I'm so confused, I'm spuddering

So, over at Digby's Hullabaloo, there was, um, this:

I think... I think I might need to see Sarah Palin's birth certificate. I don't know where she was really born, but it's becoming pretty clear to me that English isn't her native tongue. Also, this B.S. in Communications she supposedly has from the University Of Idaho? That should have been the tell, shouldn't it? I mean, B.S. in Communications--if that isn't some kind of none-too-subtle joke on the part of Palin's foreign puppetmasters, well... then the alternative is that the University Of Idaho will give any inarticulate jerk a bachelor's degree in Communications, I guess.

Everybody else, I'm sure, will point out how clueless and lost Palin appears to be about what Obama actually meant when he said "Sputnik moment" and her obvious ignorance of 20^th Century history. (And her confusion over the difference between "aspire" and "inspire." Communications, they say? Really? Really, really?) Anyway, if you'd like, you can go to the Digby piece I linked to in the first line for that sort of thing. My thing, honestly, was to wonder what in the Nine Hells Palin was talking about when she started babbling about "Spudnut moments", as I'd never even heard of this store Richland, Washington, that apparently is supposed to be the key to solving all of America's problems.

So, of course I went to the Internet, and maybe you already know what I found, since Giant Midgets readers are, as a rule, cosmopolitan sophisticates: the spudnut is apparently some kind of potato flour doughnut from the 1940s. I can only imagine. No, actually, I can't: as an avid fan of the succulent, lard-filled, yeasty and sugar-encrusted Krispy Kreme doughnut, I have no idea what a potato flour doughnut might taste like; I can't even think of a good reason you'd do that to a doughnut, though the fact the spudnut is a German recipe might go a long way towards explaining something. I shouldn't knock it, I know: spudnuts might be very, very tasty, and the fact that people were apparently willing to quixotically pursue spudnuts across North America for decades must say something about their addictive qualities. (Wikipedia, in addition to providing some historical context for the spudnut craze, claims there were also 170 Spudnut Shops in Japan in 1975, which tells us nothing. The Japanese have had 80 kinds of KitKat bar, including Earl Grey, Camembert and grilled corn. Yes, we're talking about candy bars. Yes, "grilled corn" is a candy bar flavor in Japan. No, I don't think that's terribly rational. Yes, that was the whole point.)

The Spudnut Shop Palin refers to is, as I mentioned, the one in Richland, Washington, and has been open at various locations in Richland since 1948, although the parent company the store originally franchised from has been out of business since the '70s or '80s (the previously-linked Wikipedia article confusingly says, "By the 1980s, however, the parent company closed...," leaving some ambiguity as to whether they closed in the '80s or before the '80s; huh). They seem nice enough from their website, which promises, "Before you know it, we'll be greeting you by your first name, and the waitress will be serving up your favorite Spudnut before you even order it." It indeed says something about their work ethic and reputation that they have, in fact, been around since 1948.

But I do have to wonder if Palin is thinking about the larger context of the Spudnut Shops story, as opposed to just considering this one, single store. I raise the question only because of the fact that while more than thirty Spudnut Shops endure (Wikipedia says 35, this website says 37), overall the Spudnut Shops story is the story of a franchise that ultimately failed, going out of business and leaving, out of some hundreds of storefronts (170 in Japan, alone!), a mere three dozen outlets apparently selling their own individual versions of the spudnut. The original recipe for the spudnut seems to have been lost for decades and then recovered, but the original glory of the spudnut, the height of the spudnut's spread and influence, it appears, began in World War II and ended during the Cold War.

Oh-oh.

One straining for a metaphor might suggest that a "national Spudnut moment" would be a national moment in which our larger organization--our Spudnut Stores parent company--goes belly-up out of business and our founding document--our spudnut original recipe, if you will--is lost for a generation. Lone, individual Spudnut Stores scattered here and there struggle on, some of them thriving while others go out of business and are torn down or replaced by dry cleaners, fast-food joints, florists and ethnic bistros; few of these increasingly isolated survivors, if any, still use the original ingredients and instructions for greatness. Also, lots of people haven't even heard of the stores and their major product is a fried zero.

Okay, so maybe that's a reach. Could be. But reading up on the history of Spudnut Stores and thinking about Ms. Palin's... whatever you want to call that...; honestly, I couldn't help imagining a nation's "spudnut moment" as being a postapocalyptic disaster, small city-states with their own fragmentary homebrew versions of a long-lost Constitution, facing the twilight. As a friend said when I told him about all of this, "Let's have a huge success before spiraling down into a shadow of our former glory." Which probably isn't fair to the small business Ms. Palin inarticulately dragged into the national spotlight, but, I mean, it's right there, you know?

Can a fried potato pastry carry the load of being a new symbol for something something small business patriotism families something hooray America? Should it? Do we even want to know? What I do know is that Ms. Palin has provoked a feeling deep within me, a stirring, a passion, a hunger. A hunger for doughnuts.

Mmmm... doughnuts.