sarah eve kelly

The Helen Thomas debacle and the Gaza flotilla debacle are two shining reasons why I don’t engage in political debate with anyone, no matter how drunk I am. The truth is this: I just don’t know enough. Whenever I try to know enough, I end up crying. I’m serious. I can’t read something and say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ I can’t read something and even say, ‘Yes, that’s what I believe.’ (I read a lot and say, ‘No, that’s not what I believe,’ but that’s not helpful.)

This is not what I elected to make myself expert in. For a while I relied on people who did choose to hone their expertise in current events, but then I stopped. Give me Thomas More. Give me the Reformation. Give me the historical role of gender. Give me wars. Give me coups. I will throw down with you: on these matters I have a living, evolving, deeply informed opinion. But this other stuff? I can’t hack it. It makes me cry.

I know what I feel about Israel. It’s extremely, extremely complicated. I won’t step on the mat with it; I shut down when the conversation starts. This isn’t only emotional. I’m emotional about a lot of things, not all of them historical or political. They don’t make me cry in a way that stops me articulating myself. My feelings about Israel are an amorphous blob in my chest. For arguably the first time I can’t bend words to my feelings; I can’t make words work.

What’s up with that? Everyone has an opinion about this; everyone talks about it. I feel strongly about it but can’t - won’t? - talk about it. In happier moments I believe I won’t have the conversation because I don’t want to open my mouth about something it’s almost impossible to know enough about. When I talk about the historical role of gender, for example - something I feel very strongly about - I am ready with defences, with fourteen layers of argument and rebuttal. I don’t have to prepare. I’m ready with the rhetoric. I’m ready to go to.

But there’s also this: I’m ready to have my mind changed. I’m ready to respect my opponent.

With something like Israel, there’s no one I can trust. Try to find objectivity on this subject. Try to wade through the politicking and the self-serving bullshit on both sides. Wade through that for truth. You won’t find it. There is no opponent or proponent to respect here. And I won’t have my mind changed. So I don’t talk.

How my mind is made up doesn’t matter. Even if it did, I couldn’t articulate it. I’m horrified by those I disagree with, and by those I agree with. I’m horrified at all of it.

Is it safer to confine my expertise to the world before the 1832 Reform Act? You might think so; I don’t. But I think it’s what I’ve got; it’s what I’m talking about; it’s what I’m willing to talk about. This I don’t talk about. Read this entry again. I didn’t talk about it.

Till next time &c &c.

‘Michael Moriarty is an amazing actor. You have to watch this show.’

That was my dad, back in 1990. I was in the sixth grade. We didn’t have much beyond Peasant Vision on TV in those days, but inasmuch as we gathered round that window to the outside world, it was to watch two shows: CBC’s The Fifth Estate (which I largely ignored) and Law & Order (which I was infatuated with).

My dad doesn’t often make pronouncements about things. I’ve gotten three (beyond this one) that I can remember vividly: that Mahler’s Fifth Symphony must be listened to whilst lying down; that I should feel free to judge people based on whether or not they liked The Lion in Winter starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, and that I was going to play the clarinet, whether I liked it or not. So when he piped up about Michael Moriarty, I listened.

Last week I found out that Law & Order had gotten the axe from NBC after a twenty-year run, and last night I watched the series finale. What an innocuous finale it was. I didn’t feel like the 27th Precinct or the Manhattan District Attorney’s office was shutting down so much as I felt that my window on it was closing. There was nothing to cry about in the episode, not really. But when my media player shut down and all I had left was my computer, I sort of felt like someone had taken my house away.

Twenty years. That beats a lot of things. It outruns my relationship with my husband by eight years. It outruns the longest stretch of time I’ve lived in a single dwelling by fifteen years. It might have been the last thing my parents had in common. That show is older than three of my cousins, one of my sisters, and two of my nephews. In a very backwards, twisty, oblique way, it represented a stability that I’ve been consistently unable to manufacture for myself. Every week, a new episode of Law & Order. And now: Law & Order: Los Angeles? LOLA? QTF, man?

