News for the Week Ended November 17, 2010
 BY ANN ROSTOW


Hey Willow! EWTHTT

Good morning readers. It is a spectacular day in Austin Texas. Cloudless bright blue sky, a slight breeze, temperature heading up to the high 70s. What shall I do today? A walk? A round of golf? A drive through the hill country in the convertible? Or maybe I’ll just sit here in front of my laptop and write about gay court cases and Willow Palin for hours on end until the sun slips west, the shadows lengthen and the air chills, at which point I’ll go to the car wash and then meet Mel in a dark cozy bar.

Yes, that’s what I’ll do! (I promised Mel that I’d clean her car today. In fact, I lost a bet on a pool game two months ago and she ran out of patience so I said I’d do it this afternoon after I finish my column.)

As for Willow, she sent a nasty Facebook message to one of the kids in her school who dissed Sarah’s reality TV show. Willow called the guy a faggot, using little stars to mitigate the slur, and said he was “so gay,” and “disgusting.” Or it was something like that. Bristol added her two cents to the exchange, and one of them wrote “stfu,” which I translated after several minutes of thought.”

“Stfu” is not one of the cyber acronyms I use myself, and in fact, as the years go by I have become more and more circumspect about language. I remember an editor here in Texas who deleted the word “fuck” from one of my columns several years ago, which annoyed me. He explained that the word is jarring, it distracts and detracts from the context, and it should be reserved for rare moments in order to preserve its power. I had to agree. Unless used properly, it demeans the writer.

I also remember a French executive who worked for a UK-based company where I was a consultant years ago. This elegant man constantly used the words “shit” and “shitty,” in the casual and innocent way they would be used in French. In English, it was astounding.

“That’s a shitty deal.”

“This research is shit!”

Of course “merde” and “emerdante” are quite inoffensive terms in his native tongue, but it did strike me at the time that language is a delicate instrument and that salty talk is not always funny or brash. Sometimes it makes you look like a fool, although in this instance we all knew that our Gallic colleague was simply losing himself in translation. 

My headline acronym, for the record, stands for the not unreasonable demand: “enough with the homophobic trash talk.”
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Wasilla Gorilla

Now, speaking of Sarah’s TV show, I read that it got huge ratings, and I confess Mel and I contributed to the head count. Earlier on Sunday night, she asked jokingly if I wanted to watch “Palin’s Alaska” or whatever it was called and I gave her an emphatic no.

But then we were checking the channel guide and there it was. We had to turn it on for a minute and we were somewhat hooked. So much so that we switched to football for a few minutes and decided to return to Alaska.

Sarah Palin is very cute in this show. She’s engaging. When little Piper licks the cake spoon and puts it back in the bowl, Sarah catches her and tells her that’s gross and not to do it again. When Willow’s boyfriend sneaks up the stairs to Willow’s room, Sarah sees him from the corner of her eye and calls her daughter on her cell phone and gets the miscreant downstairs in a flash. Although the audience wonders why the boy would try such a stunt in front of several TV cameras, the scene still works.

Even Sarah’s annoyance with author Joe McGinniss (who rented the house next door in order to write a book about her last summer) seems understandable. The Palins check to see if he’s on his upstairs porch as they return from a fishing trip much as any of us would scout out a nosy neighbor.

That said, the picture perfect family complete with the fun-loving and endearingly goofy matriarch seems as close to “reality” as a Christmas card photo. We are not shown the massive ego, the greed, the ambition, the control freak, or the unfocussed hostility that characterize the Palin profiles in let’s say, Vanity Fair. That’s not to say that I believe everything I read in Vanity Fair, but almost.

One thing I would say, however, is that Palin’s Alaska does not reflect a woman who wants to be President of the United States. She actually comes right out and says she’d rather be fishing than stuck behind a desk, and I think we can all agree that we’d rather she be fishing as well.

I think she’ll run some trial balloons over the coming months, but I would be surprised if she maintained a presidential campaign through the primaries. And yet, she might start something she can’t stop, trigger a popular wave among her core supporters that only ends with defeat in the polls. Surely the Republicans will not allow this bizarre woman to carry their standard in 2012. Some of my Democratic friends think a Palin nomination would guarantee Obama’s reelection, but I would find it too frightening.
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Conventional Stupidity

Speaking of Obama’s reelection, did any of you read that op-ed from bygone pollsters Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen arguing that Obama should bow out of the 2012 race in order finish his term in a statesmanlike fashion?

The idea that such a gesture would remove politics from the equation over the next two years is so sophomoric that one wonders what Schoen and Caddell have been smoking for the last couple of decades. Alaskan salmon?

What really bothered me however, was the media attention they garnered over the piece. Just because an idea is original or contrarian does not mean that an idea is sound or rational or even worthy of debate.

It reminds me of the stories that pop up every now and then under headlines like “Not All Gays Support Same-Sex Marriage,” that feature one or two gay weirdos telling reporters that marriage is a patriarchal institution to be avoided. You know what? If 95 percent of gays and lesbians support marriage equality, such a headline is simply bad journalism. Write the story if you like, but don’t make it sound as if conventional wisdom is flawed.
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Interminable Military Ban Remains Newsworthy

Can you tell that I’m not in the mood to write about Our News this week?

