Bored in Virginia, "Mother of Presidents"

October 27: Frederickburg, Virginia. Half listening to Palin's stump speech in this park rally plastered with posters ("Country First: No Surrender" "NObama" "Redistribute THIS" "I am Jane the Plumber") I was re-minded by this state's imperial and Freudian nicknames ("Old Dominion" "Mother of Presidents") that Virginia is the state of Presidents. One thinks of its famous farmer and Revolutionary scribe Thomas Jefferson, with his Bible, which, like this rally, was fully sanitized, the miraculous and supernatural words excised from the text, even as Palin's calculated earnestness was met with disproportionately atavistic cheering, I felt numbed by her oft-repeated promise to "shake things up in Washington" that "shake things up," [secouer] such a favorite colloquialism in America, bestowing on whoever says it the immediate status of both the fussy matronly housekeeper and the "maverick" [franc-tireur] and "reformer" [réformatrice] as if to re-form were to create a new form...and through these wholesome Puritan Palinian pleas "to rein in wasteful spending," [surveilleur étroitment] one pines for the less anal-retentive companionship of immoral, prolifically ill-behaving former U.S. Presidents: the promiscuous hedonistic Epicureanism of Old Dominion's Jefferson, the rowdy gun-toting, dueling Carolinian anarchy of Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson, the hard-drinking former Southern general Ulysses S Grant.