Classy tools and morons

Why don’t you like Sarah Palin?  People are ALWAYS asking me this.  (Not really.)  There are lots of reasons, but this thing with David Letterman has really awakened the semi-dormant disgust that I felt toward her all during the latter end of the presidential campaign.  Last night, I saw this (I saw it on Huffington Post, but can’t seem to embed from there):

First of all there’s a semantics issue: Letterman did not call her slutty.  He referred to her look.  Not the same thing.

Anyway here in Madrid I don’t watch our 24-hour news channels, and until I watched this I had no idea who Contessa Brewer was, but I might kind of like her, and I know I like her more than Campbell Brown, who kind of gets on my nerves because she’s alright but I don’t understand why everyone loves her so much.  (Although I was listening to a Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! from winter on my iTunes last night and she was the celebrity guest and I have to say that I have a little more respect for her now.)  This Ziegler douche clearly needs a swift kick in the nuts, but I’m not sure it would be worth the trouble.

So then this morning Huffington brought me this:

I wish Letterman hadn’t been so nice, but I SUPPOSE if he REALLY wants people to understand that he doesn’t think raping 14-year-old girls is funny, then it’s okay.  That aside, there are two things about this that really piss me off, and that show Sarah Palin as the vacuous carcass of ridiculousness that I believe her to be.

First: Ziegler went for the sexism angle when Brewer addressed the “slutty” thing and he was all, ‘I dunno, you’re the female, you tell me!’  Look, I would never dare say that there is no sexism in the media, but not every single thing ever said about a female politician is sexist, and just because the word “slutty” is used does not make the statement inherently sexist.  If comedians and entertainers and journalists can endlessly poke fun at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer and every one else whose personal shenanigans get brought into the spotlight, then Sarah Palin is fair game.  She wants to be a politician, and she clearly likes the attention, so she can’t be okay with all the other politicians and public figures getting made fun of and then whine when it happens to her.  And if we can all happily make fun of Phil Spector’s terrifying face/hairpieces and Michael Jackson’s disconcerting physical appearance, and Donald Trump’s hair, and Angelina Jolie’s lips, and Pamela Anderson’s boobs, and Larry King’s age, and if we can obsess over what Michelle Obama is wearing every second of the day, then we can make fun of Sarah Palin’s clothes.  Either we’re equal, or we’re not.

Second, and this is the worst: Have we been gossiping about Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter since September?  No.  I don’t even know what that kid’s name is.  The media frenzy has always been over Bristol.  Obviously.  (And who, as Letterman pointed out, WAS knocked up and is now an adult.)  No one in their right mind would ever think that in those jokes Letterman was poking fun at any of Palin’s children other than Bristol.  What does that mean?  It means that the only people bringing up the sex life of her 14-year-old daughter are Sarah and Todd Palin.  No one else.  Now that’s good parenting, good politics, and high class.

UPDATE:

I hate that I’m even paying attention to this, but Sarah Palin went on the Today Show this morning to talk about this “feud”.  Turn the volume down if you’re sensitive to shrill:

To be fair, the first in this post above didn’t play the A-Rod joke, and I hadn’t realized that it was Palin’s younger daughter at the game with her .  (But they look really, really similar, and if I’d seen photos in the paper I probably would have assumed it was Bristol since she’s the one in all the tabloids, and it wouldn’t surprise me if others mistook her also.)   And maybe the joke was in poor taste, as Letterman has readily said.  But do you really think that the joke was making fun of Willow Palin?  Is it fair to decide that Letterman thought statutory rape is funny?  I admit that I can’t argue about this one much more because, while I can understand how some might think it crossed the line, I’m a young woman and I simply didn’t find it offensive — in the slightest.  It seems to me that the butts were: Alex Rodriguez, obviously; Bristol Palin, obviously, because she DID get knocked up as a teenager and, because teen pregnancy is generally something that is frowned upon in our culture, we make fun of it, regardless of how tasteful that is; Sarah Palin, because she and her husband exude a certain trashiness while attacking others for having a lack of class, and she would oppose an abortion even if her daughter were raped and she’s a fervent supporter of abstinence-only sex education and was so before her teenage daughter got knocked up.

Her complaints about the “slutty flight attendant” thing hold no water whatsoever.  Putting the word “slutty” before a profession doesn’t necessarily say anything about the profession itself.  Saying she looks like a slutty flight attendant, which she frequently does, just means that she looks like a flight attendant who is slutty.  It would be more insulting to flight attendants if we said that they looked like Sarah Palin, or that Sarah Palin just looked like a flight attendant, because THAT would imply that flight attendants look slutty.  The fact that “slutty” is put before something means we’re qualifying that thing, which we wouldn’t need to do if we felt that all flight attendants were slutty.  We don’t say that a scantily clad woman in cheap thigh-high boots looks like a slutty hooker, we just use “hooker” because, well, duh.  Saying that Palin looks like a slutty flight attendant isn’t sexist, it’s reality.

Ultimately, even if you do decide that Letterman’s joke really was inappropriate, doesn’t Palin’s comment about keeping her daughter away from Letterman void her complaints?  Not only did she initially imply that Letterman might be some sort of pedophile, Matt Lauer immediately gave her the chance to clarify and she didn’t budge.