I haven’t even checked my email in two days, and that’s where all the stories are. I’m reluctant to go there because I have hundreds of messages and it’s overwhelming and labor intensive. OK. For you I’ll do it.

Well, I’m back. That was exhausting. Omaha steaks, free diapers for life, cape candles, Travelocity, hotel deals, thanksgiving recipes, prayer tips. I think there’s a way to get this stuff off my email, but I don’t know how.

Meanwhile, I had asked my housemaid, Myrtille, to ask Cook to prepare a light luncheon of avocado filled with tomatoes stewed in aged balsamic vinegar and butter, and a small glass of very cold rose. As usual, both she and Cook are nowhere to be found and I was obliged to assemble the repast myself. Much like Sarah Palin, I like “working” outside, so I am enjoying my lunch on the screen porch.

My email contained vast numbers of messages about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which I won’t get into. You know that the repeal of the military ban is attached as an amendment to the defense appropriations bill, and that said bill has already passed the House with the repeal in place. The Senate has until early December to follow suit before the end of this session of Congress. But the odds that these lame ducks will fly are long indeed.

Strangely, I read that three gay military groups have issued a letter telling lawmakers that it’s OK to drop the Don’t Ask amendment as long as the Senate passes the defense budget. The Palm Center, OutServe and Knights Out (a West Point group) issued a patriotic statement noting that funding the military is the highest priority, although they still support an end to the ban.

May I just say that this is crazy talk? One way or another, the Senate will fund the Defense Department. It’s not as if we are either going to repeal Don’t Ask, or suddenly bankrupt the Pentagon. So why issue such a gratuitous statement and undermine the slim chances of a repeal by giving cover to antigay lawmakers?

As for the repeal itself, I suppose it’s not dead until it’s dead, but I’m not holding my breath. At this rate, the military ban will still be in place two years from now, voiding the signature first term promise that Obama made to our community. The Don’t Ask court case has just taken up its lengthy residence in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where any outcome will (probably) be appealed, ergo don’t look to the courts to end the ban before the next election.
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Prop 8 Oral Arguments Coming Up

Speaking of the Ninth Circuit, the court has scheduled two hours of oral argument on the Prop 8 case for December 6. The first hour will be devoted to the question of whether anyone has standing to appeal Judge Walker’s marriage equality ruling to begin with. The proponents of Prop 8 will get 15 minutes to argue their case, followed by 15 minutes for lawyers from Imperial County.

Imperial County stepped into the Prop 8 case once it became clear that the issue of standing was in doubt. Since the State of California has declined to defend Prop 8, Imperial County is suggesting that it has the legal right to act on behalf of the unwilling state.

After Imperial gets its fifteen minutes of fame, our side will have half an hour to rebut both parties.

The second hour will be devoted to the underlying merits of the case, starting with the Prop 8 proponents and followed by 15 minutes each from the Olson team and the City of San Francisco. It looks as if the Ninth Circuit is prepared to rule on both the issues of standing and the constitutionality of Prop 8.

Under normal timetables, the court would issue a decision in early March. If the panel agrees that no party had standing to appeal, that part of their decision could be appealed to the full Ninth Circuit, or to the Supreme Court. Quite frankly, I’m not sure what would happen to the underlying case during this process. Maybe it would tag along for the ride up the court ladder.

As far as I can tell, courts can do whatever they like.
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Temps Perdu

What else is new? Are you excited about the royal wedding? Me too! I’m not sure why.

Does it not strike you that the “1900s” now sounds like some ancient time in the distant historical past? I can hardly believe I lived “in the 1900s,” let alone that I spent a sizable chunk of time in that century. I say this because the notion of a royal wedding and princes and princesses seems archaic.

Do you ever look at mailboxes and pay phones and electrical wires and think of photographs in the year 2075? These things are the horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps of our lifetimes.

My grandmother was raised on a square-rigged sailing ship, transporting cargo from Baltimore to South America in the late 1800s, and my granddaughters will probably see the twenty-second century. That just seems paranormal.

Meanwhile I had planned to object to several TV commercials in this column, beginning with the Nationwide ad where “Pam” complains that she signed up for car insurance with some other company and then she never heard from them again!

As Mel noted the other night, and honestly I had asked myself this same question, why would you want your car insurance company to contact you for no reason? The meth addict from Nationwide pledged that his company would treat Pam like a valued member of the family, and even name the company in her honor, but again, do you want that kind of obsessive attention from your car insurer? No, you don’t.

Finally, I am repelled by the scatological trend in toilet paper ads where one brand has decided to “talk frankly” about getting “clean” and keeping your “hands clean” and another has the jumped the shark completely with the tagline: “Enjoy the go.”
   
Please. Have you no decency? Can we not go back to squeezing and pseudo-scientific displays of absorbency?
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arostow@aol.com