The cast of this show was managed sort of like a hockey team: infamous Oilers ex-head coach Craig MacTavish said that any good team needed a ‘churn’ if it was going to remain supple and strong. It’s interesting that 1990 is when Law & Order began, and is also the last year that the Oilers won the Stanley Cup. The churn worked beautifully for the former, and more or less disastrously for the latter.

I felt betrayed when Claire Kincaid left (I was fifteen; I believed in love and justice). I felt betrayed when Ben Stone left, for that matter, though my love for Sam Waterston is unconditional. I cried when Adam’s wife died. Of course, casting mistakes were made (I shall not name names, but there were dark years). But this was a solid show with a solid formula that consistently attracted serious talent. And watching it disappear into the ether of cancelled shows is much sadder than, say, The Simpsons being cancelled (seriously: ninety per cent of their best episodes were in the first nine seasons; there I said it). There were only moments on this show when one thought: have they done all they can do? Because then they did something else, and did it better.

I thought the twentieth season had a stronger cast than the show had seen in years. (Lupo is the most compelling detective that show has seen since Mike Logan, and you heard it here first. Maybe.) It never occurred to me that this might be the last. As someone recently said, sure, Sam Waterston has his Ameritrade ads, his TD ads, but how are his eyebrows going to find work now?

I’m sure NBC had its reasons. But this show followed me from BC to Alberta and back and back again; it followed me to London and Cambridge and back again; when I tell you I was more or less flat-chested when the show started, maybe you’ll get an idea of how important this show has been in my life. So I’m here to apologise if I took it for granted. And for the love of Christ, television, please don’t cancel anything else without consulting me first. I’m not sure if my psyche can handle it.

Till next time, &c &c.

The Bottome, which is properly the Womb and the Matrix, is the chief of all parts … for in it is the Infant conceived of the Seed, formed and distinguished, nourished and increased, made a Living Soul, and preserved even to the Infusion of that divine and immortal substance, and then thrust forth into the world.
Dr Chamberlain’s Midwifes Practice, 1665

In Newsweek last week, Kathleen Deveny examines the increasingly widespread use of the word ‘cunt’. Even in such a story, she can’t spell the word out - dashes and asterisks stand in for the letters we know are there, lurking, and even her use of the term ‘C-word’ doesn’t baffle the vast majority of us.

For most of us, ‘cunt’ is not a word that can be used when our mothers are in the room. It’s offensive - I find it offensive! - but when asked why it is offensive (and I am, by my combatively intellectual male friends, frequently asked), I can’t really say. I suppose that, for me, it comes down largely to the onomatopoetic thrust of the word: one syllable that can be spat out, usually with venom, to describe the apparatus that (as Dr Chamberlain tells us) is responsible for the nourishment of the ‘Living Soul’.

I mean, talk about a degeneration of terminology! From the highly feminine and aesthetically beautiful word ‘matrix’ (’a place or point of origin or growth’ - thanks, Daddy, for the beautiful OED, complete with magnifying glass, and sorry I’m putting it to such a rude purpose) to a word that rhymes with both ‘blunt’ and ‘grunt’, and is about as pleasing as either of those.

But the opening anecdote of Deveny’s story is, I think, a little misplaced. That ‘cunt’ should be used in The Guardian, an English newspaper, devoid of dash or asterisk, isn’t going to surprise or bother many Guardian readers. So much I have learned since moving to England. You can drink in Parson’s Green without fear of arrest, you can show breasts without a black bar across the nipples, and the word ‘cunt’ is hurled across pub patios with great frequency and without inciting alarm. There is, figuratively as well as literally, an ocean between Britain and North America.

The Newsweek story, in fact, made my examination of reference to female bits a sort of perfect storm of comparison and controversy. In the 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited, a lovemaking scene between two of the main characters, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte, became problematic when the miniseries was preparing for broadcast in the US, because actress Diana Quick’s left nipple was visible during the post-coital snuggle. This was not an issue for Granada, nor for the British public, but it was for PBS, and after a long struggle, the handy old black bar was used to cover the nipple (and part of Jeremy Irons’s face, which is just criminal). The bums of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews got through the censors without argument, but a lone nipple is nothing but trouble.

