Palin: North by Northwest
I spent last Friday night in my local park watching an outdoor showing of the Hitchcock classic "North by Northwest," in which advertising man Cary Grant is mistaken for a CIA agent by the name of George Kaplan. It ends up that Kaplan is not a real person at all but an illusory character created by the Agency to entrap a ring of foreign spies led by the coolly evil James Mason. But once Grant has been mistaken for Kaplan, CIA bigwig Leo G. Carroll decides that he makes a better decoy than the faux character they have created, so they use him to reel in their prey.
Granted, I've been a bit disturbed of late -- not least of all by the Republican convention -- but I got to thinking after the film of the parallels between the Cary Grant character and America's star of the moment -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
