THE PLANK NOVEMBER 16, 2009
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Well, it wasn’t exactly must-see TV--which was probably good news for both of the women involved as they work to rebuild (a public image in one case, ratings in the other). There was no Tom Cruise-esque couch-jumping moment. No one wept or cursed or called anyone an ignorant slut. Both gals were unfailingly polite. Oprah was gentle with her poking and prodding. Palin neither embarrassed herself nor went after Oprah with a Bowie Knife, exceeding the extremely low expectations that only somewhat justifiably plague her.
Overall, I thought the in-studio bits weren’t particularly compelling. Palin seemed way too amped up, almost manic in her perkiness, and not terribly at ease, especially when compared to the low-key, soothing tones of Earth Mother Oprah.
For those who don’t obsessively follow politics (presumably the bulk of Oprah’s audience), Palin offered up a few new tidbits about her disappointment with the McCain campaign and her ongoing tabloid-rific spat with her grandbaby’s daddy, Levi (and his “aspiring porn,” as she calls his recent Playgirl shoot). She also voiced her annoyance over the double standards to which both she and her family were subjected during the election (that mean old Katie Couric wasn’t nearly so tough on Joe Biden), though none of that will be new to anyone who’s heard Palin open her mouth in the past year. She handled some questions better than others, and at no time did I feel we were seeing beneath the surface of Sarah Palin, Conservative Icon and Self-Styled Rogue. But it was a straightforward, safe, perfectly respectable interview.
Far better were the photos and taped bits with Sarah and the Palin clan at home in Wasilla celebrating Halloween. We saw Sarah snuggling with baby Trig, then handing him off to the ever-supportive Todd so she and Piper could dash out into the cold to go work out. (“Sweat is my sanity!” she told Oprah.) We saw Trig wobbling around the house in his chicken costume--an image so heart-warming it made the audience go “awwwww.” We saw Sarah and Piper making caramel apples and, later, trick-or-treating. In perhaps her most winning bit, Palin talked about how she had promised Piper this year that she would stay in the car so she wouldn’t cramp her daughter’s style--a complaint with which parents are all too familiar. The photo of Trig asleep on Sarah’s chest as she checked her Blackberry with one hand seemed a little odd and could cut either way: overworked, relatable, multi-tasking mom or distracted, career-obsessed negligent parent. But, in general, if Palin made up any real ground with women voters, it was likely in this portion of the show.
All things considered, the sit-down should prove a plus for Palin. That said, it did raise a few questions about the long-term prospects for her reinvention tour. This is clearly a woman who has neither forgotten nor forgiven the many injuries she feels were unfairly visited on her last year by the media, the Democrats, the McCain campaign, and other “haters.” It’s possible she realizes that she made some significant mistakes, but that realization is clearly buried under a massive glacier of resentment and irritation at others. Asked point blank by Oprah if, when she got the call from the McCain campaign, she had even a moment of wondering whether she was ready for the job of vice president, Palin stuck with the “I didn’t blink” assertion and reminded us of all her executive experience. The only failure or naivety Palin remains willing to acknowledge is that she didn’t realize the perfidy or self-interestedness of those around her. Palin is charming and charismatic enough that this wasn’t a big problem for the length of an unexceptional Oprah interview. But it promises to make any future political runs verrrrry interesting.
13 comments
"Well, it wasn’t exactly must-see TV..." Hate to break it to you, but there is no such thing.
- williamyard
November 16, 2009 at 6:56pm
Sounds delightful.
- WandreyCer
November 16, 2009 at 8:14pm
Bill, my old friend, I must dissent. But then I may be rationalizing my addiction to it, and to being in the prone position with nothing to do but letting the waves of whatever it is that's amusing me to death wash over me as I figure out big words to describe the small things I see. But one point of pride: i have never watched Oprah in my life!
- basman
November 17, 2009 at 9:33am
Must-See TV Now Enforced By Law.
- ratnerstar
November 17, 2009 at 10:09am
...Must-See TV Now Enforced By Law.... I keep going back to The Wire. Lesser of course, but I would include Curb Your Enthusiam. And two network sit coms: ....Old Christine: Julia Louis-Dreyfus (what a monicker) is funny in an acute, self deprecating way and is a foil for herself; and, almost there, The Big Bang. What can I tell you: I define the middle in midddle brow.
- basman
November 17, 2009 at 11:21am
I don't get Opal down here in Mexico so I can't really comment, but as far as must see TV, there is a locally produced show coming out of a village in Chiapas, sort of a reality/fantasy/acid trip/cooking show that I never miss. One dish I prepared from it, afterwards I shat lotus blossoms.
- blackton
November 17, 2009 at 12:03pm
...One dish I prepared from it, afterwards I shat lotus blossoms.... You gotta' time when I am going to read your posts better. The honest emes, I'm just going out to have lunch, you lunch destroyer you.
