Glamour and culture

My friends, these are not small-town values we can believe in.  

Great article on Palin in the LRB by Jonathan Raban.  Here's a snippet:

Palin’s view of aesthetics was nicely highlighted in 1996, a few months before she ran for mayor, when a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News happened to light on her in an excited crowd of five hundred women queuing up in the Anchorage J.C. Penney’s, waiting to snag the autograph of Ivana Trump, who was in town to hawk her eponymous line of scent.

‘We want to see Ivana,’ Palin said, who admittedly smells like a salmon for a large part of the summer, ‘because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.’

Here's hoping she was able to finagle a playstation 2 for her trouble as well, or whatever it is people were waiting outside department stores in the cold for in 1996.