palindrome

Psychosemiotic comments (webletter to MarKc Ames
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081020/ames

This is definitive on several big psychosemiotic (sign-use analysis) points, and deserves to be widely referenced by those who would know Palin (-drome) backward and forward. Maybe it takes a journalist.

Focusing on the focus groups metaphysically focuses the interface between vegetative reaction, in W. Reich's sense, and conscious experience (at the deep pre-verbal 'spark' level). This is where the involuntarily produced tokens* get translated by some inner, memory-involved process into text* (token + text => Sign-use (S*)): "SHE FLIPS MY BIC!" - Joe Muppet zings. Part of the whole phony thing about Fox news is this obvious-once-you-see-it manipulation of the being-bullies who always have just the right text for those tokens that might be welling up in your worthless, rebellious, spoiled soul. We're all John Mark Karr to them.

This is the critical interface for talking-point bullies*. Cut you off right there, just as that rebellious swelling from somewhere is about to escape one's lips. "HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, BUSTER BRIOWN!" (wink. gag ) They are constantly mirroring, as I think Maureen Dowd calls that, and expect those who are rudely interrupted to see themselves in their mirror too. Everything is a heheh to them (which makes them expecially LOL-sensitive, but hard to pull that off they are so shameless and fascile -- Sixpak's got the Queer eye now, had to come). It's a depressive adaptation to sustained trauma imported, I think, from the Middle East where living together in mutual hatred evolved into an existential artform decades back.

What Ames fails to connect (no blame; no one does unless they follow the neuro-psychological processing levels up the predicate ladders) is the Mother-Child (regressed to: fetus -- group-fantasy of Trig inside Palin's belly) template. He is excellent on America* desparately in need of a REDEMPTION drama. The neuro-psychological basis of that is Original Birth trauma, recognized since Freud and Rank as root of primal anxiety. (cf. Graff, Leary, deMause) REDEMPTION goes over by psychsemiotic processing ("=>") to BIRTH -- getting the hell out of this tunnel with little light at the end, writhing walls shrinking, stinking, de-oxygenated whale belly: the present psychic condition of much maligned Joe $ixkiller. The flip-flop flaccids with their Fox news o'meters, are registering umbilicus cuts that threaten to ABORT THE UNBORN. We're all unborn, to them.

The dots marking tokens of the most powerful unconscious fantasies are:

*McCAIN as "Vietnam war hero" (all heroes are fetal heroes who "make it out"; he even 'stayed behind until all were released" -- fetal sibling fantasy.)

*RESCUER - Heroes always come back to rescue the perishing (fetal siblings) It was 'fitting', in synch with the unconscious template that McCain would "suspend his campaign", throwing everything selfish aside, his own rebirth bid at the highest level, to Rescue the Bailout (er, Rescue: "Rescue the Rescue" - T.Friedman; the unc. likes to double up as much as possible on the power tokens; it "squared" the textual velocity), arriving by "parachute", like Mary Popins.

*PELOSI - => Fem Dems => Main (when it is v. Wall) Street => The People => Mother <= (our) America the Beautiful. We are all Pelosi -- in her moment before the first House vote. Now WE ARE ALL RAPED, THROUGH HER, BY HER. She has joined the Killer Mommy ranks of Palin wannabe gottchas. Sarah will cut her a new one.

"Mrs. Palin -- piece of work, that one