Close Readings: The Marriage Vow (2nd ed.)

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 5 Comments

Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, standing up for something or other

Last week, when Michele Bachmann and other, less amusing Republican presidential candidates visited Iowa, they were approached by local busybody Bob Vander Plaats and asked to sign something called The Marriage Vow. You may remember Vander Plaats from his infuriatingly successful campaign to recall Iowa Supreme Court justices who said gay marriage was constitutional, or from when he offered to fellate you in a highway rest stop, although that second one is technically libel. Anyway, Bachmann and man-on-dog guy signed the heck out of that pledge, taking the politically risky position that families, children, not cheating on your wife and church are all good. Plus, by deduction: homosexuality is bad. Oh, and also black people had it better under slavery, because more of them were married then.

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Close Readings: Sarah Palin’s view of expertise

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 5 Comments

"Are you going to stand there babbling about what carbon does, or are you going to get the first woman president a fuckin' Jamba Juice?"

There is much to enjoy, guiltfully, about this review of Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin, the tell-all book by former staffer Frank Bailey. Memoirs like his threaten to become an ugly micro-genre of an already ugly mini-genre, but there is something in the essential sameness of Sarah Palin Stories—the pride in ignorance, the deceptions of others en route to self, the different supporting characters in the same vexed orbit around our heroine—that suggests a form whose themes transcend detail. They’re like Sherlock Holmes stories. As Holmes was to Victorian London and solving crimes, so is Sarah Palin to suburban America and being a mindless church bitch. What I’m saying here is that I think here oeuvre is more than genre work. That’s good news for Close Readings, which received from Stubble yesterday this wonderful gift:

Remember: amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

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Close Readings: Beck on Palin on Loughner

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 2 Comments

The file cabinet interviews the cat.

Yesterday, on his radio show, Glenn Beck announced that he had conducted an email exchange with Sarah Palin regarding the public response to Jared Lee Loughner. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. “Sarah, as you know, peace is always the answer,” Beck said he wrote. “I know you are feeling the same heat, if not much more on this. I want you to know you have my full support.” One hopes, for Palin’s sake, that he is already lying at this point, and that she does not have to field creepy emails from Glenn Beck every Monday morning. Regardless, Beck claims that two things happened next. First, he recommended that Palin hire some bodyguards or something, “because an attempt on you could bring the Republic down.”* As Emily Post reminds us, you should always conclude any letter of support by speculating on what would happen if the person you’re writing to were assassinated. Second, the response he claims to have gotten from Palin is so baffling, so obstinate in its thwarting of sense, that it is the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Close Readings: Ginni Thomas on Anita Hill’s voicemail

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 4 Comments

In our rapture over Christine O’Donnell’s last throe of national-profile insanity, we missed the other transcendently awesome thing that happened Tuesday. At approximately 7:30am on October 9, Virginia Thomas—wife of Supreme Court justice and Coke drinker Clarence Thomas—left the following message on Anita Hill’s voicemail:

Good morning, Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. O.K., have a good day.

Anita Hill did not go on to have a good day. The former metonym for sexual harassment and current Brandeis professor sat on the message for a while before turning it over to Brandeis campus police and, eventually, the FBI. Seriously, Anita Hill: stop snitching. More importantly, Ginni Thomas: stop being a crazy person. Your voice message is so creepy and weasel-worded that you are subject of today’s Close Reading.

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Close Readings: The preamble to the Pledge to America

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 3 Comments

Seen here obscuring the face of the only woman involved

Last week, the Republican Party released the full text of its Pledge to America, a document that explains the GOP’s plan for fixing what’s wrong with this country—most of which rhymes with “the hawk’s pajamas,” if you get their meaning. The content of the Pledge is not exactly a thunderbolt. It advocates the same policies that Republicans have been pushing for the last two to 74 years, as well as certain politically unlikely plans, such as eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency, that qualify less as a promise than a threat. The Republican Party’s pledge to America is that they will lower taxes and deregulate industry, plus repeal health care. While the notion of an America in which each session of Congress devotes itself to undoing the legislation passed by the previous session is exciting, most the Pledge itself is unremarkable. What is remarkable is its introduction—500 words of hyperbolic nationalism that are the subject of today’s Close Reading.

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