“Hockey Mom” is still pulling great ratings, but I saw my first “I’m sick of” comment in the media pages today. Tomorrow, “HM” episodes will have been on the air 24/7 for two weeks, with almost no change in the dialogue. Sarah Palin says the same lines, over and over again. It’s worse than being forced to watch nothing but “Survivor” 24/7 for two weeks. Pretty soon, nothing helps. You could put lipstick on “Survivor” and it would still be “Survivor.”
That’s where we are. You could put lipstick on “Hockey Mom,” and it would still be “Hockey Mom.” The novelty is wearing off, as the novelty always does. If the show’s producers expect Sarah Palin to get John McCain elected, look for some re-invention soon. God help them if the audience starts calling for guest appearances from Joe Lieberman.
Wherever that goes, “Hockey Mom” has been responsible for a great spinoff, “Lipstick Season,” which may be topping the Nielsens long after the election. At last, the media has a reality show that means something. Millions of American women are coming onstage to talk about what it means to be a woman in a society where “Hockey Mom,” which portrays a woman as a marketing tool, can become a hit.
Millions of American men should be drawn to “Lipstick Season” too, but I’m only interested in one of them. Me. Karen has poured thousands of rounds of cannon fire into the television since “Hockey Mom” came on, and I find myself mystified. It is as if she is speaking a second language that I never heard before. I have fancied myself a hard worker where understanding women’s issues is concerned, but now I have to borrow a line from Olympia Dukakis: what I don’t know about women is a lot.
I think it is a matter of women finally having a double standard placed so everyone can see it, and placed there by a woman in the employ, of all agencies, the Republican Party, which women think wouldn’t know a double standard if one came up and bit it on the leg. It’s very convoluted, very hard to follow, totally new in my experience. Someone on morning television speaks of Palin’s right to privacy, and Karen fires back, the kitchen shaking with the thunder of the barrage. She is visibly incensed and combative, that same intensity I have sensed in the national air since Palin came on the scene.
I ask Karen to explain it to me, and she growls that the right to privacy is the bedrock principle of a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. I try to put it together, but I have always been weak with any thinking that involves inverted or over-under-around-through logic: if this is right, then that is wrong, which makes this other thing right. It takes the form of, well, how can Palin do this, when that is so, or not so?
It may be that Palin has pulled the pin on a gender grenade starting a war that women have been itching to fight, but couldn’t, because before, it was always a man pulling the pin. Is this a war that can only be fought with lipstick? Am I making any sense? I wish I knew, but I do know that I am feeling decidedly grateful in an over-under-around-through way to the GOP producers for “Hockey Mom” and the way it is setting the stage for “Lipstick Season.” I think it is going to be an epochal production.
September 11, 2008
September 09, 2008
The Willie circle
Jessie posted a terrific photo of Willie Nelson on her blog last week. She was given a ticket to go to his concert up in Humboldt County where she lives. She snapped the picture just as he was going onstage, and in the blog, she wrote that seeing Willie sing changed her life.
It closed a circle for me. I don’t think parents realize they have these things like circles closing with their kids to look forward to. The thing has to happen, the circle has to close, before you see it. Now that it has happened, I must say that it is the coolest thing. I now know, also, that, if I wanted to, I could probably look forward to other circles closing involving Jessie and me, but I don’t think I want to. It would be smug. Yick. For better or worse, as a father and grandfather I am not a doter.
This particular circle started its long journey on July 4, 1980. On that day, seeing Willie sing changed my life. It was, and remains, the longest day of my life. I apologize again to my companions that day, my ex-wife (Jessie’s mom) and a splendid couple, Lynne and Bill Schwind, from San Antonio, who came along because I told them it would be fun. Bill even drove, poor devil.
The occasion was Willie’s Eighth and Last Annual Fourth of July Picnic, celebrated at Bee Cave, Texas, southwest of Austin in the Hill Country. I went down there to write about it for my newspaper. I talked to Willie, and he did sing, but I don’t remember that very well. It’s an interesting thing about memory. The memory is created more by the rememberer than the thing remembered. Willie is the memory’s bookmark, but what I, the rememberer, remember, is heat and stench, or, as they say around Bee Cave, “steench.”
