- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I watched the debate on CNN, and was fascinated by the remarkable enthusiasm of the men in the audience for Palin (as measured through the dial do-hickies graphed on the bottom of the screen). Women apparently responded to message, but the men seemed only vaguely aware of that intellectual stuff at first. Those man dials rose hard to almost explosive levels when the little vixen simpered and twitched for her audience. It was kind of embarrassing; I imagined living rooms across America where men might soon have to beat a hasty retreat to “freshen up” while the wives stayed behind, glowering in the light of their television screens.
Then, thank God, Sarah went too far and narrowly saved the institution of marriage from yet another affront. It was innocent enough: she was just trying to show the folks what a reg’lar gal she was. First she winningly referred to the women as Soccer Moms (and the meters showed those men were still mighty pleased). But then, darn it, she mentioned old Joe Sixpack, so beloved of pundits and pollsters. Who’d a known? It appears the mighty American male voter, though maybe he still has a hankerin’ for those sixpacks and trucks, falters in his manhood when he’s publically patronized by a “babe”. The dials suddenly and utterly deflated (check it for yourself if you think I’m making this up), and I’ll be goldarned if those first early moments of passion never fully returned.
That republicans despise the majority of Americans is obvious, and given events of the past 8 years, who can blame them? On the other hand, eventually (after hundreds of thousands of lives, a tanked economy and a gutted city, not to mention an increasinly hostile world) folks are sure to wake up ‘cause they’re better than that. You betcha.
