The Unbearable Lightness of Palin

I've been consumed with both paying work and my labors on the next MMIP production. (Diary of A Superfluous Man coming to the internet in November). Consequently, and perhaps mercifully, I've been unable to follow the adventures of Sarah Palin all that closely. I did catch a segment of the debate last night, though, and I watched her interview with Couric on Youtube.

Palin is an ignoramus: a hustling, bullshitting featherhead completely out of her depth. But that's not the worst bit. Such creatures are legion in the world, and life is generally kind to them. What troubles me more is that a sizable percentage of the American public doesn't mind that she's running for Vice President as a hustling, bullshitting featherhead completely out of her depth. Indeed, they try to sell her glib ignorance and sad unwillingness to look facts in the face as evidence that she's a Real American, an authentic, two fisted, meat eating, faith holding exemplar of the Good, True, the Red-White-and-Blue. I would have thought that the farce of the last eight years would have sated all but the most stupidity-hungry voters, but no. Tens of millions of people actually look upon Sarah Palin, smile warm smiles, and say "She's so me!".

I remember, years ago, sitting in my friend Neil's apartment and watching evangelical TV. We did it for a laugh. Anyone who can tune in to Jack Van Impe or Paul Crouch and not laugh at the combination of piety, syrup, bombast, hairspray, eye shadow, and gold-painted particle board can never hope to laugh at anything. But even as we chuckled we knew that most of the people watching and giving money to these clowns weren't laughing. They believe in this gilded tripe. When Jack Van Impe claims that UFOs are the angels foretold in Revelations, or when Pat Robertson claims that feminists are witches, their congregations, millions strong, not only swallow their stories, but they also write checks to sponsor the spread of these important messages. Sarah Palin would have gotten nowhere in life if these same people weren't willing to stuff envelopes and knock on doors to spread the word for her.

Of course, every nation can boast its resident population of boobs, and they often wield substantial political power. But it's always been strange to me that the U.S., a country with magnificent cities, great universities, and more than its share of great thinkers in every field of human endeavor, would choose the benighted clodhopper as the symbol of its national identity, and judge politicians on the basis of how closely they match that image. You'd think that George W. Bush would have spoiled this symbol for good and all, but no. It lives and appears immortal. Hence, Sarah Palin.

The rest of the world might want to start interviewing for the next last best hope of humanity.

Palin's Speech

As I figured, Palin is effective on television. She delivers speeches well, and she knows how to serve the red meat to the crowd. Much of it was made of lies, but it worked in a Young Tory of the Year kind of way:



I did find something curious though. Palin delivered, toward the end of her spiel, a long hagiography about John McCain's military service, and how much we should honor it, and how it proves that his character is one vastly superior to that of his opponent. I'm not surprised McCain/Palin is making this argument. It's the best one they've got. But I think back to four years ago. That time the Democratic nominee was the Vietnam veteran, and many of the people who cheered Mrs. Palin's remarks tonight were there, wearing band aids to mock John Kerry's military service. Later in the campaign their side invested millions in scurrilous ads that purported to show that Kerry's military record was a fiction. I guess the Right's sentimentality about military service kind of comes and goes, doesn't it?

Sarah Palin

Bristol Palin's pregnancy appears to have thrown the political world into a rage. I'm not quite sure why. The only dimension of that situation that is political is that Bristol's pregnancy is yet another symptom of the bankruptcy of one of the right's pet causes: abstinence-only sex education. In the end, I don't think it'll amount to much by itself. The only people who get really upset at this sort of thing--social conservatives--will give it a pass because Sarah Palin's a social conservative. (Imagine if Chelsea Clinton had turned up pregnant at seventeen. James Dobson would have never let us hear the end of it.) Now, if Bristol had been caught with another girl...

That said, I have plenty of better reasons for disliking Sarah Palin. First, she's a Republican, and if the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that Republicans are by and large disreputable creatures. Next, as Wasilla's mayor, Palin tried to ban books she deemed naughty from the library. When the librarian resisted, Palin tried to have her fired. Next, there's the whole matter of her firing the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner because he refused to (improperly) fire her ex-brother-in-law. Then there's the whole issue of McCain's method of picking Palin, which seemed to boil down to right-wing+XX chromosomes=running mate. If that's the way McCain'll pick his potential successor, what about the rest of his cabinet, or his Supreme Court justices? Then there's the matter of her courtship of radical right wing groups like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and the Alaska Independence Party. (Yeah, I thought the Civil War closed the question of secession, but I guess since George W. Bush took us back before the legal precedents of the Magna Carta, the question is open again.) Then there's her support of creationism in biology classes. (Another issue that was, for all rational people, closed in the mid-nineteenth century that she'd like to reopen.) Then there's her lying about her fight against the "bridge to nowhere". And there's her global warming denial, and her support for Pat Buchanan. (Has anyone asked her what she thinks about the Holocaust?)

All that's just in four days. I'm sure I'll see other things down the line. But those aren't reasons for her to be dumped from the ticket. The contemporary Republican party seems to like everything that I listed, and though I'm not watching cable news right now, I'm guessing an army of hacks has already fanned out to argue the virtues of book banning, creationism and abuse of power. After eight years, they've grown awfully good at it.

Sarah Palin's apparent failure to see that her children are properly educated about contraception strikes me as irresponsible and stupid, but that falls under the heading of her problem. (I do wish that her public policy choices wouldn't inflict this same problem on people far less able to bear the costs, but that's tantamount to wishing she weren't a Republican.) I dislike her because her policy interests and political goals would place cruel burdens on people I care about, starting with me. I dislike her because she's a symptom of this country's advancing decadence; she's another crackpot that too many people will take too seriously and defend too loudly.

But don't worry about her being dropped from the ticket. The Right will love her whatever she does, or did, for no other reason than that the Left hates her, and that's what counts.