Scientists just last week announced some findings about the brain and memory which could help explain this. They found that memory of an event resides in the same brain cells, or neurons, that activated, or “fired,” most furiously when the event was actually experienced. It is as if the memory neurons are actually re-living the event. It is possible, therefore, that, remembering that event, my talking-to-Willie memory neurons aren’t firing as furiously as my heat and stench memory neurons. It means I am re-living the heat and stench more than I am re-living Willie. I am sad about that, but relieved that, given the furious-firing premise of these memory findings, that I can remember anything at all besides sex.
The heat neurons were fired by the famous Texas Heat Wave of 1980 – they made T-shirts about it – and the fact that it took us, and the other 30,000 patrons in attendance, four hours to go the 10 miles on a two-lane road from the main highway to Bee Cave, and then four hours to get back out. A human can’t love Willie any more than that. The stench neurons were fired – many of them fusing in apoplexy – by a telephone booth on the edge of the concert grounds into which I ducked to phone my story to the paper, to find a temperature of maybe 130 degrees and a steench left by some bad Texas boys and girls who as the beer flowed and the day went on couldn’t hold it any longer. It took many days and showers before I didn’t smell like that phone booth. Thinking about it, I can smell it right now. Hey guys, your findings are right! Damn, I need a shower.
It closed a circle for me. I don’t think parents realize they have these things like circles closing with their kids to look forward to. The thing has to happen, the circle has to close, before you see it. Now that it has happened, I must say that it is the coolest thing. I now know, also, that, if I wanted to, I could probably look forward to other circles closing involving Jessie and me, but I don’t think I want to. It would be smug. Yick. For better or worse, as a father and grandfather I am not a doter.
This particular circle started its long journey on July 4, 1980. On that day, seeing Willie sing changed my life. It was, and remains, the longest day of my life. I apologize again to my companions that day, my ex-wife (Jessie’s mom) and a splendid couple, Lynne and Bill Schwind, from San Antonio, who came along because I told them it would be fun. Bill even drove, poor devil.
The occasion was Willie’s Eighth and Last Annual Fourth of July Picnic, celebrated at Bee Cave, Texas, southwest of Austin in the Hill Country. I went down there to write about it for my newspaper. I talked to Willie, and he did sing, but I don’t remember that very well. It’s an interesting thing about memory. The memory is created more by the rememberer than the thing remembered. Willie is the memory’s bookmark, but what I, the rememberer, remember, is heat and stench, or, as they say around Bee Cave, “steench.”
Scientists just last week announced some findings about the brain and memory which could help explain this. They found that memory of an event resides in the same brain cells, or neurons, that activated, or “fired,” most furiously when the event was actually experienced. It is as if the memory neurons are actually re-living the event. It is possible, therefore, that, remembering that event, my talking-to-Willie memory neurons aren’t firing as furiously as my heat and stench memory neurons. It means I am re-living the heat and stench more than I am re-living Willie. I am sad about that, but relieved that, given the furious-firing premise of these memory findings, that I can remember anything at all besides sex.
The heat neurons were fired by the famous Texas Heat Wave of 1980 – they made T-shirts about it – and the fact that it took us, and the other 30,000 patrons in attendance, four hours to go the 10 miles on a two-lane road from the main highway to Bee Cave, and then four hours to get back out. A human can’t love Willie any more than that. The stench neurons were fired – many of them fusing in apoplexy – by a telephone booth on the edge of the concert grounds into which I ducked to phone my story to the paper, to find a temperature of maybe 130 degrees and a steench left by some bad Texas boys and girls who as the beer flowed and the day went on couldn’t hold it any longer. It took many days and showers before I didn’t smell like that phone booth. Thinking about it, I can smell it right now. Hey guys, your findings are right! Damn, I need a shower.
September 06, 2008
Pulling the plug on the First Amendment
In 35 years of newspapering and teaching, I developed a quiet amusement over the general public's almost total ignorance of how the news media does its job. Then, last year, I received the following email from a reader, one Stuart Jewell, complaining about media content: “It’s strange to me, that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”
His words struck not my newspaperman's heart, but my media educator's brain. I thought: "It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs."
