Road, radio, &c

I just did several days on the road, running through a pretty good swath of the middle of the country, from South Texas to southeast Kansas and then back by another route. In East Texas I once hit three radio stations in a row that featured voices with pompadours, oleaginous voices – pompous, pious, and portentous – nattering on about Gawd and the divine wishes, which are mostly unconsidered conservative. There seems to be some enthusiasm for Sarah Palin in that country, and it's disturbing. A guy named Michael Joseph Gross has done a nice piece on Palin for Vanity Fair magzine that reveals her as a vile-tempered harridan. From the story:

The intensity of Palin’s temper was first described to me in such extreme terms that I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be exaggerated, until I heard corroborating tales of outbursts dating back to her days as mayor of Wasilla and before. One friend of the Palins’ remembers an argument between Sarah and Todd: “They took all the canned goods out of the pantry, then proceeded to throw them at each other. By the time they got done, the stainless-steel fridge looked like it had got shot up with a shotgun. Todd said, ‘I don’t know why I even waste my time trying to get nice things for you if you’re just going to ruin them.’ ” This friend adds, “As soon as she enters her property and the door closes, even the insects in that house cringe. She has a horrible temper, but she has gotten away with it because she is a pretty woman.” (The friend elaborated on this last point: “Once, while Sarah was preparing for a city-council meeting, she said, ‘I’m gonna put on one of my push-up bras so I can get what I want tonight.’ That’s how she rolls.”) When Palin was mayor, she made life for one low-level municipal employee so miserable that the woman quit her job, sought psychiatric counseling, and then left the state altogether to escape Palin’s sphere of influence ...

You can read the longish piece here. For about thirty seconds in '08 I thought Palin was a breath of fresh air, a woman with a life trajectory that paralleled a lot of people I've known. I quickly concluded that she was coarse, trashy, vulgar, vain, and stupid. I've had no occasion since to change that conclusion. I really get the willies on behalf of the republic to see that a lot of people seem to think that she is fit for public office