Archive for April, 2010

Hail Sarah, Full Of Grace. The Lord Is With Thee.

Via Weigel, Ted Nugent gives his view of Sarah Palin:

If Sarah Palin played a loud, grinding instrument, she would be in my
band. The independent patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our
forefathers are alive and well in Sarah. In the way she lives, what she
says and how she dedicates herself to make America better in these
interesting times, she represents the good, while exposing the bad and
ugly. She embraces the critical duty of we the people by participating
in this glorious experiment in self-government. The tsunami of support
proves that Sarah, 46, represents what many Americans know to be common
and sensible. Her rugged individualism, self-reliance and a herculean
work ethic resonate now more than ever in a country spinning away from
these basics that made the U.S.A. the last best place.

Nugent perfectly channels Palin's appeal to a bewildered, beleaguered, older white America. This appeal is not about policies or even Palin's actual life so much as projection onto someone of an ideal type that represents something deep down in the national psyche. See if you can observe any policy reasons to support Palin in Nugent's poem. Now look at the way he conflates her neurotic fundamentalism and delusional grip on reality with those dry deists who founded this country on Enlightenment principles. Then look at how most see her as "authentic" when she is, of course, less authentic than even John Edwards. And note too the judgment that a governor who quit halfway through her first term represents a "herculean work ethic." We are in Imaginationland here.  And boy, how it makes Nugent – and so many others – feel good again, feel as if they have recaptured their country again. They see in this immaculate misconception (with a bonus miraculous birth to another symbol of the pro-life movement, a child with Down Syndrome!) the salve to every anxiety and view all criticism of her as somehow illegitimate, and stemming from a hatred of the real America. Rejecting Palin, of course, is actually a resistance to fake America, with its magical realist narratives and Christianism as a doomed cover for collapsing social norms, family breakdown and drug use. A reader writes:

Churchill's essential genius apropos
Hitler was not to see that he was rotten, which everyone did,
but to understand that Hitler had suspended the normal rules of
political engagement among his followers so that the obvious
profit/loss-gain/setback constraints of power politics no longer
applied.  Sensible warnings that he would lead his country into war and
ruin, from inside or outside, were of no value, as they would have been
to the Kaiser or even Mussolini.

There are moments in history when it
helps to see that the precedents of history no longer cover the ground.
No, of course, Palin is no Hitler — but your central insight, that the
normal rules of American political life have been suspended in
permanence for her by circumstances and her admirers (she could easily
run a campaign without ever having to face a single neutral, much less
hostile, reporter) is correct, and this counts.

Of course the Hitler analogy is way out of bounds, as my reader notes. But I do think the fact-free cult of personality around Palin – her embodiment of an idealized representation of the America some feel they are losing – does represent something new and dangerous in politics. What we see is a politician who, for a critical segment of the population (the GOP base) cannot do wrong because she is Sarah Palin. She is a symbolic, iconic figure – and her support comes from non-rational identity politics in a time of economic distress and great social change.

Look: I’ve read history. I’d rather be over-vigilant than sorry.

Tweet Of The Day

"Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill baby drill' should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty," – Bill Maher.

I have always been in favor of Cape Wind off Cape Cod but the confluence of these two events will surely help swing public opinion further in favor of non-carbon energy. David Brooks has a very helpful column today on how government is necessary to get this industrial revolution kick-started. If the Democrats do not use this disaster to advance the energy bill ASAP, they may miss a critical moment to escape the oil-addiction even George W. Bush acknowledged in his final years.

(Photo: A boat makes its way through crude oil that has leaked from the
Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico on April 28, 2010 near
New Orleans, Louisiana. An estimated leak of 1,000 barrels of oil a day
are still leaking into the gulf. By Chris Graythen/Getty
Images.)