Suddenly, and clearly, I understood that Stuart Jewell's problem was not ignorance. It was illiteracy. Media literacy is not a required subject in American schools, from kindergarten to university. Jewell had offered a judgment of a vital democratic institution without any sort of a knowledge baseline. With his focus, I expanded my ongoing research into the media-public relationship, and I found a gap, between the media and the public.
This gap has always been there but it really started to open in 1950s America. David Halberstam, in his comprehensive history, "The Fifties," noted it: "It was in the fifties that the nation became wired for television, a new medium experimented with by various politicians and social groups." Only 10 years later, "television had begun to alter the political and social fabric of the country, with stunning consequences."
It was a literacy gap. All the knowledge about the new medium resided with the experimenters, knowledge to which the general public had no real access. At the heart of the gap was a code, centuries old, but simple and easy to learn in college and university media degree programs. I teach it to 200 new students a year. It should be taught to everyone.
Never before have I seen that gap more apparent than in the Republican convention and the events surrounding it. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. In 21st-century America, if you are not a media professional, you are, like Stuart Jewell, essentially media-illiterate. In this illiteracy, Americans accuse the media of bias, irresponsibility, moral decay, Hannah Montana. And many of those accusations are true, because media professionals, in a media-illiterate world, know they can get away with it. The gap has become a wedge. The result is an American crisis, creating fear and mistrust, even loathing, of a media institution that is the life blood of democracy.
At the Republican convention were thousands of Stuart Jewells (with millions more watching) and a handful of media professionals, most notably a Republican strategist named Steve Schmidt. So notable was Schmidt's presence in the proceedings that he is the subject of a long profile in the Sunday, Sept. 7, New York Times. Using media tools, Schmidt manipulated public response that brought the audience, who had no idea why, to a frenzy. Democratic media professionals did the same thing last week at Denver, but in St. Paul, there was an ominous difference. Schmidt attacked the media, again and again, in ways that were not legitimate. He did not do this viciously; he did it as a professional using media tools to evoke a response.
If the public understood that, all would be well. But they didn't and don't. In their media illiteracy, Schmidt the media pro knew he could get away with it. And that is a huge part of the American crisis, going forward from this convention.
The public doesn't understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code that the professionals use, and thus are the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, Jeff Greenfield, now of CBS, laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."
Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close.
Steve Schmidt is trying, though. If he succeeds, he will have succeeded in pulling the plug from the First Amendment. Somebody needs to get him to talk about that. But for Sunday's New York Times profile, he declined to be interviewed.
His words struck not my newspaperman's heart, but my media educator's brain. I thought: "It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs."
Suddenly, and clearly, I understood that Stuart Jewell's problem was not ignorance. It was illiteracy. Media literacy is not a required subject in American schools, from kindergarten to university. Jewell had offered a judgment of a vital democratic institution without any sort of a knowledge baseline. With his focus, I expanded my ongoing research into the media-public relationship, and I found a gap, between the media and the public.
This gap has always been there but it really started to open in 1950s America. David Halberstam, in his comprehensive history, "The Fifties," noted it: "It was in the fifties that the nation became wired for television, a new medium experimented with by various politicians and social groups." Only 10 years later, "television had begun to alter the political and social fabric of the country, with stunning consequences."
It was a literacy gap. All the knowledge about the new medium resided with the experimenters, knowledge to which the general public had no real access. At the heart of the gap was a code, centuries old, but simple and easy to learn in college and university media degree programs. I teach it to 200 new students a year. It should be taught to everyone.
Never before have I seen that gap more apparent than in the Republican convention and the events surrounding it. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. In 21st-century America, if you are not a media professional, you are, like Stuart Jewell, essentially media-illiterate. In this illiteracy, Americans accuse the media of bias, irresponsibility, moral decay, Hannah Montana. And many of those accusations are true, because media professionals, in a media-illiterate world, know they can get away with it. The gap has become a wedge. The result is an American crisis, creating fear and mistrust, even loathing, of a media institution that is the life blood of democracy.
