It’s a familiar story: decent person pursues his dreams but somehow gets lost along the way, achieving success and recognition but becoming, ironically and usually late in the second act, unrecognizable to himself. (Q.v. Batman, Wayne’s World.) The postindustrial, now postfinancial American economy has a way of rewarding people, not products, but the old laws of supply and demand still apply. To paraphrase Voltaire, if Sarah Palin did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent her. This Friday, Combat! blog presents links to people who gave us a little of what they were and, finding us willing, produced more and more of it until it became the totality of their being. It’s the chip in the windshield that becomes a crack, the bump off a housekey that becomes a three-day bender, the simultaneous belch and sneeze that causes you to vomit on your computer.* It’s the self out of control, which just might be relevant to our impending holiday weekend. Sit back, crack a beer, tell yourself it’s the only one you’re going to drink today, and join us for an unusually coherent link roundup—whatever we may become.

First, our national culpability comes uncomfortably close to home: Steven Schier at the Atlantic points out that, while the rest of us lay in rapturous conjecture at Rand Paul, the Senate passed financial reform. “Now, ask yourself this question,” Schier writes. “Which event is more likely to make a large difference in your life—federal financial reform or Rand Paul’s opinions?” In a piece that is perhaps to brief for its own purposes, Schier acknowledges that Paul’s crazy statements are easier to write about than financial services laws, but he ascribes the broader phenomenon of our misdirected attention to the proliferation of ideologues in contemporary politics.

Say it three times and she appears. Timothy Egan provides what is perhaps the most succinct dissection yet of the Sarah Palin brand, and the degree to which she has sold out what few principles she had in the interest of more exposure, more money, presumably more red dresses. In addition to coining the excellent euphemism “demi-governor,” Egan provides a handy list of some of the absurd candidates Palin endorsed in recent Republican primaries. Consider Vaughn Ward, who apparently believed Puerto Rico was a foreign country and then, when corrected, said, “I don’t care what you call it.” He’s also fiercely opposed to government intervention in the private sector, although his wife works for Fannie Mae. The other, similar candidates in Egan’s column make it read like an erudite high school student’s theme on hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, on an internet Steven Schier says is dominated by quick and easy controversy, Slate is doing an eight-part series on the mutability of memory. Unfortunately, they’re letting William Saletan write it, so it A) promises more than it delivers and B) keeps delaying delivery to remind you how awesome it’s going to be when it gets there. On the plus side, the series focuses on the work of Elizabeth Loftus, whose demonstrations of the ease with which false memories can be fostered has challenged the use of eyewitness testimony in murder cases and the 90’s boom in so-called repressed memory therapy. On the minus side, there’s stuff like this: “Loftus suspected the same phenomenon was creating incest memories more broadly. But how could she expose it? In her book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, she described her next thought.” I cannot overemphasize the importance, in narrative prose, of managing the scale and linearity of time.

Once you get going, though, it’s hard to keep everything in mind. Consider the strangely tragic case of Joe Mathlete, whose blog post about his thoughts on the new Marmaduke movie becomes a riveting, 3000-word refutation of pretty much his entire professional life thus far. Mathlete (not his real name) is the creator of Marmaduke Explained, a genius idea that A) he started as a lark, B) made him relatively famous and successful, and C) he seems to kind of hate now. He describes the phenomenon of wishing that United Features Syndicate would send him a cease-and-desist, and the eventual suspicion that they hadn’t in order to spite him. ” I especially hated how much I hated all this, and how I couldn’t really vent about this to anyone,” he writes at one point, “because, shit, some people have REAL problems, and think about how many opportunities I’ve had because of Marmaduke Explained. So stop whining, Marmaduke Guy.” If ever there were a cleaner articulation of the despair inherent in the human condition, it was probably in French.

There’s only one cure for existential despair, and it is dancing. As with my nine-months-late excitement over “Single Ladies,” I suspect that this video is old to everyone else, but I saw it yesterday and I love it. It’s from an album called The ArchAndroid, which sounds like a parody of hip hop concept albums. I learned my lesson about those from Prince Paul, but still, I can’t stop listening to this song. Try to do the tightrope dance and damage your knees.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xktMnfb0Q0A

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