"Murder murder murder
Someone should be angry
The crime of the century
Who shot little Bambi?"
"Who Killed Bambi?" - The Sex Pistols
Behind the clear-framed glasses lurk the exophthalmic eyes of the killer. Where middle America convinces itself that here stands the gentle mother of a Down syndrome kid, the rest of the world sees the assassin of an even gentler wildlife. What did the caribou do to Sarah Palin? The caribou doesn't know she's supposedly "pro-life", Palin took his. The caribou had as much a right to his own life as Palin's last child, but unlike him Palin deemed him unworthy to stay alive.
Did the caribou stand a chance against the babe with the idiotic smile? The caribou is dead, shot in the neck, shot in the groin (Republican males, beware) , his soft fur stained with congealing blood. The caribou lays on what is no longer a white, pure blanket of snow. The caribou's dead eyes cannot see the woman with her child seating behind his dead carcasse. Rudolph - his nose has turned red when blood came rushing through his nostrils as the forceful lead blew his arterial vein - Rudolph is dead, and Santa Claus will be one reindeer short at Christmas. Two shots, and Sarah Palin has deprived children he world over of their Christmas presents. Mommy killed Rudolph, Mommy killed Bambi, someone should be angry.
Palin, mouth open, hair flowing, is looking somewhere to her right, while the hooded kid (we're told she is one of Palin's daughters, but the gender is unidentifiable in this picture) is staring straight at the photographer, straight at us, with a look of pained anxiety. Did Mommy do this? Did Mommy kill Bambi?
The Republicans would love to convince the yet unconvinced that this woman is fit to be the next Vice-President, and, should McCain croak his pipe prematurely, she's one breath away from being president.
Yes, the woman brandishing a rifle with a demented look on her face, scantily clad in a stars and stripes bikini (am I the only one to see this as a desecration of the flag? Do you want your beloved flag, America, to wrap someone's crotch? I find this gross), this woman has been picked to run with McCain
(UPDATE: that picture, 1st from the bottom, is a fake. Thanks to commenter Joseph for bringing this to my attention).
Frail and diminished, the Republican nominee has felt a need to get a trophy running partner, as only weak old geezers do when the fountain of youth as definitively passed them by. He's so old, he doesn't remember Bambi, Bambi who stood up for America's innocence, America's commercial power, America's cultural values and, let's face it Republican values as well (as far as I know, Walt Disney wasn't exactly a Democrat). But McCain doesn't care, his Party has long ago ditched any real moral values and leanings toward decency to replace them with die-hard obscurantism and ignorance, from Ronald Reagan to George Bush to George W. Bush, from Jessie Helms to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. In a final assault to clutch to power, they let Sarah Palin kill Bambi. History will tell us if she was just an accessory to the crime, or a full-blown perpetrator, a stooge or main actor. For now, she is the woman who killed Bambi.
Elsewhere Palin poses with what she thinks must be an intense look of concentration on her face while she looks through the visor of a rifle. She succeeds only in looking slightly stupid, with one of her eyes wandering off to one side (don't you find it scary?), while the rifle is thrown directly into the viewer's face, menacing the out-of-frame-spectator with the threat of meaningless yet imminent slaughter.
It is a sight full of violence and fury, acted by an idiot, signifying nothing. Yet significantly meaningful to a casual viewer.
This woman, my dear readers, based on the way she likes to pose in photographs, the faces she makes when she does so, her love of displaying firearms and dead animals as props wherever she wants to symbolize anything, this woman stands for all the world to see as the careful object of a
mise-en-scene destined to be only that: a meticulously arranged tableau of symbolic props. She is the vacuous recipient of the Republican male fantasy: neither plain nor ugly, none too smart (we hear she spend 6 years wandering through 6 different universities to finally graduate), ready to espouse any conservative slogans and more than willing to force her agenda on people's throats (creationism, banning books from libraries), regardless of the Constitutional legality of the means she employs.
