When even I am crippled by the sympathy pains I had watching Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, you know it’s the sort of carnage you can’t even crack a smile for.
Maybe the most grotesque part of this election has been witnessing the consequences of having let the few remaining threads of trust we kept in some sort of irrepressible, benevolent truth macerate into a pulpy slop after a quick 8 year soak in Rovian discourse. A corollary distrust in language now runs so strong that even the ham & eggers loyal to Palin have abandoned all faith in any singular reason prevailing above all, defending efforts to stonewall Palin away from reporters by arguing that the media has not “earned the right” to her access. From the comments:
The media has not earned the privilege of talking to Palin; they are an elitist group who think they are better than she is; they are not. The public knows what they are doing and the public doesn’t pay them much attention anymore. The approval ratings of the media are lower than the approval ratings of the President. They are a sorry bunch these days.
It’s funny how it’s true and not true in equal measure, right?
Watching her flail in the Couric interview with this sort of silent, pleading indignity underscores the humanity of a woman who has been exploited like some kind of theatrical prop. Sadly, when she offers to “try and find some” specific examples of McCain’s maverick efforts of financial reform, rather than invalidating her as as a viable candidate, it has the counter-intuitive effect of exposing some very earnest and inexplicably charming vulnerabilities which demand your empathy, not your dismissal, for a pretty average woman who seems like she was manipulated just like the rest of us. The irrational power of her appeal is depressingly intoxicating.
I hate to position her as such a victim, the last thing any women need is another victim, but I cannot help but feel pity for her. She is so categorically unfit for the position that the whole thing is starting to feel as cruel and reckless as the pigs’ blood poised above Carrie at the prom. Like some serialized telenovella, the story arc of each day is like a replay of the last decade in miniature, the slight distance affording us a look at how devastating our silent complicity was, though it seemed so natural at the time.
Palin and McCain can’t convincingly play their parts as autonomous agents of their own free will, and it inevitably makes you reexamine the line between acting and living, sincerity and the stage. The script they read from has almost no discernible meaning, a near complete dissolution of the once pragmatic relationship between the literal and the figurative, and this in turn becomes the language of their support. Because the GOP has objectified her in stratospheric ways, Palin functions as the crux of this shift.
“It’s war and the media is the enemy. They are not on the peopl’e’s side. They smeared Hillary Clinton, lied on Obama, lied on John Edwards, gave a free pass to democrats in the senate, and lie thru their teeth all the time you don’t know what is true. They smeared Palin and are after McCain. Anything to get this low life Obama elected. This will not go unpunished. Also theydeserve wahetever they got coming to them. Fox news is all I watch because it presents both sides better than the National Barack Channel or the Sexist News Network with Jack Laugherrty,”
If I really wanted to annoy you with melodrama, I could say that the momentum of 70 years of criticism is about to deliver us into an Age of Reason more in the vein of Sartre than the familiar Paine–it may be hackneyed, but that’s the point. Regardless of who’s ultimately sworn in, whomever it is will find themselves an icon of deep cultural disillusionment for either one half of the country or the other. The godlessness of the post-modern condition has finally trickled all the way down to the bottom; even the hayseeds know that real life is only a play, “a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Consider:
Sarah Palin as the consummate empowered woman.
Bristol Palin, wrangled into standing at the alter with an empty high school fuck, the kind of regrettable lay intended only for nostalgic giggle fits of the future, now doing her duty as a martyr for the GOP.
Sarah Palin, hanging out the hatch of a low flying aircraft, her eye pressed to the scope of a rifle, keeping her aim steady on the panicked wolf running in terror across a stark Alaskan stretch of nothing. The wolf’s joints begin to buckle one by one, until it finally collapses on its side. It can only manage gravelly, uneven breaths. She shoots.
Sarah Palin, sitting on a blue chenille couch ajacent to a leering, fulsome Henry Kissinger, struggling to savor the wisdom he imparts on her over the twenty minutes they spend together. She could not see Vietnam from her back yard, and so it does not take up any of the space she has reserved in her mind for the rich and incisive guidance he will give her on strategy and how to deliver your words with a hypnotic rhythm that may impress authority and blind devotion on one’s audience.
Non/Fiction, eh?
This is a sick, demented site, by a group of hateful, liberal elite wannabe snobs. But we can forgive the mentally challenged and put up with their tantrums, like good Christians.
Gloria, truly good Christians know that lying is a sin, and they also know there ain’t a goy in the whole wide world with a name like “Gloria Steinberg.”
i wish there was a canned “ohhhh dissed” sitcom audio file. *insert wish here*