I have discovered a new hidden thread in the vast tapestry of theories about Sarah Palin and her mystery resignation. The eureka moment came the way most of my breakthrough insights come to me: at the movies. I was sitting in a theater watching the trailer for the forthcoming G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, while trying to dig my Dr. Pepper and Entenmann’s brownie out of my backpack without alerting security, when I noticed that one of the villains blowing stuff up on the screen before me was, as the writers of pulp paperbacks would put it, distaff, distaff and hot. Distaff, hot, and dark-haired. She handled a rocket launcher with the aplomb of a trained huntress and was quick to turn to violence with a smirk and a grudge. And her swaggering hotness was only accentuated by the fact that she wore–eyeglasses, stylish eyeglasses that clearly marked her as a woman too busy and secure in her hotness to bother with laser surgery, never mind contacts. Because I was so busy trying to figure out who the actress was–turns out it’s Sienna Miller after a brunette rinse job–I was slow to recognize what my brain was really yelling at me, which was that the associations forming there went beyond the identity of the actual woman onscreen. Gradually the pieces began to come together: oh my God, Sarah Palin has joined S.H.I.E.L.D!
Or, rather, Cobra. I should confess right up front that I’m not the best person to go to for a breakdown of the G.I. Joe mythology, if that’s not too grand a word for the back story behind a late-summer movie based on a TV cartoon based on a toy line. I have faint memories of the glorious days of the original G.I. Joe, which I believe may have been the first product ever to inspire arguments that included some form of the claim, “Nuh-huh, dolls are for girls, this here’s an action figure!” In his golden age, G.I. Joes were a foot tall. The toy was first issued by Hasbro in 1963. Joe’s division was racially integrated starting in 1965, and in 1967 the guys were joined on the front lines by a female figure, the G.I. Joe Action Nurse. This turned out to be the New Coke of the G.I. Joe line and was quickly discarded, so quickly that its existence could easily be discarded from any history of the product line, but I don’t think you should ever pass up the chance to type the words “Action Nurse.” In the mid-70s, which was around the time I first made his khakied acquaintance, Joe learned kung fu and picked up a movable “eagle eye”, which I remember thinking was bionic, a notion that I developed with or without any encouragement from the manufacturers. It’s not as if I were taking notes.
Little did I realize at the time that G.I. Joe was on his last legs. Because of the Vietnam syndrome polluting the air and an invasion of idealistic hippie teachers into the educational system, war toys were out of fashion, replaced by Free to Be…You and Me and acoustic sing-a-longs of “Kumbaya.” The Joe line was discontinued, kung fu grip and all, only to re-emerge in the 1980s, physically shrunken but still patriotically motivated as all the bedamned, after Ronald Reagan had declared Morning in America. One place where the new morning went unnoticed was my bedroom, especially on weekends, because after a childhood slavishly devoted to watching Saturday morning cartoons, I had reached an age where I found that I could explore much stranger and more stimulating worlds than those provided even by Sid and Marty Krofft by sleeping till noon. (In those days, my version of “Watching the sun come up” was “Staring in confusion at the CBS Children’s Film Festival“.) It was during this period that G.I. Joe got his own TV series, one that rewrote the books by giving the old boy an adversarial organization, the terrorist outfit Cobra. Again, I missed all this, and would later have the pleasure of being made to feel like an old fart by peach-cheeked youngsters doing geeky comic riffs on Joe and Cobra Commander instead of on Pet Rocks and the Bay City Rollers, as God intended. Suffice to say that as little as I know about this phase of G.I. Joe’s career, I would know even less if I weren’t willing to do the research necessary to keep up with Robot Chicken.
In the contemporary Joe mythos, Sarah Palin’s doppelganger is the Baroness Anastasia DeCobray, who according to Wikipedia “serves as the COBRA Organization’s intelligence officer, sex kitten, and lieutenant to Cobra Commander”, and “whose beauty is matched only by her ruthlessness”, just like Palin and my mom. Apparently she went over to the dark side after her brother was killed by an American soldier and has a long-standing, murky relationship with a Cobra bigwig named “Laird James Cullen Destro XXIV”–and not to bash family tradition or anything, but after a while, doesn’t the Roman numeral thing begin to just denote a lazy reluctance to even try to think of a different name?–who is played in the new movie by Christopher Eccleston, which means that whatever nefariousness he’s involved in, I’ll probably end up rooting for him a little. (Wikipedia notes that James McCullen XXIV, and the Baroness and Jimbo “share a romantic relationship [the extent of which has never been revealed].” Mark Sanford would probably say that they never crossed the ultimate line.) The Baroness was so well received by TV viewers that she was later immortalized as part of the toy line. She was substantially more successful than Action Nurse.
Does Miller’s Baroness really look that much like Palin? Let’s split the difference and say that she looks almost exactly the way that the media keeps insisting that Palin looks: ripe and lascivious in a nasty, aging-mean-girl sort of way, she embodies what reporters seem to be getting at when they write stuff like this, from Todd S. Purdum’s instantly notorious Vanity Fair article: “Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.”
Of course, standards of beauty in politics keep shifting all the time: when Palin announced that she was quitting, I actually thought, for the first time in years, of Susan Molinari, the House Republican whose star rose after the 1994 elections because GOP bigwigs liked to point to her as proof that there was a place for both women and social moderates in the party, and who bolted two years later when offered an on-air job at CBS News. You used to hear a lot, even from people standing in the same room with her and who she could have beaten with a cudgel if the mood struck her, about how Molinari was too “cute” for politics; her fast fade from the airwaves was a harsh reminder that there remains a vast chasm between being too cute for politics and cute enough for TV news. This really is a tricky area to discuss, but I’ll just say that, for those of us who haven’t been in solitary confinement since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there really are people who are perfectly acceptably assembled yet who we simply cannot see in a sexual light, and for me, Palin leads the list. It’s not her politics, and not entirely the personality that comes through, but (to steal a phrase from Spalding Gray) the teeming amoebic mass that is her face, the way that it’s always going through a non-stop round of “wink, leer, sneer, pout, glower, repeat.” I watch her doing this stuff with her features while she’s doing family-audience-approved activities in public, and I am gripped with a desperate need to not even imagine what that hyperactive mug of hers gets up to when she’s in the throes of passion.
Did the Liberal Media Conspiracy deliberately plot to make the G.I. Joe movie just so they could have Miller doll herself up in Palinesque drag and plant subliminal images of the Wasilla warrior palling around with, indeed, fighting alongside terrorists, in the minds of voters? And did Palin get wind of it all, and, recognizing the damage that it would cause to her beloved children for them to hear playground chants of “Nyah, nyah, your mama had a romantic relationship the extent of which has never been revealed with Doctor Who!” Note that the movie opens early in August, which means that Palin, who plans to leave her job at the end of July, will be able to finish fixing the state and retreat, with her family, to an undisclosed underground lair where she can plot her next move without insidious media contaminants seeking through the vents. Obviously, I don’t actually believe this; it’s just one of those things I let my mind run with while waiting out the twenty minutes of trailers at Loew’s Sony. But if I can address myself to a single reader for just a moment: Glenn Back–you like? Slide me $250 via PayPal and it’s all yours. Throw in an extra $50, and I’ve also got one about how the Mark Sanford who left his house Friday morning isn’t the same one who came back from Argentina…
–Phil Nugent</i
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