A COUPLE COUGARS:These Cats Are really Gone

Going Rogue in the wild. A tandem of  dysfuntional cougars, who escaped the idyllic Cougar Town setting of the wildlife preservation. Harkening to the call of the past and a howl to the more enigmatic qualities of human nature. The old ghosts in the machine are cantankerous and cranky, but they’re  getting up to speed. In the case of ”author” Sarah Palin, its of that American archetype, the untrustworthy narrator, the confidence women. Its the rhetoric of manipulation, shocking the public into a state of anti-awareness.

It must be part of the American dream. This admiration of people who encompass all the ”yankee” spirit of ingenuity and resourcefullness. Good ‘ole American know-how; how to ingratiate themselves into people’s lives in order to swindle them. Alex de Toqueville, historian and political commentator saw Americans as people who continuously transformed themselves while shedding their past like dead skin. ”Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him. ( Democracy in America, Toqueville ) The trickster, who unremittingly alters his masquerade, thus becomes a fitting metaphor for the shifting values of American life. Like Palin, mediatized into becoming a figure of covert and overt admiration against the grain of liberal pieties of trust. The sense of ”becoming” , in particular, American, is essentially to divest oneself of a past identity, to make a radical break with the past, history, and construct a new reality; something illusory, fictional and pragmatic that is plausible enough to sell.

The con artist is a leitmotif that runs through every facet of American culture. Sarah Palin is just a busty and leggy snake oil salesperson of the right, a first cousin to the blustery and rhetoric laden Michael Moore of the left. From Elmer Gantry by Sinclair lewis to Huck  Finn, the list is long and impressive. Palin’s absurdity defines the farcical elements and creates the parody providing relevence and a certain levity seen in the political portrayals of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s assumption of politics as farce.

”She was presented as a straight-talking woman who could raise five children while hunting and fishing, governing and staying fit. Here was a woman who returned to her desk, days after childbirth, following a pregnancy that she never thought to trouble anyone with – not even, she claims, while she was in labour during a lengthy flight….Ms. Palin’s appeal to right-wing men was as the spiritual sister of that mythical Chinese woman who gives birth silently in the fields and returns to tilling. A few more of the likes of her and America wouldn’t need daycare, health care, much education, complex ideas (easily replaced with common sense!) or even decent jobs – clearly any resourceful woman could set a few snares and live off the land…Their deference, the laxness of her book suggests, has emboldened her:Going Rogue is beyond self-mythologizing. It’s beyond verifiably unreliable or even delusional. It’s practically Nabokovian in scope. ( Tabatha Southey, Globe and Mail )

As the article reveals, the fascination with Palin, does not long survive the actual opening of her book. Unmasked, its the onset of nausea with the fixations and boredom competing with the ingenuities , irritations  and  self-contradictions. In Going Rogue, nobody seems real; she seems to be playing with automata. Just a wearied and unwearying catalogue of ready to use homilies and cliches; heaping dollops of farinaceous inedibility.

In Hungary, the Jobbik party, a right wing is using similar rhetoric behind its flashy female symbol, who appropriates the older European tradition of storytelling, and an old storyline of belonging. A traveling medecine woman,  and a satchel full of phony prescriptions of conventionally satisfying solutions to the country’s ills. Morvai though, is touching part of  Hungary’s jingoistic desire to resurrect Horthy and fuel the power and glory fever within the cauldron of Hungary’s human rights crisis. A patriotic romance, a stirring of the young hearts, which she may not fully understand.

”On paper, Krisztina Morvai is the kind of woman that any political party would like on their ticket: an attractive blonde working mum, who juggles a high-flying legal career with bringing up three children.Meet the coiffeured, fragrant new face of the Far Right in Europe, whose blonde bob, customary red jacket and campaigning feminist background make her arguably the world’s only cross between Hillary Clinton and British National Party leader Nick Griffin.”

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Morvai FB Group fans? Hungarian parliament ,March,2009