Dust on the Bookshelf

Tim Polenta, I mean Pawlenty, wants to be Vice President

Some of you may remember my earlier discussion comparing Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty with Polenta...

            And yet I can't stop thinking about Tim Pawlenty. This man:

            

            He seems nice enough from this picture. And I figured as the former governor of Minnesota he's probably smart enough too. Until I saw the video in which he thought Bill O'Reilly's calling him "vanilla" (re: plain) meant that O'Reilly was playing the race card. Or the video of the Republican presidential debate, after his "ObamneyCare" comment was brought up, in which he back-stepped and sucked-up so hard to Mitt Romney I thought he was just going to abandon his podium to go door-to-door for the former governor of Massachusetts.

            Geez, this guy seems lame, and confusingly so. Maybe comparing him with the food that always brings him to mind will stir some clarity into this melting pot.

            -Polenta -vs- Pawlenty
            -Bland unless well-seasoned -vs- Bland and politically unseasoned
            -congeals over hot fire -vs- breaks down under fire
            -sticks to your ribs -vs- sticks it to Mitt
            -can be molded into a loaf -vs- easily molded and aloof
            -vs- "vanilla"

I refresh your memory today to make a bold claim about the man. Tim Pawlenty wants to be Vice President. He always has. As mentioned above, TP was early afraid to stand up to Mitt Romney and refused to confront him in person. In this past week's Republican Presidential debate, TP was given the opportunity to actually confront Romney on his state health care plan and defend his creation of the term "Obamneycare."
   
In that clip TP is evasive as ever and while he does stand behind his creation of the term, he mostly focuses on how he better contrasts with President Obama than Mr. Romney.

But it gets better. After the moderator asks many of the candidates about certain absent figures (Rick Perry and Sarah Palin), TP takes the opportunity on an unrelated question to name drop and highlight a time he got to hang out with Rick Perry. Watch the clip for yourself, but all I heard him say was "pick me rick! pick me!"
  

Sunday Pawlenty officially dropped out of the race for Republican Presidential nominee. He came in third in the Iowa straw poll. A day earlier, Rick Perry announced that he would run for president (here we go again, texas). Seems that TP probably ticked Mitt Romeny off one too many times, but lucky for Tim, he has not yet gotten on Rick's bad-side. He practically gave him a shout out and a thumbs up at this weekend's debate. 

As I said before, like polenta, Pawlenty can be easily molded into any desired shape. So I would not be surprised if we soon saw him take the form of a Mockingbird, Texas' state bird, and perch himself on the roof of Rick Perry's camp, mimicking any cry that political campaign makes. 

does Frank Norris speak of cities?

I am giddy to begin a new book today. It was referenced in my class on the American Gilded Age (1870-1900) and nestled in the used book basement of the Harvard Book Store for a whopping $2.50.

The Octopus by Frank Norris, (full title: The Epic of Wheat: The Octopus, a Story of California) was published in 1901 as part of an intended three part series about wheat. Norris sadly died after completing the second volume. But Norris, who the inside cover of this book describes as "strikingly handsome" wrote about more than just wheat. He wanted to capture, in style of the newly popular european realists, the destructive push and pull between wheat farmers and railroad monopolies in the West. He essayed to show how these big businesses, a popular depiction of them at this time was in the form of an octopus, hurt American families and small businesses while poisoning the whole industry with their black gold ink. Unclear if Norris will at any point talk about "big government" but I look forward to the likely parallels in his contemporary nostalgia for a wild, more independent if not personal, America and some opinions expressed today at a changing american market and economy.

For now a passage, in which I feel Norris may not only be talking about sheep. His dreary account of this pack resonates with some the turn-of-the-century fears of big American cities becoming urban wastelands of lost anonymous souls. 

The sheep were spread out roughly in the shape of a figure eight, two larger herds connected by a smaller, and were headed to the southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat stubble as they proceeded. But the number seemed incalculable. Hundreds upon hundreds of gray, rounded backs, all exactly alike, huddled, close-packed, alive, hid the earth from sight. It was no longer an aggregate of individuals. It was a mass-- a compact, solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a tick pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth. From it there arose a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate, like the sound of very distant surf, while all the air in the vicinity was heavy with the warm, ammoniacal odor of the thousands of crowding bodies (28).

Standard Oil as the Octopus

 
"The curse of California" Railroad monopoly as the octopus