The Relevance of Sarah Palin

     The Celebrity Apprentice never featured a contestant named Palin, although La Toya Jackson and Trace Adkins made it on the show.  Joan Rivers, too, and Meat Loaf, Lisa Rinna, Gary Busey, Dionne Warwick, Cyndi Lauper, Andrew Dice Clay, Dennis Rodman, and Cheryl Tiegs, were also contestants.  The show still exists.  Donald Trump, who squeezed the program out of his ass in 2008, will not host the eighth season due to electioneering obligations.  Instead, Arnold Schwarzenegger (former bodybuilder, actor, former governor, former Kennedy in-law, and son of a Nazi), will play host to a cast including Boy George, Vince Neil, and Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi.
     Has-been celebrities have to go somewhere; I'm not giving them a hard time for being on Trump's show.  To be a has-been, one is also a once-was, a state of accomplishment most people never achieve.  I've seen actors and actresses in specific TV shows, performing brilliantly, working with strong scripts and excellent colleagues, and then their other work isn't nearly as remarkable.  The actress Alyson Hannigan, for example, was extraordinary in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Buffy's best friend, Willow Rosenberg.  Hannigan then spent nine seasons on a comedy, How I Met Your Mother, a show I've tried to appreciate, since Alyson is on it, but it does nothing for me.  Her great talent, so evident in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, got smothered on the other show.  I don't, and never will, regard her as a has-been, but her case illustrates Hollywood's fickleness.
     Dionne Warwick, back in the day, was a majestic presence with a soaring beautiful voice.  Picturing her on The Celebrity Apprentice, face to face with Trump's troll under the bridge personality, seems an insult to the concept of aesthetics.
     Has-beens, or once-wases, subordinating themselves to a human shitsack with a malevolent brain, coated from head to toe in compacted Cheeto dust, seems insulting to human dignity itself.  Actress Tia Carrere, who appeared in Celebrity Apprentice Season 5, is not a masterful thespian, but she was fun in Wayne's World, and in the underrated sword and sorcery film, Kull the Conqueror, she burned up the screen as a long-dead evil sorceress resurrected with bad results for all.  I say Tia Carrere has dignity and deserves respect, even when appearing on such a crappy show as Trump's multi-year reality TV lead-up to his presidential run, a show that served the purpose of making him well-known, at least his surface "tough and smart" personality, to a very wide audience that would then think in terms of either voting for him or not.
     Sarah Palin would be a perfect Celebrity Apprentice contestant.  She's a has-been, and also a true believer in the Trump line of philosophical politics and sticking it to the masses.  As his surrogate, she spoke to the Milwaukee County Republican Party in a state four days before its crucial primary, one that may make the Convention in Cleveland a contested one, if Trump loses Wisconsin to Cruz.
     Palin, in my view, is a poor propagandist to send out.  One expects a spokesperson to be able to speak well.  Her penchant for cute phrases and her tendency to lapse into gobbledygook, her overall sentence structure non-existent, as if punctuation was never a subject taught to her, will leave any intelligent listener, Republican or Democrat, shaking their heads, as I saw some members of the audience do during her twenty minute speech.  The audience was polite and quiet, although they gave her a standing ovation at the end--not as forceful and sudden as the ones Hitler received in the Reichstag, but most everyone stood.  The helium, though, has escaped the Palin balloon.
     I understand she was trying to be humorous when she said that Mexicans entering our country illegally are given "gift baskets with soccer balls" by our government, but her lack of ability with intentionally delivered comedy just made me think, "The government isn't doing that, though.  You just scolded the government for doing something it doesn't do."
     Palin, and Trump, are examples of how a major political party goes from strength (the Reagan years) to an uneasy but nevertheless adequate stability reinforced by across the political spectrum security concerns (the George W. Bush years) to a fracturing and crumbling, something akin to unmedicated multiple personality disorder (the present).  Sarah Palin's relevance as a supposed "conservative" is a fiction, yet she's plugging away, brought from Alaska by Trump to lend additional credence to his campaign.  By choosing her, he shows us how bad he is at selecting people to do things for him.  Sarah Palin's authoritarian-loving brain serves Trump's ego, but even actual Republicans, like those in Wisconsin who won't vote for Trump on Tuesday, are not interested in handing power to a man who doesn't respect his own limitations when it comes to using that power.
   
                                                                           Vic Neptune