No, Wait, Diane Savino is My Girlfriend

I’m moving to Staten Island.

Martha Stewart Is My Girlfriend

Inadvertent Symbols

I was walking from the bank to the cheap Mexican place on a new route today when I passed the house pictured below.

The sign reads, "Dear God, Please give us a new congress. This one is broken and corrupt. Amen"

Yes, that is a teabag hanging below a sign imploring God for a new legislative branch. This assemblage is flanked by two American flags and the dessicated remains of a Palm Sunday frond. Here in Queens country, where last year 74% of voters cast their ballot for Barack Obama, we have a Teabagger. I will admit to being shocked at first, thinking this whole teabag phenomenon a construct for the flyover states to express latent racism and a means whereby a certain Australian billionaire can market a right wing tax scam as a grassroots movement. The shock passed quickly though, and I smiled, because the owners of this home were a special bunch. They were stridently buying the wrong narrative and in doing so had inadvertently created a touching symbol of the modern Republican party.

Think about it. The two flags, patriotic and aggressively so. Almost insisting that by quantity, their patriotism is stronger and better than yours.  The palm frond, dried almost beyond recognition, a sad and not at all genuine religious gesture. The cheaper-than-cheap motel curtains, pulled tight against the world, asserting their lack of welcome or fear of what’s outside, or most likely both. The sign itself, a plea to God but one directed at the street, as if that were a natural place for supplication from above. Finally, the tea bag, a hilarious malapropism, a clear indication that the vernacular you’re speaking is forty years past.

I’ll admit to feeling weird about taking the picture, because I knew I was going to be mean about it. But sort of like a kid that pounds on the glass until the lions become enraged at the zoo, I couldn’t help myself. And walking home, I had that feeling you get upon leaving that zoo. Yes, the animals were strange and wonderful – unbelievable, really! – but it’s sad that they live in cages in such close proximity to their own filth and far from the places that usually harbor them.

The Charlie Keep On Giving

John McCain just addressed a group of supporters as, “my fellow prisoners”.  I have to admit to not minding it so much, a rare moment of honesty from the elderly Republican. I felt for him for a hot second, as I too quite often feel trapped in America.

Sarah Palin’s Tanning Bed

Apparently Sarah Palin spent some $30,000 of her own money to install a tanning bed in the Alaskan Governor’s Mansion. I might discuss just how it reflects on the character of our nation that we might well be electing a person who owns and uses a tanning bed to the Vice Presidency, but I won’t. I could wonder where she came across that thirty grand, posit perhaps about some oil or timber lobbyist lining her pockets, but really that doesn’t interest me. I could even talk about how vanity and politics are so intertwined that every election is reduced to a popularity contest devoid of substance, but everyone already knows that and apparently is pretty okay with it as well. What interests me here is this: did Sarah Palin tan in the nude?

Seriously. While Governor of Alaska, did Mrs. Palin disrobe, engage the ultraviolet bulbs on her high-end tanning bed, and bronze her naked flesh? The thought is about as sexy as my cat giving Ron Jeremy a blow job, but in my opinion this is what we should be thinking about on Election Day. Sarah Palin’s vagina cooking in the purple glow. Go ahead. Try it. Now imagine voting for her.