Posted on 10/27/2008 1:38:52 PM PDT by lewisglad
My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant, 75-year-old scholar confessed to me over wine: “I’m sexually attracted to her. I don’t care that she knows nothing.”
There can be no denying that McCain’s selection of her over others far more qualified —— suggests other factors at work. His judgment may have been clouded by ... what?
Science provides clues. A study in Canada, published in New Scientist in 2003, found that pretty women foil men’s ability to assess the future. “Discounting the future,” as the condition is called, means preferring immediate, lesser rewards to greater rewards in the future.
That men are at a disadvantage when attractive women are present is a fact upon which women have banked for centuries. McCain spokesmen have said that he was attracted to Palin’s maverickness, that she reminded him of himself.
Recognizing oneself in a member of the opposite sex is a powerful invitation to bonding. Narcissus fell in love with his own image reflected in the river, imagining it to be his deceased and beloved sister’s. In McCain’s case, it doesn’t hurt that his reflection is spiked with feminine approval.
As my husband observed early on, McCain the mortal couldn’t mind having an attractive woman all but singing arias to his greatness. Cameras frequently capture McCain beaming like a gold-starred schoolboy while Palin tells crowds that he is “exactly the kind of man I want as commander in chief.”
This, notes Draper, “seemed to confer not only valor but virility on a 72-year-old politician who only weeks ago barely registered with the party faithful.”
And though it isn’t over yet, it seems clear that McCain made a tragic, if familiar, error under that sycamore tree. Will he join the pantheon of men who, intoxicated by a woman’s power, made the wrong call?
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
This desperate, jealous woman is NUTZ!
THANK YOU, VERY KIND. _:)
Now that the early hysteria has died down, the legacy media is moving into the second phase of their assault against Sarah Palin: sometimes regretful, (often mocking) disapproval over her un-ignorable shortcomings. We’ll know we’ve reached phase three — “Palin’s moment is over” when they dig up a few rogue “Republicans” to express “second thoughts”. According to Jon Friedman, the media is simply going to close their eyes to Palin until she goes away.
But none of it will stick any more than the savage first-stage attacks stuck. Palin will see it through because of her courage, her intelligence, and her steadfastness, but also because she’s Maureen O’Hara.
Maureen O’Hara is not particularly a household name anymore. An actress of the golden age of Hollywood, she’s still around today, at close to ninety. She’s said to remain a striking figure, and is still quite active — a few years ago she was grand marshal of the New York St. Patrick’s day parade.
She was born just outside of Dublin, and as a girl learned judo and fencing along with playing soccer — unusual for the 1920s, doubly so for socially backward Ireland. In the late 1930s, she arrived in the U.S. already an experienced actress.
O’Hara was noted for her appearances opposite John Wayne. She starred in a number of films directed by John Ford (who chose her as one of the few actresses who could convincingly stand up to Wayne), and many more by other directors. She played a number of different roles but there was one in particular that she embodied to perfection, and that was the frontier woman.
We have a clear image of what the frontier woman was like. Stalwart, stoic, tough, capable, but at the same time remaining feminine, deferring to the man but defying him when necessary. A number of actresses have done well in this kind of role — Barbara Stanwyck and Joanne Dru, to mention two. But O’Hara did more than play the role, she inhabited it, setting the archetype in her own image, and in the process becoming something of an icon herself.
(It goes without saying that this archetype represents the ideal.)
When Sarah Palin appeared on the national stage, she was stepping into an archetype that already existed. In personality, looks, and behavior she resembled nothing less than our cultural image of the frontier woman. She was something out of history — something that we already knew, were quite familiar with, and strongly approve of. But at the same time it’s true that few people living (and those very aged) have ever met a frontier woman of the original breed. Our archetype comes from somewhere else. It comes, in fact from the movies. And in large part, from Maureen O’Hara.
While Palin looks nothing like O’Hara (who was a redhead, just for starters), the gestalt — the overall picture — is strikingly similar. The same strong features, the same sense of character, the same way of holding themselves. They even have the same powerful jawline that would look masculine on a less feminine woman.
