SOB

‘Only dead fish go with the flow': a love song to Sarah Palin

Having risen early on Saturday morning, I turned to the Internet - and there, on my "home page", I was immediately faced with a story about Sarah Palin.

This resulted in a remarkable experience that I want to share with you.

Apparently Palin - whom, you will recall, was the governor of Alaska and former Republican Party candidate for the vice presidency of the USA - stepped down on Friday as governor, 18 months before her term expires.

According to the learned journalist who wrote the analysis, she did so because she wants to be president, or at least a major player in the Republican Party election campaign, in 2012.

"Now she will be free," Howard Fineman explained, "to travel the country, rake in a lot of dough as a speaker, work the [Republican Party] and conservative dinner circuit, hawk her book once it comes out - and see how the game develops."

By the way, I didn't know - before Saturday, that isf - that Palin had signed a book contract for an undisclosed sum and had chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir. This was explained by the improbably-named Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair in another piece that I looked up.

He wrote that Palin's book will be published not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house. The special edition might include "supplemental material on faith", as Mr Purdum quaintly wrote.

I wish Palin had told me she was planning to do a book. I have some experience in the field. Though I am not senior in position, Christian or conservative, I have co-written books with the late banker Bob Aldworth and with Eugene de Kock of Vlakplaas fame, and recently I wrote a biography of JG Zuma. In short, I clearly can work with people from diverse backgrounds who have different interests.

Also, people didn't give Zuma much of a chance of making it to the Union Buildings, then I wrote his biography and he became president. You do the math.

I could do a new, dual edition: Zuma and Palin: she who wanted to be vice-president but didn't make it, and he who was vice-president and got fired but made it anyway.

Possible titles are: The Zulu and the Alaskan Rabbit Hunter (a sort of update of Dan Jacobson's wonderful short story, The Zulu and the Zeide); Beauty and the Beast (though, if I used that title, I'd probably get whacked by The Times - the local tabloid fish wrap, not the London one - for plagiarism); Hunting Snakes in Nkandla and Bears in Anchorage; Where ANC and Republican Party Values Intersect (this would be the more intellectual version so that I might be reviewed in The Sunday Independent); etcetera.

The possible permutations are endless. It's not such a wild notion, is it? After all, Alan Bullock wrote a great book on Hitler and Stalin. It'd be good, I tell you. We - she and I - might even make it on to the short list of the Alan Paton Award, which is very highly regarded, I understand, in Anchorage and Dallas.

Anyway, the learned Fineman continued as follows: "[But,] scrappy though she is, Palin is no rocket scientist. Her knowledge of the issues and of the wider world remains shallow and incomplete. In some respects, her family life is a monument to confusion, if not hypocrisy, about Traditional Family Values. The cutesy-pie thing is fading fast, and isn't the route ... to Margaret Thatcher-hood. Her performance on the national campaign trail (after the first scripted moments ...) was, for the most part, not only laughable, but also cringe-worthy. She was in over her head.

"But [he continued] you never say ‘never' in politics, and there are reasons why it's worth paying attention to what she is up to these days. She is popular with core Republicans and conservatives for her emotional approach to abortion, for her Alaskan devotion to guns and hunting, and for her libertarianish [sic] theory of government whose last true devotee was Barry Goldwater. Palin comes from the core of the core [Republican Party] demographic: rural, Protestant, married and churchgoing. She is in THAT mainstream."

But, for me, peering at a computer screen on Saturday morning, what was remarkable was not the possibility that the 2012 Republican election campaign had lurched into gear on Friday - "like the distant sound of a chain saw in a stand of northern pines," as Fineman wonderfully put it - or that a number of polar bears are likely to be a little safer for the nonce. (If Palin is way south of Alaska working the dinner circuit, she can't be out hunting).

What was exciting for me ... well, this is where this column becomes difficult. This the moment I have been avoiding for 780 words or so, because I'm not at all certain that this is the right sort of thing to discuss on Politicsweb, or Moneyweb, or any public web for that matter.

But I do have a duty to tell the truth, do I not, without fear or favour? You wouldn't want me to shuffle, in some mealy-mouthed manner, past reality, would you, as did Hugh Bladen during Saturday's third test against the British & Irish Lions?

