sense of irony just wasn't paying close enough attention.

So Madeleine Albright--born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1937 to Czech parents, who escaped to Switzerland, Serbia, England, and finally to Colorado (a Westerner after all!)--would not be an acceptable running mate for Obama or anyone else, due to constitutional restrictions.

But look on the bright side! Now no one can try to push Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme into the spotlight for the highest national office! Nor Pamela Anderson, William Shatner, Gerard Depardieu, Amy Winehouse, the girls from T.a.T.u., the former members of ABBA, Osama bin Laden, Charlize Theron, Charo, or Kim Jong-il.

Although I wouldn't count out the Republicans trying to change the Constitution to let one particular candidate sneak into the Oval Office. That Charo, she would be a formidable opponent, with more cuchi-cuchi than Sarah Palin could ever muster.