The importance of the frontier woman cannot be overrated, because it was the women, in the end, who broke the frontier. Mountain men and related types had been traversing the wilderness for decades before the Westward Migration got rolling, without leaving behind as much as a scratch on the landscape. It was the women — and their families — who made the land bend, who brought with them a sense of permanency, who civilized the frontier. Where men went, they created forts and outposts. When women followed, they established settlements and towns.
These women were what Florence King calls “viragoes” — not in the accepted sense of the nag, but in the original sense of the woman who is strong in and of herself. King argues for the virago as being the true model for modern women, as opposed the whiney and vindictive quintessentially urban radfem.
We could do far worse than O’Hara (or Palin) as our prototype for the modern virago. (There’s a Spanish term that covers similar ground, “hembra”, meaning the same in the female sense as “macho” does for the male. Why the term never caught on in this country I leave to speculation by the reader.)
Such women are no rarity. They exist all over the country. We could all come up with a list of our own. Mine includes the woman who assisted her adolescent child in recovering from an emotional breakdown while she herself was recovering from cancer, the woman who has steadily home-schooled all her children, sending them to places like Yale, and has just seen her eldest son off to wars against the Jihadis, and the woman who kept together a family and established a career after her weak husband succumbed to drug addiction. (We could also add Maureen O’Hara herself to this list. When her husband, pilot Charles Blair, died in a plane crash in 1978, she took over the operation of his commuter airline, Antilles, becoming the first American woman to run an airline.)
The frontier was supposed to have “closed” by 1900, when no area existed in the continental United States that remained unsurveyed, unsettled, or untrod. That was undoubtedly the case in the real world. But in the American psyche, it’s another story. There, the frontier will never be closed — it survives as a living reality. The Westward Migration is this country’s Odyssey, in the same way that the Civil War is its Iliad. What the road west implanted in our character remains, for good or ill, and is likely to remain for as long as there is an America.
That is why Sarah Palin will prove immune to attacks by the legacy media, no matter what form they may take. Palin reflects an ideal - an aspect of our best selves burned into history and made a permanent part of us all. In Palin they have come up against an archetype, a facet of the American character. This is not something you run into every day, not something the media has much experience with, and something that they will discover is not at all vulnerable to the techniques they’re used to.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/sarah_palin_and_the_archetype.html
Kathleen Parker is grumpy, and needs some moose stew to cheer her up, or some moose helper:
http://media.coveritlive.com/media/image/200810/FsFDKBRgry_thumb_1027_mooseburger.jpg
PLEASE DON’T GIVE “VICHY REPUBLICANS” ANY HITS!!!
If Obama was short, fat and unattractive, he’d have the same chance of getting the Dem nomination as Al Sharpton. Heck. He’d BE Al Sharpton.
There's a spot reserved for her in the "Gloryhole Room" of Scott McClellan's office.
What a refreshing post ~ THANK YOU!
Parker sees Palin as a THREAT.
Right thinkers see her as an INSPIRATION.
Kathleen Parker is to Sarah Palin what Maureen Dowd is to Catherine Zeta-Jones.
What I can’t understand is this. Biden knows nothing and yet scads of people plan to vote for him. Does Parker think Biden is sexy to women?
What is this woman’s problem? Geez. Are those Washington parties really this important to her????
UGH!
Vaseline and gauze
**********************
You got me there. (LOL) I see you’re military, nust have something to do with combat. -:)
No, actually I was an Enlisted Supply type.
Thank you - what a great way to start my day!
Dunn’s essay on Palin and his comparison to Maureen O’Hara
is excellent and so easily visualized - his portrait of the actress - sharing of facial features and hair coloring.
While these similarities are easily presented for us to see, I agree it is the inner being, the real woman within, which rings true and when holding up the sad raging Parker, it expresses how failed she now is and cannot allow herself to praise another woman who is far more the ‘female’ and talented than she could ever be.
Parker has been skating on old, borrowed, tattered New York acceptance - the in crowd who need desperate daily doses of mirror image for assurance when as members of the public, we are now witnesses to the falsehood of members of the crumbling society incorrectly entitled the press.
Fairweather fellows they are - who lack the depth to plunge into the honest substance of a candidate, because in so doing on their solo journey of discovery, they may find their own insignificant reality.
It would not be a pleasant trip.
Most kids today would only recognize the archetype as Jane Seymour in “Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman”
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