So too with, believe it or not, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Because the series was buried in a late Saturday night slot, Pythons explain that the BBC more or less let them get on with it, and interfered almost not at all. The exception was an episode in the second series, ‘The All-England Summarise Proust Competition’ (aired 1972), in which the following exchange takes place:

Jones: So, what are your hobbies, apart from summarising Proust?
Chapman: Strangling animals, golf, and masturbation.

Terry Jones expressed some alarm and dismay that the censors didn’t have trouble with ’strangling animals’, but with ‘masturbation’. After a long fight, the word ‘masturbation’ (which had caused uproarious laughter from the live audience) was blanked from the scene, and viewers at home thought the audience was laughing at the word ‘golf’. The Pythons were also forbidden from using the word ‘cancer’ throughout the series, being forced to (with poignant crudeness) replace it with ‘gangrene’.

These examples, however, are the exception that makes the rule for Monty Python, as anyone passingly acquainted with Terry Gilliam’s animation will know. Cut-out early 20th-century nudes feature enormously throughout this animation, interacting with one another by, for example, tearing away flowers covering breasts with their teeth. Small troupes of men climb up the legs of these women, seeking the treasures above, to be batted away with giggles. One episode in the first series, ‘Full Frontal Nudity’, features an old perv taking in a girlie show promising to show it all, only to be stymied by seeing breasts and crossed legs, but not the real prize. This was BBC television, and thank God for it.

(Monty Python’s Flying Circus could, of course, be described as a four-series drag act, complete with reliably consistent references to poofs and fairies, but that is parenthetical to this argument, ha-ha.)

I forget who said that showing a breast gave a movie an automatic R-rating, but cutting off that same breast would bring it down to PG. This seems true of North America alone. In British newsagents, pornographic magazines are at the top back of the rack - out of reach of small children - just as they are in North America, but there are no punches pulled on the covers. Breasts are there, not covered by black bars or tassles or a modest forearm. They don’t suggest: they come out and say it. This is not a defense of pornography, just an example of a lessened shame in the form, parts, and function of the human body.

My little Canadian self was shocked when, as a new immigrant, I first saw nudity on television and on the covers of magazines. Now I understand that there is something terrifically dirty about taking that nudity into basements and back rooms, as is done with marvelous hypocrisy all over North America.

Something tells me that, in Britain, anyway, the word ‘cunt’ will eventually fall into the same category as ‘calling a spade a spade’ and ‘Welsher’: few enough people, in time, will know what it actually refers to. That it takes something beautiful - something, in a way, quite mysterious and magical, the very seat of God’s creation, if you believe in that kind of thing - and makes it dirty (as referenced by Deveny, when Lecter uses the word to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster does a remarkable job of looking like she’s just been slapped, and that’s how most women would react to it) will be forgotten, and it’ll be just another rude word.

(Although everyone here knows what ‘Welsher’ refers to, so I don’t personally use the term. I like Wales.)

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Stephen Fry almost mocks himself when he turns an old Fry and Laurie sketch into a genuine question in one of his more recent blessays. I can’t promise paragraphs nearly as long as his, nor as sensory (I doubt any of my phrases will wobble, or pucker, or be especially fruity), but I figured I had to toss my bit in.

The blessay in question turns out to be a salvo against linguistic pedantry (how pretentious is that?): essentially, stop niggling and start enjoying language; don’t be afraid to make mistakes &c &c. In principle - in broad, yawning principle - I agree. People should feel freedom to splash around in their own language and see what gets licked up. Stephen seems to do his uppermost to commit every infinitesimal sin that the pedant would pick up on and delight in (’I’ for ‘me’, ‘okay’ for ‘OK’, ‘alright’ for ‘all right’, and the weirdest tangle of commas - and lack of commas! - that I’ve ever seen), seemingly baring himself for criticism, knowing how safe he is because he’s Stephen Fry and everybody already knows how clever he is! He seems to want to free others to make similar mistakes - see, I’ve gone and done it, and I’m still readable, people still enjoy what I do with language - but it rings a little false. Not that his intent wasn’t pure, but that it implies (yes, implies, not infers!) a sort of linguistic socialism that doesn’t actually exist.