Did you notice that the Bokkies came onto the field wearing silly little white armbands - they looked like striking hospital patients from the neurology ward - on each of which was written "Justice 4"?

Now Bladen simply skated badly over the meaning of those armbands. (Well, in fairness to him, maybe he really didn't know; there are times when he seems not to know what's potting.) They were the team's protest over the suspension for a few matches - upheld following an appeal - of John Philip "Bakkies" Botha, the lock, whose jersey number is four.

Botha, who specialises in playing the man not the ball (as does DA leader Helen Zille, though in her circles it is known as the ad hominem approach), got caught out in the second test doing just that.

This resulted in that dingbat coach, Peter de Villiers, coming to Botha's rescue verbally - and thereby booking himself at least three pages in the next edition of Jennifer Crwys-Williams' Dictionary of South African Quotations, even if, by then, De Villiers has been removed from national rugby coaching and is teaching ballet in Paarl.

Why the Springbok squad felt it necessary to protest about Botha's treatment, I cannot understand. All of us love a good punch-up from time to time. When the fellows hit each other with their handbags, no one gets more of a vicarious frisson than I. And if I am watching in a certain Melville eatery, a fight on the field even comes close, praise the Lord, to shutting up that radio personality Eric Miyeni, who bangs on endlessly and loudly, both on the radio and (alas) off it.

But Bakkies, like De Villiers, has clearly lost the plot. He's supposed to be out there to jump in the line-out and push in the scrum, not to behave as though he's in a Pretoria pub of a Friday evening. Anyway, if he wants to be a dirty player, which is fine with me, he could at least try for a modicum of subtlety. He could, for example, make speeches to the referee as the All Black captain Sean Fitzpatrick used to do (and, increasingly, our captain John Smit does). Or he could simply shut up and get on with it away from the cameras, e.g., like former All Black flankers Josh Kronfeld and Richie McCaw.

But it's now been 400 words or so and I still have not told you what was so exciting about coming across that story about Palin.

It's like this. As I might have mentioned in a previous column, I am chronologically somewhere in the middle of my sixth decade, so the, shall we say, engorgement of my essential thing (as the poet Dennis Silk called it) is a rare and welcome occurrence. And reading about Palin, and looking at her mug shot (which is all there was), did it for me.

Now of course I, like everyone else, did see - whenever the run-up to the US election was - those photo-shopped e-mails of Palin that did the rounds, the ones in which she appeared bare-breasted, and I saw the bare-breasted Tina Fey impersonation of Palin on Saturday Night Live. (I think Fey bared her numbies - or maybe I was fantasizing; there are times when I seem not to know what's potting.) And maybe those two experiences played a role on Saturday morning.

But I suspect the issue is more complex.

Let's face it: there's something incredibly alluring about Protestant, married, churchgoing, gun-toting, right-wing, ditzy chicks who are simultaneously sexy. I have always found it so and I believe it has always been the case.

And is it such a bad thing that Palin is sexually alluring? Is it such a bad thing that this is what she pre-eminently brings to the party?

You know, in the good old days of 1960s to the 1990s, before the Politically Correct, who are very unsexy people, took over in this world, we used to believe in making love not war - which is a very good principle, if I might say so. So what's wrong with Palin, who makes one think of making love not war?

Yes, I know that there are "good" reasons why sex has become taboo. The HIV-Aids pandemic has rather spoilt things, especially in this neck of the woods, and has opened the way for all the dour, righteous folk who want us to remain virgins till we are 57 (I have a BIG birthday coming up!) and to be as non-sexy as possible.

They are the Naysayers. They have set themselves up against Eros, against lust, beauty, love, intercourse, fertility, and Palin.

They contemptuously attack our national heroes such as Joost van der Westhuizen and JG Zuma.

They are against what Freud - or maybe it was Nietzsche - called the Life Force and they are in favour boring PC people such as Barack Obama.

They have reduced politics to, well, politics. I bet you that Maureen Dowd, the (probably dowdy) queen of the New York Times op-ed pages, who launched into Palin on Monday morning, is simply jealous.

Food for thought, food for thought. And before you get angry with what I have written, remember what Palin said: "Only dead fish go with the flow."

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