inkbluesky

I have to agree, Boys will be boys

7. Stay Away from the Beauty Queen attack. I really mean this. For many reasons, it’s a loser. In the most base sense, I’ll remind you that people do in fact, love Beauty Queens. Also, she’s smarter than that, and has already proven she understands how to manipulate her opponents, who think to attack her this way thinking that she won’t have the brain-power to respond. She does, and she will. Also, there’s that whole winger thing of pretending to care about women who are being ‘attacked’ for being women; they do it (sadly) better than many on our side do. While we should recognize that her looks will play a role in the election, we should be very careful to treat her as a corrupt, Republican politician, and nothing about her gender or appearance. Short version: wingers long for and follow with religious conviction, their “Joan of Arcs.” Palin could be one.

The willingness to portray oneself as the pour beleaguered victim even when they have so many advantages (10 houses, 500 shoes) is one of the zealots stock in trade. Look at history and all the underestimated morons that humanity has put in power then had to endure; a tragic mistake to think in terms of having an inherent moral superiority over someone, or think that superiority will lead you to easy victory even as right as you might be in terms of goals. , SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR

I. LAYING PLANS

18. All warfare is based on deception.

20. Hold out baits to entice the enemy.  Feign disorder,
and crush him.

II. WAGING WAR

19. In war, then, let your great object be victory,
not lengthy campaigns.

You never know who commenters are. So the derisive comments about Palin on some sites that are laden with sexism could be trolls. Otherwise whether it the big name media columnists, blogs or the Obama campaign no one should be mistaken in thinking this is anything other then a war against two worthy adversaries. Just judging from a couple of videos on the net, Palin is media savvy and knows how to use it to her advantage. She has been caught pandering and is currently caught up in a scandal that involved using her political position as means to extract revenge in a personal matter. Hammer her on the issues.

art of war. should have titled it victims everywhere.

Maybe there are too many drugs in the water supply. The Wall Street Journal doing a good review about Emily Dickinson’s friend/editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily’s Ambassador

Higginson (1823-1911) has long been exiled to the underworld of Dead White Males: He was the establishment prude who co-edited Dickinson’s work for publication after she died at age 56 in 1886 — only a handful of her nearly 1,800 poems had been published in her lifetime. He shepherded two volumes of them into print in altered form, grammar and punctuation conventionalized, slant-rhymes rewritten to rhyme. Perhaps Higginson deserves a reprieve. After all, co-editor Mary Todd Loomis was the more avid prettifier (“Let us alter as little as possible,” he scolded her)

This is from a book review by Bill Christophersen of ‘White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’ by Brenda Wineapple. There is an excerpt from the book here. While Dickenson has always had her fans, she has been underestimated by many. Often times assigned to the order of chic writers as in chic flicks. She was too big, too expansive to be assigned to a little corner of the literary world. Christophersenin his introduction,

“Parting is all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell.” Who but Emily Dickinson would hijack the meter of the hymnal (“Our God, our help in ages past / And hope for years to come”) to doubt the afterlife? Gnomic and subversive, her poems are shots of triple-distilled whiskey that jolt going down, then radiate, leaving us wide-eyed and slightly fuddled.

Some of her stuff because of the rhymes can go down as quaint Hallmarkish poetry. Hardly relevant in our modern world, but on taking a closer look Dickinson’s work is a “jolt” and sometimes a dark one at that.