At the Republican convention were thousands of Stuart Jewells (with millions more watching) and a handful of media professionals, most notably a Republican strategist named Steve Schmidt. So notable was Schmidt's presence in the proceedings that he is the subject of a long profile in the Sunday, Sept. 7, New York Times. Using media tools, Schmidt manipulated public response that brought the audience, who had no idea why, to a frenzy. Democratic media professionals did the same thing last week at Denver, but in St. Paul, there was an ominous difference. Schmidt attacked the media, again and again, in ways that were not legitimate. He did not do this viciously; he did it as a professional using media tools to evoke a response.
If the public understood that, all would be well. But they didn't and don't. In their media illiteracy, Schmidt the media pro knew he could get away with it. And that is a huge part of the American crisis, going forward from this convention.
The public doesn't understand, because they have never been taught, that people are the authors of the media code that the professionals use, and thus are the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, Jeff Greenfield, now of CBS, laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."
Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Journalists, educated in these realities and principles, write to it, write to the people, as if through a window which no power, natural or man-made, can close.
Steve Schmidt is trying, though. If he succeeds, he will have succeeded in pulling the plug from the First Amendment. Somebody needs to get him to talk about that. But for Sunday's New York Times profile, he declined to be interviewed.
September 05, 2008
Days of our lives
When I was 17 years old, if I had told my grandmother Susie that someday I would read about a kid my age who knocked up the daughter of a woman governor, then two days later watched the kid and his girl and the governor hugging and shaking the hand of a candidate for President of the United States, Susie would have said, "You're crazy as a loon, boy."
Well, these are loon-crazy times, Suze. Watching TV this week has not been like watching a soap opera, it IS a soap opera. Republican political managers, most famously Karl Rove, are gifted media producers. As a media professional myself, I can't help but admire their work, even as it scares hell out of me. Their work of the last week has been frighteningly inspired, and also lucky.
Media producers use a set of known values to obtain a reaction from an audience. In fact the values taken together are known as a “reaction package.” Among the values are conflict, progress, disaster, prominence, proximity, human interest, novelty, sex, and sensationalism. All of these values are present to some carefully calibrated degree in every media product you see. Ninety-nine percent of Americans are completely unaware of these values at work, and their media illiteracy in the 21st century has become a real danger.
The Republican team's assignment this time: produce a media product for the Republican National Convention that is guaranteed to make news (a powerful way to maximize the product’s profit); to create proximity (an abiding level of warmth and belonging among the conventioneers and the Republican Party); to create conflict between adversaries and the Republicans; to maximize that conflict and turn it on the adversaries; and to manipulate emotions among Republicans everywhere.
How would I do it? The same way any media professional would do it. My convention follows the Democratic convention, with its charismatic star Barack Obama, and as that convention nears, I learn details that I incorporate into my planning. The speech in an outdoor stadium with an audience of 80,000 is a difficult act to top. I am going to need something to snatch away that image quickly, the next day, if possible. I will want John McCain to announce his vice-presidential candidate on the Friday after the Democratic convention ends.
How can the power of that announcement be maximized? Prominence, possibly. Conflict would be nice; people are drawn to conflict, which is why soap operas are successful. Of course sex always sells. Sensationalism could trump the Democratic sensationalism. And then novelty. Something so rare and made such big news that it would snatch away the media from the Democrats, and keep them away indefinitely. A surprise candidate . . . Obama kept people guessing, but then Biden certainly didn’t come as a surprise. What I need is a surprise candidate whom nobody knows.
A nobody lets me control change of the status quo. I want the biggest change possible, which will put me in control of the media. A nobody will generate a frenzy of media coverage, which works for me two ways. It creates curiosity and excitement, creates prominence for the nobody, and after a couple of days of media hounding, we’ll attack the media for its “feeding frenzy,” and the entire constituency will feel good.
Let's see: conflict, sex, sensationalism, novelty, a nobody who will make news. And there sat Sarah Palin. It must have felt like finding Marilyn Monroe sitting on the stool at Schrafft's. It was close; deadlines are hell in the media business, and it came down to the final days. McCain wanted Joe Lieberman, but the poor guy was still thinking that an election was about governing. Media professionals see this all the time. It was a media professional in the 1960s who told the National Football League owners, "Guys, you're not in the football business, you're in the television business." A media pro had to pull McCain aside and explain to him that he wasn't in the governing business, he was in the winning business.
