Sara(h) Smiles, Part 9: Your Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You

Canvassing in my little town on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2002 again today, I was struck by how many of my neighbors liked the idea of recruiting Iraq president Jalal Talabani as Sarah’s presumptive running mate, this in the wake of his having declined to sign the execution order for Tariq Aziz, convicted last month of persecuting Shi’ites not liked by his boss, the late Saddam Hussein. Many folks expressed that they were pleased about this because Aziz was the highest-ranking Christian in Saddam’s inner circle, and perhaps the Middle East’s pre-eminent Episcopalian.

When I interviewed him for Conspicuous Consumption magazine in 1994, I found Aziz to be very much more charming than his frequent rants on the evening news about the West’s being a moral cesspool had led me to expect. He proved to be solicitous and courtly, in fact, an implacable kisser of women’s hands and holder-open of doors for them, twinkle-eyed and wry. And once he had a couple of glasses of gjw, a sort of Iraqi sake, down his throat, he turned into an utterly irresistible raconteur; I wish I were able to relate to you his hilarious story about Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he dated briefly in the 1980s, but after being a major film star for so long, she can easily afford to hire lawyers.

Naturally, not all my neighbors were inclined to let Terry — as Aziz invited me and other Western friends to call him — off the hook, especially when it meant that little videos of his hanging wouldn’t proliferate on the Internet, as had those of Saddam’s. One retired John Deere mechanic over on Offal Street summed up the feelings of many when he said, “The fact that the guy’s a Christian doesn’t mean he didn’t do whatever it was he was convicting of having done, gassing Kurds or whatever.”

Those who didn’t want to talk about Terry all seemed to want to talk about Willow Palin’s having told one antagonist on Facebook on Tuesday, “Your effin fat as hell. Stfu,” and another, “Your such a faggot.” Many were outraged that the lamestream media had been making such a big deal of the middle Palin daughter having, metaphorically, extended her middle finger in defense of her mom’s and big sister’s television programs, Sarah Palin’s Iowa in the one case, and Dancing With Unwed Mothers in Bristol's. “When your in that situation,” one of my neighbors wondered, rather eloquently, I thought, “What are you supposed to do, just lay down on your stomach and let them cornhole you?”

Others were delighted with the introduction of the heretofore seldom-seen STFU, which they’ve been delighted to welcome to their existing arsenals of acronyms, which in most cases already comprise ROFL, LMAO, the rather earthier LMFAO, WTF, and OMG.

But of course there were a couple of elitists who described themselves as “dismayed” (a word as popular with Obama socialists as eschew and palpable) by Willow’s allegedly appalling grammar. To them I say get a life. For the average person who hasn’t been to Yale or Harvard or one of those, your is perfectly fine in all contexts, readily understood — and isn’t that the whole point? — by all.

As for the faggot business, it’s just like the lamestream press to assume the worst when it comes to the Palins. In the United Kingdom, a faggot is either a cigarette or a smaller, weaker fellow pupil whom you feel morally compelled to tyrannize (actually, tyrannise) until he attempts unsuccessfully to hang himself with his school tie, which failure serves only to fan the flames of your and other pupils’ sadism. Knowledge of other cultures is not known to be a hallmark of the Palin household, so we can probably infer that Willow was using it in the more familiar former sense. If this is true, and wholesome young people are now calling one another cigarettes derisively, shouldn’t Big Government, which has for so long been so eager to crush the American tobacco farmer under the jackboot of oppression, be happy, rather than indignant?

I worry about Sarah asking Jalal Talabani to be her running mate. I worry that a lot of people might think she was trying to install the Taliban as vice president, and your all wet, in my view, if you anticipate many Americans being comfortable with that idea.