My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month,” Obama responded.What about the word Governor is so hard for that campaign to understand? And as everyone else has already protested, now campaigning for President is a qualification for President?
See also: Yearning for the Mud.
The French have an idiomatic phrase nostalgie pour la boue which means, roughly, "yearning for the mud." "Yearning for the mud" in America is a compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation. It's usually a mix of drink, drugs, and weird sex until the soul is obliterated by the abused flesh. The obliteration of the soul and the abuse of the flesh is one of the central tenets in many of our post-modern, secular lifestyle religions.
Most people try this sort of thing a time in their youth, but soon grow out of it when time and experience get the upper hand. Others grow out of it via deep psychoanalysis and a few trips to the rehab clinic. Still others are simply killed by it, their lives bracketed by dates that are far too close together.
Many, however, never kick it and were, in the past, thought of as "perverts" but are now more kindly seen as "differently minded." They live in those urban cores of the soul we now esteem as "Alternative Lifestyles." Once there they busy themselves in making bad design, bad decisions, bad art and bad politics. We are rich and kindly as a culture so we generally let them be. Once comfortable in their redoubts they think it their duty to sally forth from time to time and infest the rest of the nation.
A bit more.
There's a lot of cross-over of all kinds between celebrity culture and media culture. Indeed, at a lot of levels, it is becoming hard to tell them apart. Both live, for the most part, in an insulated bubble that is impervious to personal moral, psychological, or political change and ruthlessly exacts the penalty of expulsion from the bubble in the event of such change.
I'd like to suggest that there's another kind nostalgie going around in this hybrid culture that glories in the mud:Nostalgie pour la defaite -- "yearning for defeat."
Nostalgie pour la défaite is that state of the soul when an American, who either came of age in the Vietnam era, or who was taught and mentored by many leftists or liberals of that vintage, yearns for the defeat of America, and acts accordingly in word and deed. This compulsion is not only required to keep their residency in their subcultures, but to keep their status as well. The more virulent their articulations of hate, the higher their regard by their peers. Neither children nor even infants are safe from their depravities.
It is a perverted form of "confirmation bias." In a way, joining this group is like joining a gang -- once you're in, getting out is not an option unless you seek social and political death. Once articulated, this state is then seen as confirmation that his or her world view and social milieu is the correct view and correct milieu. To operate otherwise would throw not only all the professional views and actions of the last thirty years into question, but the entire structure of the afflicted personality as well. It is life in the lie and Palin, as an example and a symbol, puts the lie to this lifestyle.
RTWT.