Gloria Steinem wrote
a great piece in the Los Angeles Times about the choice of Palin for the republican ticket, that I can only encourage all of you to read if you haven't. (Here's one of my favorite quote from her article: "This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need").
Meanwhile FBC! is horrified and fascinated by Palin's inclination to be seen in photographs posing amongst the corpses of dead animals, whether they have been freshly killed or have been taxidermied . This is a woman who, no doubt, would she find a litter of 5 or 6 kitten, wouldn't hesitate to kill them with her own hands, right in front of her own children ( "See honey, this is how you get rid of innocent little animals, just smash their head against a wall. We'll get the help to clean up after, don't worry").
Indeed, she killed Bambi.
And Rudolph.
Given the opportunity, she'd add Simba too.
Winnie The Pooh's hide is sprawled on Palin's official Alaskan couch, while a dead King crab looks on. Message: the Alaskan governor is carnivorous, and has aristocratic (that is, anti-American) aspirations. Yes, you've read it right, I said "aristocratic".
You see, only kings and aristocrats (that is, non-elected members of an obsolete, anti-democratic order) used to pose with the spoils of their hunting slaughters. Louis XIV, who waged countless wars and lost most of them, used to multiply the representations of his likeness absorbed in hunting massacres, to symbolize the victories he couldn't obtain at home and abroad. This absolute autocrat needed to pretend to be victorious over dead animals to legitimize his political, diplomatic and economic failures. Versailles (and nowadays the Louvre, which houses most of Louis XIV's collection) was full of gigantic paintings with Louis XIV towering over dead boars and deers.
Now, Sarah Palin, who doesn't know what a Vice-President does and whose candor in that regard should suffice to dismiss her from the Republican ticket at once, Sarah Palin triumphantly poses over dead hapless animals, acting as the new Republican smokescreen over the inability of the Party to rule the country. Indeed, the last 8 years had thoroughly demonstrated it, lest people forget the Bush administration comes from the same Party as the McCain-Palin ticket .They waged a costly war we cannot win, they depleted the country coffers at the expense of the populace's health and access to education, but hey, they deserve to win the election because they nominated a former war prisoner and a mother who has the guts to kill Bambi!
But however we want to ridicule Sarah Palin, her vulgar outfits, her bloodthirsty antics and lack of education and culture, we have to take her seriously. This woman is dangerous. She already outshines McCain, "the war hero" (in passing, being a prisoner of war makes you
automatically a hero? According to that logic, the prisoners in Guantanamo are...what?). What the McCain-Palin ticket has understood from the long fratricide struggle between Clinton and Obama was that elections are no longer decided on issues, experience, knowledge, programs and serious thinking about how to get the country out of the nightmarish quagmire America has been plunged into by the Bush presidency and the Republican Party .
No, elections are now won and Presidents are made only on the strength of symbols and good PR management.
We've spent several months watching whether the race symbol was going to win over the gender symbol. Now we have to see how the Obama campaign can use different symbols to benefit the Democratic Party, but first and foremost the American people, and defeat the geriatric "war hero" and his gun-totting Barbie doll.
I suggest simple slogans, effective examples and an aggressive stance against the Republican Party and what it has done to America over the last few years.
Meanwhile, let's forget about race symbols (Robert Mugabe is black, and see what he's done to his country) and gender symbols (Margaret Thatcher is a woman, and looked how she ransacked Britain) and if we have to use some let's focus on the symbols that make America so great at home: free speech, equality, access to healthcare, education, homes and jobs for all. And let's make America welcome abroad again: a foreign policy that is humane and not forceful, the manufacturing of cultural values that could become America's coolest export again. Let's not perpetuate the crime of the century, let's not kill Bambi all over again.
The various pictures of Palin above have been sent to me via email without any credit line. I believe the one with the caribou and the one with the bear and the crab may come from Associated Press, but I really don't know. I'd be happy to indicate credit if someone can point me in the right direction.
Meanwhile, apologies to the Sex Pistol for linking their song to Sarah Palin.
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