Miscellany

I post this image in response to a comment by Frances Madeson on this previous post. This haunting image of a manacled person with schizophrenia in Beni, Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) entered into this story.

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If you don't read BDR's blog, BLCKDGRD, every day, you're missing something, whether it's politics, local news and sports, literature, music, poetry, or out-and-out or merely-tongue-in-cheek curmudgeonry. He misses little. For example, in this post, he refers to my previous post about Congo and Nicholas Kristof's important op-ed piece in Sunday's New York Times in the same sentence. The more attention brought to this seeming intractable humanitarian crisis the better.

BDR's clearly paying attention and has proven himself a true blegfriend over and over again. Frankly, I don't see how he finds the time to do what he does without getting paid.

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Over the weekend, there was a little get-together of about 600 people in Nashville, Tenn. You may have heard about it; they called themselves a tea party. Personally, I'm not sure why such a minuscule gathering garnered so much press and publicity and commentary in the media and around the blogosphere. You'd've thought it was a million-man march or a multi-city, multi-million person protest against the plan to invade Iraq (which didn't get anywhere near as much press). Even though I watched it on C-Span, I was planning to ignore Sarah Palin's closing keynote address. It was shallow. It lacked any sort of logic or reasoning. It was all ATTITUDE. But here's the thing: Andrew Sullivan, a former conservative Republican, heard the same speech and, as his ear is experientially attuned to the dog-whistles of the right wing, came away with a very different appreciation here and here. As he says, it was pure sophistry (something I wrote about recently here in my two "Feck" posts). Yet:

It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity - utterly fraudulent, of course - that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs - except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.

Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war.

I cannot vouch for his conclusion, but it does give me pause.

Palin For President! Seriously.

Now, this is one Palin and one election I can endorse heartily: "As a long-distance traveller, [Michael] Palin has paid his dues, which is a fortunate position to be in for the prestigious role he has just taken up, as president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Python man is now the nation's [i.e., Great Britain's] First Geographer." Palin's brief is to try to bring some excitement back to the study of geography: "For some reason, geography is not seen as a popular subject in school. It's seen as very unglamorous. Yet when I was at school, I can remember geography offering me the chance to get out and go on field trips and go on walks, and I loved maps, I loved atlases, I loved learning about other countries and places where things were different from our own – and that's all covered by geography." (h/t)