To quote Studio 60, again (the same episode, actually):

‘Are there good actors and bad actors?’

‘Yes…’

‘Good directors and bad directors?’

‘Yes…’

‘Good reporters and bad reporters?’

‘…’

‘What kind of reporter do you think I am?’

Stephen says, at one point, that language is our only free gift, that it doesn’t require equipment or really any specialized training, that parents teach their children in the ordinary way and children infer legions from those simple lessons. But not everyone turns out to be a good writer. And we can’t say that people don’t try writing enough, because they do. Do you think the downturn in the economy has stopped anyone who wants to from finishing that novel? Finding an agent? Finding a publisher? Updating a blog? Most everyone thinks he has something to offer through the medium of language. Most people don’t set out all the words in a given language and roll around in them to find the best permutations - most people don’t understand what a remarkable toolkit they have. And that’s why Stephen’s plea to ignore the rules will, actually, result in a bunch of people using words like finger paint or flinging words at the wall to see which ones stick, and in what order. Will this result in more or better writers?

It’s hard to say. I imagine that people who were in any way predisposed to do so have already tried.

The truth is that Stephen Fry can break all the rules he wants and still be a beautiful writer, not only because he’s marvellously talented but because he has all the tools he needs. Read any number of his essays - read his autobiography - read the very blessay in question! - and you’ll know what an excellent classical education he’s had. From Cicero to Waugh to Will Self, the parks and spires of his city of language are on firm foundations. Of course everyone in his class had that same education, and only he turned out to be the Stephen Fry I worship. It takes something else to be a good writer, just as it takes a specific body type (or at least the willingness to bend and stretch the body into that type) to be a good dancer or a profound relationship with the diaphragm to be a good singer of any description.

It is easier to be a pedant than it is to be a good writer. It is more common to be a pedant. It is easier to be Statler and Waldorf than it is to be on the stage. Anyone can carry around a bit of Strunk & White and run a good chance of feeling superior to another human being sometime that day. The world - my world, at any rate - is riddled over and under with shibboleths: the use of ‘per se’ or ‘him and I’, the pronunciation of ‘Magdalene’ and ‘Caius’ here at Cambridge (getting this right is particularly important if you’re American here or, as I am, perceived as American). People will laugh or scoff if you don’t get things right - I’d like to think I’m not a mocker or a scoffer, but being right, or being right in the first instance, is important to me.

Language has rules for a reason and they should be learned; this doesn’t mean I like pedants any more than Stephen does. I still abide the mantra of my best writing mentor: ‘Learn the rules, and then break them beautifully.’ Learn them, right? Not meaning of course that it should matter if a conflation of ‘that’ with ‘which’ will upset (or gratify) the most nitpicky of hunters and peckers. Not meaning that the Clarity Police shouldn’t be taken out and shot. But it is obvious throughout any narrative of Stephen Fry’s that he has learned the rules and is electing to break them for the sake of his art. One shouldn’t be ignorant to begin with, if one is able to dispel ignorance.