- basman
November 17, 2009 at 12:58pm
Addiction is the right word, Mr. b. There's good cocaine and bad cocaine. The good stuff, all sparkly and pure, goes down--er, up--with a zest few can experience otherwise. The bad stuff--sticky and beige, with that vaguely nauseating pharyngeal fume, still gets the job done--sorta. I've never seen "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or "The Wire" or "Mad Men" or any of the "Survivor" franchise or "Dancing With The Stars." And on and on. Not that my life is any more joyful or productive or meaningful as a result. But as any recovering druggie worth his 10-year CA chip will hypothesize, life isn't about joy or productivity or meaning. It's about truth, and the search for same. And some things keep us in a state of myth--i.e., they allow us to escape who we are and what is around us that those with open eyes and ears and hearts can see and hear and feel. And no wonder we avoid the truth; it's a blinding light and a deafening sound and a near-myocardial infarction, that truth: the sheer ugliness of it, the banality, the injustice, its firmament in the human ego, and finally the culpability that we all share--maybe not equally, but just because the other guy's covered in the blood of innocents doesn't mean a few drops haven't landed on me. TV does its nefarious thing by fucking with our critical thinking. It streams information at us with no time for contemplation, no context, no avenue of response. Streaming media like TV and film are the antithesis of sound rhetorical inquiry, the breeding ground for the junk diet of logical fallacies that feed our culture and politics. Nor is religion immune: Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad would all have their own talk shows; I hold out hope that Socrates would reject the deal. I'm far from immune. My liver can't handle booze, my brain can't handle coke, and my mind can't handle myth. So these days I try to stay out of their way. My problem is, though, that I can't handle the truth any better than I can handle the myth. And half the time I can't tell them apart. I used to be so amused at Napoleon in rags and the language that he used. Go to him now, he calls me, I can't refuse; when I got nothin' (and I don't, and deep down I know it), I got nothin' to lose...
- williamyard
November 17, 2009 at 1:03pm
Bill, I’d gladly be addicted to anything you write, even your list of gets from Ralphs. I’m not sure what life’s about, be it truth or otherwise. As I get older, sad to say I cannot reverse that, I get more prosaic: a bit of joy here; obliging duty there; ensuring the shit is daily, regular and firm; loving my family and my friends; and winning when I can but not worrying so much about it anymore. Maybe that’s truth and maybe that conception of it—what is true for any of us as we see it— offers some resolution here. I got into an argument with some guys, friendly enough to be sure, not so long ago over precisely this: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 50 and the poem that fronts those lines. I contrasted them and it with this by Wallace Stevens: I Clear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The light In the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow At the end of winter when afternoons return. Pink and white carnations---one desires So much more than that. The day itself Is simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round, With nothing more than the carnations there. II Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents. III There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. Which lead me to make public for the first and only time the only poem I ever wrote that I thought was worth a fraction of a damn. To wit: On Keats’s Urn Keats spoke of "slow Time", foster-father of a Grecian Urn, of frozen sculpted reliefs, of Dionysian ecstasies, of inflamed lovers in flight and in pursuit, of a pastoral piper playing his pipes under Spring’s foliage, wind blown silently on wind, pattern of wood on marble, and of the quiet celebration of communal pieties— the urn shaping hot longings into attitudes of grace, freezing grace into marble immobility, for Keats a "Cold Pastoral", the stasis of boiling blood. Why "foster-child of Silence and slow Time"? Is it that in Keats’s art, immaculate, cold as marble, conception is but a longing, no, rather, the image of a longing, a song ears never hear, all still, all passion arrested, still and "unravished", cold marble a bridal bed? Keats, his mind fevered, his blood boiling, his longing deathward, found comfort in cold form, balm for riddled life, in soothing sentences on beauty and on truth, consoling compress for his hot heart. "slow Time", we must know, is no answer as Keats so hotly urged. With "Panting pursuit", "parched tongue", and "men and maidens overwrought", he gave the lie to his own notions, like Shakespeare’s Shylock, cracking the icy marble of Venice’s frozen romance, with wounds and bleeding and salt on wound and pain, exotic force, insisting on his bond, invoking old bible rectitude, cracking the icy lies --("Thou torturest me, Tubal: it was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.")-- with his raging gracelessness, more than known on earth and more than can be known. Which sorta’ goes back to your post’s second paragraph as I read it and to the tension between stasis and passion.
- basman
November 17, 2009 at 3:45pm
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SCAM II
Palin is a liar, driven to histrionics and bitter about a past that brought more good fortune than she could have hoped for in early '08. This week or so of interviews only demands she doesn't flub a question that a teenager could handle and that will be enough to anoint her #1 in 2012. But she'll earn millions if she stopped the roll out tomorrow so don't be surprised if she follows the scent of money and quits this early. Since she's the GOP's nightmare, give her a network, a magazine and a brand of perfume. And I hope she is as kind to her future advisers as she has been to the McCain Team. At least her next batch of victims won't be able to claim they didn't read the book. -- michael
November 17, 2009 at 5:05pm
I've never understood how such a thoughtful, well-written magazine like TNR can have such an awful message board. I was coming to accept this as just another of life's mysteries, but here I must protest: how can a post on Sarah Palin turn so quickly into a lengthy, incoherent screed against television that condemns all of television and film using cocaine analogies and phrases like "vaguely nauseating pharyngeal fume"? Perhaps the time spent cooking up such gibberish might have been better used to actually experience something like "The Wire" to see that not only does it not scramble the faculties of its viewers (or whatever), it actually provides a deep and meaningful artistic experience. And Sarah Palin totally sucks.
- KillerB
November 17, 2009 at 6:19pm
basman - "...the only poem I ever wrote that I thought was worth a fraction of a damn"? Fraction of a damn? Methinks you're much too modest!
- malahat
November 17, 2009 at 6:42pm
Thanks my brother in da' blues.
- basman
November 17, 2009 at 11:14pm