The point about Sarah Palin is that she's amoral.

News about Sarah Palin: apparently she's blah blah blah blah blah.

Sarah Palin: theories as to why she apparently arouses hatred. I probably do hate her, and insofar as I do, I hate that I hate her. To inspire the hatred of others is to wield a peculiar kind of power. There's also a part of me that is in a sense unfazed by her personally, that sees in her a representation of many of contemporary America's most morally objectionable tendencies. It is these tendencies that I oppose with all my might, whether she's there to embody them or not. Right? ...

But, Sarah Palin: she's got to be a symptom of something rather than the other way around, right? Because what symptom could possibly be CAUSED by a Sarah Palin? No. She must be the symptom. The side effect.

Sarah Palin: a side effect. Like television commercials for various god-knows-what prescription medications marketed to Baby-Boomers, so that they don't have to poop at inopportune moments, or whatever it is. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE SARAH PALIN. Sometimes these advertisements -- the funniest of them, to be sure -- devote, like, over half of their running-time to the announcer guy reading out laundry lists of scary-ass side effects, which MAY INCLUDE MUCUS, SEIZURE, BLOOD CLOT, LOSS OF HEARING, OR -- IN RARE CASES -- SARAH PALIN...

I don't hate Palin so much as I fear the consolidation of political power among those who love her.

Sarah Palin -- to paraphrase the Sex Pistols -- She ain't no human being!, but a constellation of images, allusions and gestures.

The mediated phenomenon "Sara Palin" evokes nostalgia among a large number of Americans -- although, as far as I can tell, not a majority of them -- for a past that does not exist/that never existed.

I am reminded of accounts I have read of what it was like to witness the ascendancy of National Socialism in the tempestuous final days of the Weimar Republic: the celebration of ignorance, of seething, unfocused resentments.

The final revenge of style over content.

Sarah Palin makes George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. She makes Ronald Reagan look pro-education. Sarah Palin is worse than these men because, whereas their moral precepts were delusional, hers are non-existent.

She's amoral: she represents indifference toward morality, indifference toward the Constitution, indifference toward the quality of life -- and livelihoods -- of present and future generations, indifference toward science, indifference toward representative democracy, indifference toward the separation of the branches of government, indifference toward education, indifference toward art, toward culture, toward freedom, toward poverty, toward the pursuit of happiness, indifference toward the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers, indifference toward religion in its meaningful sense, indifference toward history, indifference toward ideas, and indifference toward suffering.

The only thing toward which she is not indifferent is Sarah Palin. She doesn't care about the people who celebrate her. The people who celebrate her do so in the sense that they live vicariously through her. She embodies a collective, incoherent and self-contradictory dream. This dream pines for the destruction of all things unfamiliar in the interest of preserving the self as the self construes itself.

We really should be explaining the Left objection to her in moral terms: Sarah Palin is amoral.

Some Hates/Loves (ala Westwood & McLaren)

Sex was the name of the boutique owned and operated by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the 1970s, located at 430 King's Road, London. McLaren, of course, became the manager of the Sex Pistols before his megalomania, incompetence and clashes of ego with John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon precipitated the band's disintegration.

Although Westwood and McLaren were in the business of selling clothes -- designed by Westwood, who appropriated period and street fashions -- the couple's real stock in trade was anti-establishmentarianism. They set out to tap into a growing and restless market of misfits; unemployed kids from the projects, as well as refugees of lower-middle-class suburbs, occupying condemned buildings in the economic and cultural wasteland of inner-city London. Westwood and McLaren attracted a clientèle whose sense of fashion was united its contempt for the hypocrisy, excess and bourgeois myopia of anything related to hippie culture.

Neither McLaren nor Westwood has ever been noted primarily for possessing business acumen. They frequently remodeled their store and changed its inventory out of boredom rather than to capitalize on sales. Initially calling their shop Let It Rock, which peddled Teddy Boy regalia, they moved on to edgier and funnier pastures with the advent of Sex, which specialized in rubber clothing, assorted accoutrements and paraphernalia, and -- most importantly -- tee-shirts emblazoned with snarky or confrontational slogans.

One such tee-shirt declared: "You’re gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on!" Beneath this manifesto appeared a list of pop culture and political references under the headings Hates and Loves. It is in the spirit of that pioneering tee-shirt that I shall undertake to improvise some Hates and Loves of my own. Or, rather, some Nos and Yeses. And since negation is an act of creation, let us begin with the former:

No!
audiophilia
blinders
blogs
Brooklyn
cant
ear fatigue
determinism as despair
Jim Derogatis
'expertise' as a stand-in for persuasiveness
Sasha Frere-Jones
Nancy Franklin
Jonathan Franzen
the herd
the hive
Sam Harris
Hilary
Christopher Hitchens (soused fatso, turncoat, fascist)
Peter Hitchens (bigot & mouth-breather)
Marx, mis- and shallow readings of
meritocracy, the concept of
NPR
.mp3s
'objectivists', from The Unabomber to Alan Greenspan
Peter, Bjorn and John (or whatever it's called)
scientism
Spiritualized
standardized tests (& all other forms of eugenics)
Stereolab after Sound-Dust
Sid Vicious
David Foster Wallace since 1999

Yes!
Anthony Braxton
Lester Bangs
Barack
cigarettes
cigarettes, jazz-
John Coltrane
daydreaming
eloquence
Brian Eno
Thomas Frank
good luck, not underestimating the importance of
historicism
the Hohner Pianet, model T
jazz
Mark Kozelek
Herbert Marcuse
Marx
Sean O'Hagan
Jim O'Rourke
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
The Last Metro
Lewis H. Lapham
John Lydon
Spacemen 3
thought
vinyl
.wav files
Slavoj Žižek