Sunday, January 4, 2015

Cheap shots and funky eggs


An amputation: the Tweets below were posted Saturday afternoon, mine as a reply to D'Souza's. D'Souza then deleted his and re-sent it, response-free. I felt it was a shame to leave it in that mutilated form, so here it is, restored:

Millionaires' Roe
a poem
by Sarah Palin
Aren’t you the same anti-beef
screamers blogging hate from
your comfy leather office
chairs, wrapped in your
fashionable leather belts above
your kickin’ new leather pumps
you bought because your celebrity idols
(who sport fur and crocodile purses)
grinned in a tabloid wearing the exact
same Louboutins exiting sleek
cowhide covered limo seats
on their way to some liberal
fundraiser shindig at some

sushi bar that features poor
dead smelly roe (that I used
to strip from our Bristol Bay-
caught fish, and in a Dillingham
cannery I packed those castoff fish
eggs for you while laughing with
co-workers about the suckers paying
absurdly high prices to party with the
throw away parts of our wild seafood)?

I believe you call those discarded
funky eggs “caviar”.
Palin, June 2013. Jury still out on whether the snakeskin pumps are Louboutin or Valentino. Image and fashion analysis via Wenn.
In this piece, ex-governor Palin—never one to let lying dogs sleep, if you know what I mean—is addressing critics of a recent Facebook post who thought it was wrong that she should have taken a picture of her young son using a dog as a stepstool instead of pulling the kid off of the poor thing.

The poem has been widely treated as an attack on the animal rights group PETA, but I think it is better understood as a plea for reconciliation: Look, the poet seems to be saying, my people jump on dogs, yours refuse to eat beef, but can't we all enjoy leather together? (Probably not: I believe PETA takes a rather negative attitude to the wearing of animal skins; she may have somehow confused them with urban Hindus of the present day, who may permit themselves to use leather shoes, belts, and wallets, though they would avoid them in temples.)

Aurora Limousines of Wasilla, Alaska, via BitchenWedding.com. Not revealed whether this is the company that transported the Palin family to their famed Bristolnacht adventure of last October.
Dwelling on an erotically charged list of leather things she loves, from the kinky (belts in which one can be "wrapped") to the kickin' (fur-and-crocodile accessories) brings her thoughts to celebrities, idols, some stepping out of their limos in their elegant shoes to kick some Wasilla ass, others to raise funds for liberal causes. And since the typical venue for a liberal fundraiser is the sushi bar—for causes such as Haiti, or the American Heart Association, Japanese disaster relief, or California Assemblymen like Brian Maienschein (R-San Diego) and Curt Hagman (R-Chino Hills, now term-limited out) or the Boulder Republican Women or—yeah, Obama went to one too, in Milwaukee—what was I saying?

She laughs at the irony of how she, the biggest celebrity idol of all, once toiled literally for weeks between beauty contests as a cannery slimer (as did Hillary Clinton, in Valdez one summer when she was in college, until she got fired for protesting abusive work conditions, definitely not something I can see Palin doing identified as she always is with the entrepreneurial "makers" against the layabout "takers"), helping to pack the salmon roe that tops Assemblyman Maienschein's ikuramaki; poor as she was, and even though she was being paid (terrible wages) to collect it, she thought of it as "smelly" or "funky" stuff that ought to be thrown away, and now she dwells among people who seem extravagant but use every part of the fish, and the cow too. And works for terrific pay as a slimer of words.

No pictures of Palin eating caviar, but here she is with class-struggle comrade Donald Trump consuming pizza with effeminate forks.
PS: It turns out that the labrador back is able to withstand the weight of a small kid, according to sources such as John Hinderaker (popularly known as "Assrocket") and corroborated by Modern Dog, though the owners should probably be careful not to overdo it, especially in warm or humid weather, because labs are especially susceptible to Exercise Induced Collapse (EIC), and they'll let children really hurt them without acknowledging they're in pain, because that's what kind of dog they are. Anyhow the rest of the world stands corrected. Also turns out, from the same source (plus Tengrain), that the dog's name is "Jill Hadassah", apparently to suggest in that sweet Palin way that the wives of Democratic vice presidents or vice presidential candidates are bitches, though I don't have any idea why she should think or want to say so.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, unbeknownst to me, published a verse arrangement of the Palin post hours before I did, but without a title or high-class literary commentary or illustrations. Also mine is more artistic. Just saying.

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