Silent Spring

It's been a long time since I logged in to blog. Long enough that there have been upgrades and changes to blogspot that I didn't even know about. Even increasingly pointed hints from my blog mate about how she was carrying the water alone didn't bestir me. If anything, 'Dweller's recent grand slam of pointedly funny pieces about La Palinista pushed me even further into blog slothdom.

Partly, my on-line absence has come about from circumstance. I have been on the roam this spring - spending a lot of time suspended above snow-covered vistas in a six-seater - finding my way to other places, mostly places that don't have easily accessible long distance service, let alone an internet hook up. There have been spring carnivals to go to, snow shoe races to run, fiddle dances and potlatches to attend. It's been evenings spent playing cribbage, watching basketball, and westerns that play over and over again in village homes, like Lonesome Dove and Dancing with Wolves.

But mostly, I have been suffering (and still am) from blog-block. Sure, there have been little itches here and there that I have put aside to scratch through postings, but they never amounted to much beyond some random thoughts.

My blogger-block isn't coming from a lack of worthy topics - quite the opposite. It's a veritable smorgasbord out there. I am feeling exactly the same sense of being overwhelmed into stupor as I do when I enter a Barnes and Noble and am faced with all of the 1000s of titles among which to choose just one, or maybe two.

It's sensory overload what with the Alaska political freak show led by La Palinista. Should it be a riff on the thieving sister-in-law who is such a dullard she robs the same place three times in a row (why not just grab the spoons the first time around???), or the growing dust-up between Levi and First Baby Mama over baby Tripp? Will the trash ever stop falling out of the trailer?

Or how about Palin's nauseating protracted use of her Down's Syndrome baby as political prop for her national pretensions? It's hard to overlook that her continued bleating about every child a wanted child totally ignores the fact that Alaska is among the top ten, if not the top five, in the nation for child abuse and neglect. As for educating those wanted children, fuggedabout dat in Alaska - La Palinista turned down the education stimulus funds, and you can betcha that education, domestic violence prevention and enhanced child welfare services are not at the top of her policy check list.

And it just goes on and on. Her ceaseless whingeing about the legal fees she's incurred because of "baseless" ethics violations, and the dupes that are paying into her legal fund. Natch, if she would just do the job she was elected to do, instead of carrying on like the Queen of Preen with a sense of entitlement as big as this state, most of that problem would melt away like the spring snows.

But there is no stopping her. She is a a caricature of a caricature of a caricature. Who could have imagined back in the twilight days of Frank the Bank that - gasp - it is possible to have a governor who is worse than him! Yet here we are in that very situation. Maybe the Queen of Preen doesn't exactly make Frank the Bank look good, but she certainly does make him appear, well, less bad.

Because while he was indisputably arrogant, he at least was politically savvy. Palin on the other hand is not only arrogant, she is a very dim bulb in the political chandelier. Therein lies the mother of all problems: she believes she is a political strategist of the highest order, sort of like the Condy of the Last Frontier. She believes this, I am quite sure, in the very same unquestioning, unshakable manner in which she believes that the Rapture is imminent, and that Alaska is the place to be during the tribulation.

And, it goes without saying - that makes her dangerous, dangerous in ways that Frank the Bank never was.