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Sarah Palin Channels Allen Ginsberg!

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Having despatched his women vote, has Sarah Palin taken the fight to Obama's core demographic of pot-smoking hippie homosexual intellectuals?

Compare and contrast Palin's recent interview with Charlie Gibson, in which she rails against a new cold war with Russia while refusing to rule out a hot one, and Allen Ginsberg's poem ‘America‘, in which he rails against bourgeois hypocrisy while refusing to say the Lord's prayer:

Sarah Palin, ABC World News Tonight, September 11, 2008:

My mind is made up, there's going to be trouble…

America it's them bad Russians

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians

The Russians are power mad. The Russia wants to eat us alive. She wants to take

Our cars from out our garages

Her wants to take our factories

Her wants to corrupt our college girls

Her wants to put us all in slave labour camps

Her wants to emaciate us like skeletons

Her wants Malenkov or Bulganin or somebody to be our boss.

Her wants to dictify us.

Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations

That no good. Ugh.

 

Allen Ginsberg, America:

We’ve got to keep an eye on Russia.

For Russia to have exerted such pressure

in terms of invading

a smaller democratic country, unprovoked

is unacceptable and we have to keep…

we have got to keep our eyes on Russia,

under the leadership there.

I think it was unfortunate.

some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken

away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.

That's why

we have to keep an eye on Russia.

Russia.

They are our next door neighbors.

They are our next door neighbor.

We will not repeat a Cold War.

We cannot repeat the Cold War.

We are thankful that, under Reagan,

we won the Cold War,

without a shot fired, also.

We will not repeat a Cold War.

To use Ginsberg-Palin's own words, “Are you being sinister, or is this some sort of practical joke? America, this is quite serious… America, is this correct?”

–by Vadim Nikitin

 

Author

Vadim Nikitin

Vadim Nikitin was born in Murmansk, Russia and grew up there and in Britain. He graduated from Harvard University with a thesis on American democracy promotion in Russia. Vadim's articles about Russia have appeared in The Nation, Dissent Magazine, and The Moscow Times. He is currently researching a comparative study of post-Soviet and post-Apartheid nostalgia.
Areas of Focus:
USSR; US-Russia Relations; Culture and Society; Media; Civil Society; Politics; Espionage; Oligarchs

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