Oh god, sweet Jesus, please, not another Palin diary. And...this one is from...me! What am I doing?
Well, I have a hard time resisting actual irony, especially when it is so poetically based. This story starts out with the fact that Joe McGinniss, sometime Palin chronologist, has snarkily rented the house next door to the Palins to hole up and write his next book on her.
Palin, being a woman of letters -- at least 19 or 20 out of the full 26 -- posted this news on Facebook, of course, the public square of this lamentable age of ours -- complaining about her supposed loss of privacy (!). I'm sure the irony there is beyond her. What got me to diary here was this comment: "''And you know what they say about 'fences make for good neighbors'? Well, we'll get started on that tall fence tomorrow,'' she wrote on Facebook."
Governor, meet Robert Frost. I think you missed him in junior high.
An educated person, I would think, would instead of quoting the platitude so literally might think of the poem "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost (quoted below for reference), and by "educated" I mean one who paid attention in 10th grade. I leave you as the reader to refresh yourself with a re-read and consider the true import of the Sarah Palins of the world on American thought in this age of partisan divide.
Robert Frost was, among many notable milestones of his life, the poet laureate (small l) at JFK's inauguration. "Mending Wall" appeared in Frost's seminal North of Boston in 1914.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."