I keep thinking about Jewish women, because right now I’m supposed to be doing a historiographical review of early modern Jewish women. (Posting is never what I’m supposed to be doing.) It reminds me of a passage in Stephen’s otherwise deeply moving autobiography in which he defines his ‘jewishness’ and his identification with it. Well, he could have saved many pages and just written the word ‘jewishness’. I don’t understand why people who use proper syntax and punctuation and otherwise pay their respects to proper nouns choose not to in an effort to disrespect something. Why not say ‘Jewishness’ and get the point across without seeming to deliberately diminish the word? I don’t say this in defence of Jews or Judaism; I say it in defence of language, and if that makes me a pedant, so be it. Atheists do the same thing to Christianity - they will say ‘god’ or ‘jesus’ in an otherwise perfectly sound sentence. Do we diminish fictional characters by not using capitalization? Do we do this with people we just don’t like? What point are we trying to convey, exactly? Why use tricks when you can use your words? I’m not talking about people who use lower-case for everything, or typos, or people who don’t know any better. I’m asking why is refusing to capitalize something an artistic or moral statement?

Don’t get me wrong: I have a lot of sympathy for (quiet) atheists - I’m almost one myself. But even being among those who think that Jesus was just a guy - I mean, come on, he was still a guy! Just like Stephen. He deserves his capital J to go with his capital punishment. And Jews and Jewishness deserve their capital Js, too.

Learn the rules and break them beautifully. Learn the rules first, and then decide which ones are bullshit. Don’t break them in a tantrum; don’t break them to be pretentious. Don’t saddle the language with that. That makes you a pedant just like everyone else - it makes you a critic, not a lover, just like everyone else. Be different. Learn the rules first, just like Stephen did; only then will you have a fighting chance of writing as beautifully as he does.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

You know, I’m turning 30 in six days. I really did think that by now I’d be able to wake up at seven, be working by nine, take a civilized lunch break at noon, and then get back to it. Nothin’ doin’. It’s twenty past four in the morning (make all the jokes you want), and it is ever at about 2:30, just when I’m poised for sleep, that I decide I can change the world by updating my calendar, making enormous lists that I have no intention of consulting again, and then posting publicly about it.

I had high hopes for my thirties, I really did. Although it might be that the Special Powers trademarked by that particular decade don’t actually take effect until one is properly thirty. I hadn’t thought of that.

I blame it on the US election (although that really doesn’t account for the past month). Being five hours ahead of the action means you have to stay up late, and it’s not just about the numbers: it’s the punditry, the reviews from everywhere. I’ve had an awful lot of fun reading the curmudgeons over at National Review Online’s The Corner, I read an apocalyptic piece about Obama’s first security briefing on CNN, and listened with interest to the total silence issuing from the mouth of Sarah Palin in the past 24 hours.

(Does anyone else think she’s going to spend the next four years in finishing school? Hiring private tutors, taking courses in rhetoric? Learning to walk across a room with a book on her head? Doin’s are transpirin’ in that mind of hers, I’m telling you. Something tells me she stays very quiet in Alaska for the next couple of years and re-emerges as Sarah Palin 2.0 in time for the Republican primaries.)

Anyway, the prospect of staying up till five in the morning last night really didn’t bother me; it rarely does. I feel more adult when I get my work done during the day, but I’m putting in the same ten-odd hours regardless, and, as Stephen King would say, it’s darker than a carload of assholes out there these days, so it doesn’t really matter when I’m working. The bonus is that I detest natural light: my previous works will attest to my attempt to foster perpetual twilight.

Still, though. There’s something a bit deviant about being awake at this hour. I thought being back in a student population would put me back into an anything-goes atmosphere, but these cats genuinely seem to work by day, attend choral rehearsal by evening, eat their pulses and get their Five A Day, and tuck themselves into bed by ten-oh-oh. I can’t be the first disorganized Cambridge student, can I? But perhaps I’m the last.

I take a multivitamin, anyway. Sometimes two, when I’m feeling the need for extra virtue. Or toxicity.

Between reading The Compleat Midwifes Practice and working on novel revisions, about 85% of my life’s work has me more or less confined to this chair (there are worse chairs, certainly). At this time of night it’s always tempting to consider the All-Nighter, to just go until I drop, and then drop. But then I remember the birds. Thanks to Daylight Savings Time (a professor at a readings seminar recently told me in a very smug voice that DST is a “social construction”; I returned that time itself is a “social construction” - maybe this whole thing is just an attitude problem), the birds will be out in full force in about an hour.