And so "Hockey Mom" went on the air, and it could not have been more successful: 10s for conflict, sex, sensationalism, novelty, proximity, fury at the media hellhounds, and sexism as a torch to stick in the face of any critic.
It's crazy, Susie. Real life isn't a soap opera. Millions of people find themselves troubled by the looniness, in part because they don't understand this has been a media production. But the story isn't over yet. In my profession, I see over and over how fragile novelty is. When the novelty wears off, and there's nothing to talk about but Palin's qualifications, who will she be then? There's an interesting irony lurking in the wings. This week an email is circulating, generated by an Alaska woman who has known Palin since 1992. Reading her take on Palin's governing and management style is startling. If you read the information not knowing who it was about, you could swear it was George W. Bush.
John McCain has done everything possible to separate himself from George Bush. What if he wakes up in October and finds he is joined to George Bush at the ticket? The joke will be on him. What's the difference between George Bush and Sarah Palin? Lipstick.
Well, these are loon-crazy times, Suze. Watching TV this week has not been like watching a soap opera, it IS a soap opera. Republican political managers, most famously Karl Rove, are gifted media producers. As a media professional myself, I can't help but admire their work, even as it scares hell out of me. Their work of the last week has been frighteningly inspired, and also lucky.
Media producers use a set of known values to obtain a reaction from an audience. In fact the values taken together are known as a “reaction package.” Among the values are conflict, progress, disaster, prominence, proximity, human interest, novelty, sex, and sensationalism. All of these values are present to some carefully calibrated degree in every media product you see. Ninety-nine percent of Americans are completely unaware of these values at work, and their media illiteracy in the 21st century has become a real danger.
The Republican team's assignment this time: produce a media product for the Republican National Convention that is guaranteed to make news (a powerful way to maximize the product’s profit); to create proximity (an abiding level of warmth and belonging among the conventioneers and the Republican Party); to create conflict between adversaries and the Republicans; to maximize that conflict and turn it on the adversaries; and to manipulate emotions among Republicans everywhere.
How would I do it? The same way any media professional would do it. My convention follows the Democratic convention, with its charismatic star Barack Obama, and as that convention nears, I learn details that I incorporate into my planning. The speech in an outdoor stadium with an audience of 80,000 is a difficult act to top. I am going to need something to snatch away that image quickly, the next day, if possible. I will want John McCain to announce his vice-presidential candidate on the Friday after the Democratic convention ends.
How can the power of that announcement be maximized? Prominence, possibly. Conflict would be nice; people are drawn to conflict, which is why soap operas are successful. Of course sex always sells. Sensationalism could trump the Democratic sensationalism. And then novelty. Something so rare and made such big news that it would snatch away the media from the Democrats, and keep them away indefinitely. A surprise candidate . . . Obama kept people guessing, but then Biden certainly didn’t come as a surprise. What I need is a surprise candidate whom nobody knows.
A nobody lets me control change of the status quo. I want the biggest change possible, which will put me in control of the media. A nobody will generate a frenzy of media coverage, which works for me two ways. It creates curiosity and excitement, creates prominence for the nobody, and after a couple of days of media hounding, we’ll attack the media for its “feeding frenzy,” and the entire constituency will feel good.
Let's see: conflict, sex, sensationalism, novelty, a nobody who will make news. And there sat Sarah Palin. It must have felt like finding Marilyn Monroe sitting on the stool at Schrafft's. It was close; deadlines are hell in the media business, and it came down to the final days. McCain wanted Joe Lieberman, but the poor guy was still thinking that an election was about governing. Media professionals see this all the time. It was a media professional in the 1960s who told the National Football League owners, "Guys, you're not in the football business, you're in the television business." A media pro had to pull McCain aside and explain to him that he wasn't in the governing business, he was in the winning business.
And so "Hockey Mom" went on the air, and it could not have been more successful: 10s for conflict, sex, sensationalism, novelty, proximity, fury at the media hellhounds, and sexism as a torch to stick in the face of any critic.
