Fink or Palin?

I read the following by chance this morning and it settled with me into thoughts I have had boiled up like nuisance boils in my attempt to understand the popular interest in Sarah Palin. How does a mindless twit-fart get to such a place of prominence in our national political discourse?

Mike Fink, “He was in fact a Mississippi river-god, one of those minor deities whom men create in their own image and magnify to magnify themselves.” Constance Rourke, American Humor, a Study of the National Character, 1931.

Sarah Palin to me looks like a celebrity fabrication very much along the lines to fulfill the sort of need that Mink Fink, and the mythical over-the-top American legend that folk culture of pulp celebrity has long cultivated if it be Davy Crocket or Paul Bunyan or Wild Bill Hickok or Howdy Doody.

Those wilderness dudes now have female attributes. Go figure.

For me Palin is a more than real person – a mama Klondike moose shooter rough talker that regurgitates the smarmy way my grandmother talked about my grandfather’s toilet errors and she can see Russia like no other bodacious babe since Russ Meyer -- that in many ways epitomizes someone that I would never want to have visit at my humble abode and, if she got past the front gate and the dog did not bite her in the rump cheeks, to stay over.

But she is something and she is noisy and she is still making a stir, if not a last gasp and it occurs to me today that she is magnified to magnify the self-image of her clambered sycophants. It is truly awesome.