Everybody knows what it’s like to hear the birds of a morning when you haven’t slept. It’s a warning that reality is setting back in: the day is beginning; the robins are opening up shop and soon everyone else will be too. One’s stolen season is stolen back when one is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with it: tired, cold in the extremities, reading the same line over and over, but of course there’s no getting to sleep now because of the fucking birds. The world has woken up and it’s only just occurred to you that you have no idea how you’re going to get through the day.

So yes, I’m trying to be civilized, I’m trying to be grown up. I’m failing parlously. The whole reason my husband and I came to love each other so was these habits, but now he’s a Morning Rower so he gets his carbs and is in bed by midnight. I need a new night owl. Katrina the teddy bear is great, but she’s not big on talk. She just sorta sits there, judging me. (She started judging me when the felt started leaving her face a little bit - she’s a case study in Velveteen-Rabbititis - now she’s got this sort of wry half-smile on her).

Katrina is telling me to go to bed, and the fact my stolid, wise bear has become animate tells me that she’s probably right all round.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Looking for more? See Sarah’s recent weblog entries here.

You’d have to be a Buchananite to want Sarah Palin elected. She’s a frightening woman. But since her nomination I have wanted nothing more than to take the vote back from the sufragettes and gag the media in a leaky basement.

Listen to this (from Salon.com):

She should … be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.

We’ve been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America’s women don’t need to do the same.

If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.

It’s McCain’s world, girls: You’d just live in it.

My question is this: doesn’t the leftist punditocracy have enough to go on with this woman? Her airing out of religion? Her promise to take the right to abortion away from rape victims? Her murder of small (and large) animals for fun and profit? Her views are despicable and should continue to be opened up to outrage, fear and ridicule. There is no fucking need to bring in the beauty queen antics. This is not a feminist argument. To argue that it is is, actually, anti-feminist. It suggests that American women are no more than a hive mind, free to vote on the issues if their choice is between two men, but setting aside these issues when a woman is involved if this woman is - as it has been essentially said - too pretty to be trusted.

That’s what they keep going back to, isn’t it? The beauty queen photos; is her son really her son; her daughter the whore. The suggestion that she cannot hold high office because she has too many children and a special-needs baby. The suggestion that she will, in fact, resign if McCain is elected to make way for the “real” Vice-President.

I usually have trouble with Gloria Steinem: I generally think that I’m in the wrong generation to appreciate her, and that her views haven’t evolved a jot since she stepped out of the Playboy mansion 40 years ago. This is likely unfair and ignorant; I await the outraged phone call from my mother. I read her editorial on Palin and didn’t spend as much time cringing as I thought I would, but still:

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. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

First off, McCain and Palin do not agree on a lot of things. Palin probably scares the shit out of McCain, even considering his recent - and predictable - pandering to the extreme of his own party. But the main point, again, is the feminism argument. I am a feminist; I have been one since I realised that there was a need to be one. But I am for myself - if I’m not, who is? The fact that a woman cannot run for high office without making her entire agenda about women’s issues (in order to court the leftist vote) tells me that I need to keep on being a goddamned feminist. And in case you think I’m using the term “leftist” in a derogatory way, I would consider myself far more left than right in American politics, and I’m still disgusted.

When Palin was first announced, I discussed it with a friend of mine, a Canadian journalist. His reaction to the media outcry was this: “These are the people who’ve been patting themselves on the back for a year over Hillary. Now we know how deep their respect for women really runs. It’s an inch deep. Everybody’s known all along if they have any sense that the first woman president would be some high-achieving Republican.” I add: also a woman with the skin of a pangolin who doesn’t make an issue of her gender. Hillary Clinton had her own problems with the press - it’s arguable that they made it equally difficult for her, what with the spat over the Vogue cover and the ridiculous photos of her.

Anna Wintour said: “The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is, frankly, dismaying.” The truth of these words is being lived by Sarah Palin.