It's crazy, Susie. Real life isn't a soap opera. Millions of people find themselves troubled by the looniness, in part because they don't understand this has been a media production. But the story isn't over yet. In my profession, I see over and over how fragile novelty is. When the novelty wears off, and there's nothing to talk about but Palin's qualifications, who will she be then? There's an interesting irony lurking in the wings. This week an email is circulating, generated by an Alaska woman who has known Palin since 1992. Reading her take on Palin's governing and management style is startling. If you read the information not knowing who it was about, you could swear it was George W. Bush.
John McCain has done everything possible to separate himself from George Bush. What if he wakes up in October and finds he is joined to George Bush at the ticket? The joke will be on him. What's the difference between George Bush and Sarah Palin? Lipstick.
September 02, 2008
News happens so fast these days
It was about noon yesterday. We had just gotten back from walking and I went straight to the kitchen to turn on the TV and check out Gustav. I was watching this when Karen came in from her computer in the study. “Are you watching the news?”
“I’m watching Gustav,” I said. “It’s moved onshore now.”
“So you haven’t heard the news,” she said.
What news is that?” I said.
“Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant,” she said.
“You’re kidding!” I said. “She will have to resign!” I pictured John McCain fuming at her lies. But it turned out she wasn’t lying. McCain knew about the pregnancy when he announced her selection as his VP. Then that meant that HE was the liar. Why would he do that? Did he think they could maintain the cover-up until the election?
Then the analyses started, one of which stated that Palin being the mom of a pregnant teenage daughter could be appealing to voters. I stopped worrying about it. Too complex. Never worry about anything that is too complex to describe in a sentence of 12 words or less. Most of my worries are about one-word things, like “politics.” And in the politics of this election, it’s a simple worry: “Who will win?” Thought about at that level, I don’t think John McCain could attract enough votes to beat Barack Obama if he figured out how to mate a mink with an oil well.
So I am free to wonder what it must feel like being the parents of a boy who got a governor’s daughter pregnant. And how they must yearn for the calm of those days, before the governor became the vice presidential candidate. I wonder who they will vote for.
I have also been doodling ways that McCain could have worked the news into his presentation of Palin as his selection. That would have been the best thing: get it right out there. Remember when Dick Cheney shot the hunter, then tried to cover it up? Same thing. The cover-up story is always bigger than the up-front story. Truly, McCain would be far better off to have put it up-front in some warm fuzzy way. None of my doodling so far would have been any help to him.
As for agents who have contacted the boy about a book, I would say 25, with another 15 on voicemail. The book will buy the young couple a nice first house.
“I’m watching Gustav,” I said. “It’s moved onshore now.”
“So you haven’t heard the news,” she said.
What news is that?” I said.
“Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant,” she said.
“You’re kidding!” I said. “She will have to resign!” I pictured John McCain fuming at her lies. But it turned out she wasn’t lying. McCain knew about the pregnancy when he announced her selection as his VP. Then that meant that HE was the liar. Why would he do that? Did he think they could maintain the cover-up until the election?
Then the analyses started, one of which stated that Palin being the mom of a pregnant teenage daughter could be appealing to voters. I stopped worrying about it. Too complex. Never worry about anything that is too complex to describe in a sentence of 12 words or less. Most of my worries are about one-word things, like “politics.” And in the politics of this election, it’s a simple worry: “Who will win?” Thought about at that level, I don’t think John McCain could attract enough votes to beat Barack Obama if he figured out how to mate a mink with an oil well.
So I am free to wonder what it must feel like being the parents of a boy who got a governor’s daughter pregnant. And how they must yearn for the calm of those days, before the governor became the vice presidential candidate. I wonder who they will vote for.
I have also been doodling ways that McCain could have worked the news into his presentation of Palin as his selection. That would have been the best thing: get it right out there. Remember when Dick Cheney shot the hunter, then tried to cover it up? Same thing. The cover-up story is always bigger than the up-front story. Truly, McCain would be far better off to have put it up-front in some warm fuzzy way. None of my doodling so far would have been any help to him.
As for agents who have contacted the boy about a book, I would say 25, with another 15 on voicemail. The book will buy the young couple a nice first house.
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