03 September 2008

Why I can't turn away

The Anchorage Daily News is reporting that Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin's future son-in-law and self-described "fuckin' redneck," is headed to St. Paul for Palin's big speech tonight.  I would have some respect for the campaign begging for privacy in the whole matter, but it's awfully hard when they seem to be begging for journalists to ogle the couple.  The article also strongly hints that Johnston may be a high school dropout.  

The talking points that have been issued by McCain's people concerning Palin is that she has an average small-town American family.  Indeed she does, which is why marrying off their 17-year old pregnant daughter to her jock boyfriend is such a delicious story.  That's the kind of small-town America that everybody who grew up in one knows.  It's not what the local chambers of commerce and the Podunk Pravda newspapers will show you, and not what the big national press, which exists to flatter the working class toward more uncritical acceptance of elite direction, wants to see.  The media is flabbergasted that a real, red-blooded family just appeared on the national stage and doesn't look like it walked straight from a time-machine to the 1940's. 

We know the truth; rural America is much more Drive-By Truckers than Kenny Chesney, regardless of how much it tries to convince itself otherwise.  The myth of our unblemished, pastoral tranquility has just been given a tasering on the national stage and I, for one, couldn't be more pleased about it.