Okay, hopefully this is the end, unless Letterman needs to defend himself which would be understandable.  But otherwise, please can Sarah Palin just evaporate or something now?  I’m embarrassed to have her speaking out on behalf of my gender.

Forcing creativity

Early in the year I noticed something devastating, something pervasive throughout my classes and my school: A complete and depressing lack of imagination and creativity.  In kids under the age of 12.  Which, if I’m not mistaken, isn’t that supposed to be the time when you have the wildest imagination?  I mentioned it in an earlier post, after discovering when I asked my third-graders what they wanted to be when they grew up, that no one had any interesting ideas.  Actually, they didn’t seem to have any ideas at all.

I’ve seen this manifested in other ways throughout the school year.  I also mentioned in the other post that my kids lack almost any autonomy whatsoever, in part because arbitrary rules are enforced in places like art class, and they are reprimanded for drawing a cloud the wrong shape or for drawing a landscape that doesn’t totally look like a real landscape.  They have art teachers that tell them what color to use, to not draw the line like that but like this, to make the circle rounder (more round?), and the worst of all, finish or correct projects themselves if it’s not to their liking.  (Franco died nearly 35 years ago; clearly these people were born in the wrong decade.  If this intrigues you, you might like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the oppressive artistic environment of Communist Czechoslovakia is described through the experiences of one of the characters.)  Naturally, this also stifles the students’ creativity; they are prevented from using their imagination, until the imaginative parts of their brains are, I imagine (ha), dry and atrophied.  With cobwebs and tumbleweeds.  And echoes.

But of course the schools are only partly to blame.  In fact, I think in this case most of the blame is better placed elsewhere.  Because I do have a few kids with more active imaginations, and these children seem to have some things in common: They get more creative/intellectual/emotional stimulation at home, and/or they like to read.  I have one student who, despite being pesada, always blurting out unfunny tonterías in class, is provided with far more reading materials and exposure to culture than her peers.  Her annoying comments in class drive me up the wall, but I can’t say she’s not creative with them.  (She’s also Spanish, which doesn’t necessarily matter, but given the ethnic makeup of the public schools here, it could also be significant.)  I have another student, with a really crappy home life that I wish I could get him out of, who is malnourished on so many levels at home, yet loves to read and is more concerned with the world and with ultimate truth than most kids his age from any country.  (If it turns out to matter: He is half-Spanish and half-Moroccan.)

Leave me starstruck

There are people who become starstruck at the sight of any famous person.  I might expect to feel a disorienting sense of “Baah, is this really happening?”  but my brain synapses seem to reserve being starstruck for those who I really love and admire, have been following since I was a child, or just for some reason awaken a sense of awe in me.  Actually, out of the small handful of times I’ve seen someone famous (Richard Karn at Arborland when I was a kid –my mom was very excited about that one; saw Judd Nelson two days in a row in L.A. with Ashley and the second time he flipped us the bird for no apparent reason, which first offended us and then we realized that it was awesome; obviously Jeff Daniels at the Cube, which is amazing but normal if you’re in the Ann Arbor area; Monte Nagler at Briarwood Mall, which did actually bring me close to awe; the guy who played Bania on Seinfeld at a restaurant in L.A.; President Palmer in L.A. and he said something to me and Margie about smiling or being serious or something, and this may have meant more to me if at that time I’d been watching 24; also there was this guy; walked right past Hope Davis and Gwyneth Paltrow while they were shooting Proof in Chicago –Hayley stopped with her eyes wide open in the middle of the street; Ethan Hawke at a book signing in middle school –he liked my name, which maybe is a compliment but maybe not anything to write home about because at the time he was married to a woman named Uma; just the other day at Corte Inglés we were at the checkout right next to Blanca Portillo, which was pretty sweet and she’s totally normal; when I was a kid I went to a book signing and met Ray Bradbury with my mom and I think he said something to her about how she should use a different pen, but this was not as exciting to me because I was young and not the science fiction fanatic that my parents are; this is all that occurs to me right now), while they’ve definitely been cause for curiosity and excitement and I will definitely go peek if someone tells me there’s a celebrity around the corner, so far I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who’s left me really, really starstruck.  Like, struck with enough awe that my eyes might get a little wide and my jaw might drop a little and I might fumble over my words a little and I might gush uncontrollably.  Here’s who would leave me starstruck –I’m including living people only– and if you want jump on board and tell me who would leave you starstruck, go ahead…

• George Winston (most of you probably don’t know who he is, but I’ve been listening to him since I was a baby and I love him absolutely and forever and I would probably be speechless for a few seconds if I met him)
• John Cleese
• Tina Fey
• Christian Bale
• Bob Harper
• Rowan Atkinson
• Hugh Laurie
• Stephen Fry
• Emily Deschanel (especially if she were with David Boreanaz or with the entire cast of Bones, except then I’d be disappointed if they were just being themselves and not completely in character )
• Christopher Walken
• Rachel McAdams
• Morgan Freeman
• Jon Hamm 
  

  Don Draper (Jon Hamm)

There are probably more.  I’ll add them as I think of them.  Because this is obviously a really deep and significant post that needs constant updating.