by Roy Exum
posted September 1, 2008
 Roy Exum |
This is the kind of woman I have been drawn to all my life, and, at a time when I have never been as distrustful and scornful of seedy “experienced” politicians of both Republican and Democratic stripe, this is the most refreshing change in the status-quo landscape of the party-driven phonies that I can ever remember.
Sarah Palin (pronounced “PAY-lan” in Alaska) is what I call “real,” if I don’t sorely miss the mark. She eloped. She hunts caribou. Once she broke her fingers while working on a family commercial fishing boat – and kept right on working. She’s got one son who is getting ready to be deployed to Iraq in less than two weeks.
She has another, just a baby, with Down’s syndrome. She coaches her kids’ youth teams. She runs in marathons. She flies her own float plane. Her husband is a blue-collar guy who races snow-mobiles in his spare time, and she wouldn’t trade her part-Alaskan Indian for any other man in the world. In short, she is us.
The first hue and cry was that she isn’t experienced, but it has been my observation that when peril comes knocking at the White House, guised in whatever shroud, those in charge call in a host of well-versed advisers and then make a decision.
If something were to happen to John McCain, obviously the most experienced of all the candidates, I’d follow Sarah’s lead because from every quarter comes the resounding evidence she has more common sense than any of those who seem to suffer so badly from “Potomac Fever.”
I’ve seen enough of Washington’s “experience” in just the last year or so to last a lifetime. I’ve seen Larry “The Toe-Tapper” Craig, a Republican senator from Idaho who handed a vice-squad cop his Senate card. Then there is William “Cold Cash” Jefferson, the Democratic Rep. from Louisiana who had $90,000 hidden in the TV-dinner boxes in his freezer.
I’m talking about once-noble guys like former New York Gov. Elliot “Steamroller” Spitzer, whom you know better as “Client No. 9,” and Rhode Island Rep. Patrick “The Pill Box” Kennedy. How about former California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a man who took on such regal airs before now being hailed as “The Most Corrupt Congressman Ever”?
All of these guys had experience, lots of it, and have each made the headlines in just the last 12 months. Experience no longer goes very far with me, and, from what I can see, there are millions more Americans thirsting for change. But I think you have to be careful just what kind of change you are talking about.
Barack Obama, who hasn’t been issued too many W-2 forms in his life and leaves us wondering just exactly who financed his education and his meteoric rise to fame, is perhaps one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, but when you do a “reduction” of what he says (a “reduction” is a fancy-restaurant word for cooking down the sauce), it is sometimes hard to connect the dots.
I’m also a bit peeved when I hear the Democratic camp saying the media, as biased as it well may be, is nonetheless making “too big a deal” of the years McCain spent in a Viet Cong hell-hole called the “Hanoi Hilton.” The enemy repeatedly tortured him so badly that today he has a tough time just combing his hair. Who among us can possibly make “too big a deal” out of his military service for America? Puh-leeze.
So the other day he gave us a vivid indication of the kind of president he aspires to be when he picked a relatively unknown woman who named her kids Track, Bristol, Willow and Piper before the last one – Trig – came along four months ago. And, oh, I just love that.
One of my all-time favorite books is a children’s book by Margery Williams titled “The Velveteen Rabbit.” I know I’ve gone to it well over 100 times in my life. As you ponder the difference in “experience” and “real,” allow me to share a few choice paragraphs.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. "The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."
royexum@aol.com
| Dining Out | Business | Movies | Focus | About Us |
| Church | Living Well | Memories | Outdoors | Real Estate | Student Scene | Travel |