My mother raised an autistic child almost single-handedly. I should note, also, that my mother has saved the world several times. When my brother and I were small, she was going to nursing school during the day, paying the bills by waitressing, and being such a good mother that I had no idea until I was much, much older that those years were difficult for her. An autistic child doesn’t grow up like the rest of us do. My brother is at the centre of our family: he is everyone’s cause, everyone’s responsibility, everyone’s great love. He has made all of us something more than we would have been. And still my mom goes on saving the world. She reforms hospitals; she reforms synagogues; she even has a t-shirt that says “Always Being Right Is An Awesome Responsibility”. She has wrought change and raised a disabled child: they can be done at the same time.

God help us if Sarah Palin is elected. Not because of her looks, her children, or her glasses (thank you, Roger Ebert - yeesh), but because she doesn’t believe in what I believe in and she doesn’t care about what I care about. Just like Pat Buchanan.

Dare I dream, with all ten toes crossed? My beautiful Oilers are making a comeback! God, I wish I’d been around for the third period of this game.

All of Wimbledon Park now knows the greatness of Fernando Pisani. I have a new and improved t-shirt and I am bringing the gospel to the Old World.

Ron Fournier holds forth on Barack Obama’s opinion of himself.

In the piece, Obama is quoted as saying “I’m reminded every day that I’m not a perfect man.” All it suggests to me is that he needs daily reminding.

If you don’t vote for Obama, you must be a racist.

Barack Obama is not the Messiah. He’s not a very naughty boy, either, but the cultism surrounding him is getting a little creepy.

He did a good job on The Daily Show (though personally, I thought Ron Paul did better). One might say he’s good under pressure, too, but I would argue that he’s not actually under an enormous amount of pressure. It seems to have escaped the blog pundits that they haven’t been supporting an underdog for a while now; this walking soundbyte is in the lead, and while it’s not fair to say that he’ll win a comfortable victory, the odds are good on his nomination. And that’s a pity, because I don’t think he’s that interesting, and I don’t think he would be a very effective President.

“We are the ones we have been waiting for” is a good statement, even if it is a little confusing at first. It’s a bit along the lines of “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but with a crucial difference: Obama’s foundation of support is coming from people who are used to fighting the Man and have no idea what’s involved in being the Man. That’s not a bad thing, but when you’re used to being the peanut gallery, odds are it’ll take a massive adjustment to perform well onstage.

Besides which there is little enough indication that Obama isn’t the Man. He says he’ll use his “bully pulpit” as President to shove through equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendereds at the state level; well, that’s not going to work. And what else has he said? Even his biggest fan, Andrew Sullivan, admits that he’s not exactly crisp and clear on the issues. He is important, Sullivan posits, less because of who he is and more because of what he is: a non-Boomer.

Hillary Clinton is, of course, the Boomer personified, complete with the gauntlet of DSM-IV disorders associated with that generation. And she’s not good under pressure – the last month has shown us that. Well, not good under competitive pressure. She wasn’t banking on such a hard fight; Obama wasn’t banking to win, place or show. And now, while Obamaniacs are Obamacycling their way to the White House, Clinton is left with a “kick me” sign on her back, being given fifteen seconds to answer a question where Obama is given a full minute, and having photos taken of her that make her look worse than Britney Spears at Rite-Aid. She is also “shrill” and “defensive”, and is first accused of plastic surgery, only to suffer a chaser of Anna Wintour shrieking that she’s not feminine enough. The American media would not touch Obama’s ethnicity with a ten-foot feather duster except in the most reverent tones, but Clinton is being beaten with the femistick every hour of every day.

Hillary Clinton has led an extraordinary life, not a perfect one. I’d vote for her if I could, for my own reasons. I’ve heard that she lacks humility and authenticity, that she’s an achieving automaton for whom no one can feel any empathy. But they’re all like that; you have to be like that. Personally, I’m more wary of people who can fake sincerity than those who can’t, and that’s why I think the proponents of Obamessiah for President are going to be disappointed.

PS. John McCain? Who’s John McCain?

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.