The American political scene has entered the schoolyard. Everyone has their crayons out, (or in this case their lipstick,) busily painting the mouths of all kinds of animals hoping to make them look like other animals, or the same as certain politicians or policies…If this sounds stupid to you, I guarantee you are not alone, and Aurora is confused, and not a little horrified.
Sometime back, Senator John McCain took out Cindy’s lipstick and painted the lips of a pig. To date, no one really understands why. More recently, his running mate, Sarah Palin, an ex-pageant girl with a lot of face paint to spare, decided to use some of her overstock on a pit bull and call it a hockey mom. Or was it the hockey mom who got to wear the lipstick? Perhaps Palin wanted to put lipstick on Senator Obama so she could claim that he is really a homosexual. After all, recent interviews reveal Palin will spare nothing to win what she clearly believes, will eventually be the presidency - not even her own family's dirty laundry. Like many pageant girls and politicians, I sense that Governor Palin is adept at being vague, frequently using images in place of explanation. In this instance, she and Senator McCain seem to view lipstick as an agent for change. I can imagine Palin at a beauty contest stating: “If I were Miss America, I’d change our country by giving everyone lipstick!” leaving all of us to decipher what she really meant, or if there was meaning to be found.
Senator Obama seems to be the only one in this colorful diatribe to make sense, with the redundantly obvious statement: “If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.” But unlike Palin’s “The only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom is lipstick.” Obama's terse analogy worked. Palin's speech writer needs to be schooled. First of all, who is wearing the lipstick? Has Governor Palin put her lipstick on the hockey mom or the pit bull? The analogy is as muddled as GOP policy proposals, confusing and incoherent as a Fallout Boy lyric but nowhere near as entertaining. Who wrote this nonsense, Bart Simpson?
But the GOP didn't stop there. Plummeting further into the schoolyard rhetoric is the Republican Party’s request that Senator Obama apologize for his remark about the lipstick-besmirched pig. Again, wasn’t Senator McCain the first to put lipstick on the pig? And was the pig referred to in that case Governor Palin? And is that pig the same as the pit bull or hockey mom that Governor Palin put lipstick on? Has lipstick now the power to change a pig into a pit bull? Sadly lipstick evidently does has the power to make some believe that Palin did not support the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere, although the evidence is overwhelming that she did in fact enable this folly. And Palin would now have us believe that a reference by Obama to a pig is the same as reference to a pit bull. Furthermore, she is offended. Which critter is she? Clearly pit bulls are not pigs, unless you need glasses, a hearing aid and have an IQ of 125 or below. It would appear members of the GOP and Senator McCain, fit this criteria. But his lame argument is semantically invalid to anyone who can hear, see or read. It is merely another red herring (speaking of stinking fish) thrown by the GOP to an illiterate and angry mob who will swallow anything. Obama need not apologize to anyone. As the madness ensues, I believe that in the end, we may all owe an apology to the SPCA and Miss Piggy. Furthermore, this school yard brawl filled with elementary school name calling, is an embarassment to the United States. Somebody call the principal and put these kids in time out, please.
Joking aside, I find it deeply disturbing that political debate in the United States has sunk to this level. Indeed, if Governor Palin has compared herself to either a hockey mom or a pit bull, these analogies do nothing to enhance her image as a competent leader. Her self comparison to a hockey mom makes us see her as a violent woman ready to bash her opponent with a large stick, and with the comparison to a pit bull, she evokes commonality with a creature known to frequently mall anything smaller and weaker than itself, including children and owners. Either way, she is calling herself a lipstick-wearing bitch, and Aurora believes that interpreted in such context, this is the only honest and coherent remark we’ve heard from Palin to date. That Senator Obama even bothered to respond this faded pageant girl's playground bragging with comparable rhetoric is troubling, although I understand his reasoning.
But rabid and incoherent as more intelligent minds may find her, Sarah Palin should not be underestimated. Based on her own remarks made over this past week, Palin is, arguably, the most frightening candidate this country has seen since Governor George Wallace, and like Wallace, her appeal to the hate mongers and religious zealots who fuel irrationality among right wing extremists and so called “conservatives” cannot be ignored. She is dangerous to both America and the world. She is Medea, who would kill her own chilren for vengeance. She is Eva Braun, who stood beside a madman as he tried to destroy the world in the name of power. She is the antithesis of every good, strong American woman who values the lives and rights of her sisters throughout the globe.
And the danger Palin represents is evident in the GOP’s increasingly troubling rhetoric. McCain and Palin have summoned the image of lipstick as an agent of political change; lipstick on moms, pigs, pit bulls, and possibly fish. But what is the nature of lipstick? Superficial, easily removed, oil based, and the color of blood. A pig may wear lipstick and still be a pig, but it is also a pig worsened by a product that does nothing for its health or appearance. A pit bull wearing lipstick may still be a pit bull, but the lipstick may hide, for a little while, that it is foaming at the mouth. I hear in McCain and Palin’s speeches attitudes resembling those of Heath Leger’s psychopathic, lipstick wearing Joker – a maniac who painted the faces of his victims with a disfiguring lipstick smile, as if that could hide the agony of their death throes. Palin’s use of political lipstick is evident in her disregard for her pregnant daughter’s discomfort before the cameras, in her disdain for this country’s more serious economic concerns, the loss of its youth to continuing conflict, and her wish to dismantle the fundamental constitutional separation of church and state upon which this nation was built. Like the Joker, both she and McCain would paint a bloodstained smile on American’s problems and ask: “Why so serious?”
Considering these issues, this writer may never wear lipstick again.
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