This one’s about why I think Sarah Palin deserves a place on the world stage, no matter the result of the United States Presidential Race. Which is actually an excuse to tell you about my nun fetish, so stick with it.
First, though, a complaint:
Damn those memes.
Ideas spread so fast and so organically, it’s hard to know for sure where they began. It fills writers with self-doubt.
You want to write a column about the US elections before it’s too late. You start figuring out what’s funny. The term ”electile dysfunction” comes to you. You’re very impressed with yourself.
Then that furry little animal of doubt scuttles in through the back of your head.
”Am I really that funny?” you begin to wonder. ”Or did I hear that somewhere before.”
Fearing doing an unconscious Bristow-Bovey, you hit Google. Google hits you back. Electile dysfunction? 54 051 results.
Erectioneering? Even worse.
(A ”meme”, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is an idea that travels from one individual to another. Richard Dawkins invented it to describe how nongenetic stuff might work a lot like genetic stuff. Then, when nobody was looking, he Googled it. 37 372 results. He said I shouldn’t tell.)
Which takes me neatly to the Republican vice-presidential candidate, she being one of those nutty creationists. That Sarah Palin.
She’s a hottie. But then, I’ve always had a thing for puritans. And I’m not the only one.
It won’t surprise you that, back in high school, word in the corridor was the church-going girls were the most likely to let you peek at their lacy underthings.
It’s one of those memes that won’t go away: the more chaste, the more haste. Not that I knew anything about that. I was too busy mistaking poetry for an effective seduction tool.
Too busy avoiding getting hit in the face with a volleyball by the kind of boy who regularly got to see lacy underthings.
Then came the day my parents announced that my sister and I would be taking piano lessons from German nuns at the priory up the road. I assumed, fairly, I thought, that my nun would be played by a young Marlene Dietrich.
From memory, I’d recite Auden’s Lullaby to her:
”Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass”
(I was unaware at the time of the homosexual subtext; both of Auden’s Lullaby and of having a crush on Marlene Dietrich.)
”Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers”
A flush would come to her cheek.
”Scheizer,” she’d murmur, pulling back her wimple.
Unfortunately, my nun was not played by a young Marlene Dietrich.
Sister Auspitz was several billion years old and sprayed me head-to-toe with Doom before I was allowed to sit at the piano.
I quit those lessons pretty quick.
But I wasn’t done trying to bag a puritan. In fact, I made a habit of falling for girls who only had eyes for pew.
They can be hard to spot. Typically, they don’t come right out with it.
”What’s this strange power she has over me?” I’d be wondering in that stage of first flirtation, before we got to the naughty bits.
Then, pre-empting me making my move, she’d pop the question.
”Have you found Jesus?”
My heart would fall right out of me. Not this again.
I’d want to pull the rug out from under that silliness. I’d want to crack a joke. I’d want to answer: ”No, but I found nearly five bucks between the seat cushions.”
Of course, I didn’t. That power she had over me? Guess it was the Holy Ghost. And the Holy Ghost will not countenance one-liners.
I’d faff around. Use terms like ”spiritual but not religious”.
All the while falling further, prolonging the inevitable.
You get to the point where you start hoping you can change your mind about life, the universe and everything just to make it all work.
Change yourself. Unlearn evolution. Believe in the talking snake.
Then you read the pamphlet she delicately slipped into your bookbag. Up to the subheading: ”Inviting Jesus into the bedroom”.
Now, I might have a thing for nuns, but that’s a little too kinky even for me. I’d been in a love triangle with the Son of God long enough.
Still, I can’t get away from it. There’s something about those church-going girls that the girls in malls with whale tails and Chinese tattoos just don’t have.
Something Sarah Palin has.
Something smoldering. Something that makes the schoolboy in me want to sneak a peek at her lacy underthings.
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