Palindrome

The Sarah Palin experience caught everyone here by surprise. The boss's daughter, who worked hard in high school and the one university she attended and graduated from, took the nomination as a personal insult. Watching the rollout the day after the Democratic convention, I could not believe it. Most of the claims in her introductory speech were exposed as fabrications by a simple Wikipedia search. And then there was that voice and those bizarre phrasings. Who on earth calls an actual child of her own "the newborn?" Over the next few days it seemed that all America went ga-ga native trailer park, explaining and excusing almost everything. Interestingly, one of the few holdouts in the Fourth Estate was the National Enquirer, which was of course much more experienced than the rest of the commentariat in scandals swept under the rugs of the rich and famous. Buoyed by the sound bites of "her" acceptance speech, the Palin craze seemed to sweep the nation and the world. The next day a lifer-progressive colleague at work with me on a construction job said he was impressed with the radio bites and that he for one would rather have a beer with Ms. Palin (the video above is for him) than with a particularly humourless (and abstaining) former colleague, which was of course no real contest anyway.

Everything seemed to run smoothly at first. The tame ABC interview, where Charlie Gibson threw her a Bush-Doctrine lifeline, was followed by the boot-licking effort from Sean Hannity. And then the wheels came off. Who would have thought that Katie Couric could have been so intimidating? It was not a complete surprise. I was drifting off to sleep one night reading the New Yorker profile ("The State of Sarah Palin") that Philip Gourevitch had compiled before the McCain campaign bubble-wrapped her. Alarms woke me up while reading reported dialogue like the following:

“Our security detail, when I first got elected, met with us and said, ‘Do you guys got any issues with any threats?’” To which Palin replied, “‘Yeah, well, by the way, there happens to be — the only threat that I knew of was one of your own troopers.’ And they’re, like, ‘Geez, this doesn’t sound good, you need to go tell your commissioner that.’ So I did...."

Was this a Tina Fey profile I was reading? As it turns out, Tina's best lines have been written by Palin herself. Although it would be really hard to improve on the Putin offering ("As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state."), the streamlined Tina Fey version actually makes much more sense.

The McCain Vice-Presidential nominee is new a kind of palindrome because it doesn't make much difference which way you read her words; they make equal sense either way. And it doesn't make much difference who reads her words or portrays her. Tina Fey's version of Palin makes as much sense and hits the cutesy-pie marks better than the real Palin. Sara Benincasa's hilarious Palin vlogs (brought to our attention by Judith Warner's brilliant NYT blog offering, "Poor Sarah") capture Palin up-close-and-personal far better than the offerings on Palin family values from People Magazine.

None of this should mean that it would be any fun at all to suffer through or survive a Palin-McCain presidency. Friends from Connecticut have circulated a Post Turtle version of Palin, which works far better than the lamer versions that used to be applied to Democrats: "... you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with." Derisive laughter is the right approach, but our American friends should not lose their focus. Bill Maher is absolutely right to worry about a President Palin with her personal belief in end times and a naval officer following her around with the nuclear codes. If Bill Maher doesn't scare you, you could also look at this video on Palin's crackpot religion that the boss's daughter sent after looking at a preliminary version of this post. The best traditional (word-based) account of and for Palin I've come across so far is Jonathan Raban "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill" LRB, 9 October 2008. Judith Warner suggested a search for Impostor Syndrome, first identified over three decades ago. While it has not yet earned official diagnostic disorder status in the DSM, perhaps this will be one of the lasting benefits of the Palin candidacy—a world where the mental health professioals encourage able people racked by self-doubt and alert innocent humanity to the dangers of charlatans and buffoons. Sounds almost utopian.