A Canadian's Opinion Of Alaska & Governor Sarah Palin
D. Spencer Hines
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DSH
Lux et Veritas et Libertas
Vires et Honor
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VIEWPOINT
Heather Mallick
A Mighty Wind blows through Republican convention
Last Updated: Friday, September 5, 2008 | 8:48 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News
I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential
partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to
let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added
nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn't already have sewn
up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America's name
inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the
right.
So why do it?
It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are,
really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a
woman. They're unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas
call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have
their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like
being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs
with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously.
But do they not know that women have been trained to resent other
women and that they only learn to suppress this by constantly berating
themselves and reading columns like this one? I'm a feminist who
understands that women can nurse terrible and delicate woman hatred.
Palin was not a sure choice, not even for the stolidly Republican
ladies branch of Citizens for a Tackier America. No, she isn't even
female really. She's a type, and she comes in male form too.
John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls
Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I'd had the wit to
come up with it first. It's safer than "white trash" but I'll pluck
safety out of the nettle danger. Or something.
Doyle's job includes watching a lot of reality television and he's
well-versed in the backstory. White trash — not trailer trash, that's
something different — is rural, loud, proudly unlettered (like Bush
himself), suspicious of the urban, frankly disbelieving of the
foreign, and a fan of the American cliché of authenticity. The
semiotics are pure Palin: a sturdy body, clothes that are clinging yet
boxy and a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new
microwave.
'Turn your guns on Levi, ma'am'
Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by
this decade's woman, the overtreated hair, puffy lips and permanently
alarmed expression. Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look
of the teen mum, the "pramface." Husband Todd looks like a roughneck;
Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family
obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal
father would want Levi "I'm a fuckin' redneck" Johnson prodding his
daughter?
I know that I have an attachment to children that verges on the
irrational, but why don't the Palins? I'm not the one preaching
homespun values but I'd destroy that ratboy before I'd let him get
within scenting range of my daughter again, and so would you. Palin's
e-mails about the brother-in-law she tried to get fired as a state
trooper are fizzing with rage and revenge. Turn your guns on Levi,
ma'am.
Palin has it all, along with being vicious and profoundly dishonest.
Just hours after her first convention speech, the Associated Press did
a good fast listing of her untruths and I won't dwell on them.
I did promise to watch the entire convention so you wouldn't have to,
but I discovered a neat trick. I switched between the convention and
the 2003 folk music mockumentary A Mighty Wind on Bravo.
They were indistinguishable. Click on a nervous wreck with deeply
strange hair doing a monologue on society today and where it all went
wrong. Are you watching Christian belter Aaron Tippin singing Where
the Stars and Stripes and Eagle Fly in the Xcel Centre in St. Paul or
the actors from Spinal Tap remixing the 1966 version of Potato's in
the Paddy Wagon?
Who delivered this line: "To do then now would be retro. To do then
then was very now-tro, if you will." Was it Rev. James Dobson of Focus
on the Family talking about Bristol Palin's shotgun wedding or was it
a flashback to the Kingston Trio?
The conventioneers are nothing like the rich men who run the party,
and that's the mystery of the hick vote. They'd be much better served
by the Democrats. I know Thomas Frank answered this in What's the
Matter with Kansas?; I know that red states vote Republican on social
issues to give themselves the only self-esteem available to their
broken, economically abused existence.
Lie works for Palin
But surely they know Barack Obama is not planning to finish off the
ordinary hillbilly when he adjusts tax rates. He's going to raise
taxes on the top 2% of Americans and that doesn't include anyone at
the convention beyond the Bushes and McCains and random party
management. So why cheer Palin when she claims otherwise?
Is it racism? I'm told that it is, although I find racism so appalling
that I have difficulty identifying it. It is more likely the dearly
held Republican notion that any American can become violently rich, as
rich as those hedge funders in Greenwich, Conn., who buy $40-million
mansions unseen and have their topiary shaped in the form of musical
notes.
When Palin and Rudy Giuliani sneered at Obama's years of "community
organizing" — they said it like "rectal fissure" — the audience
ewww-ed with them. Republicans dream of a personal future that
involves only household staff, not equals who need to be persuaded to
vote.
So I'm trying to imagine the pain of realizing, as they all must at
some point, that it is not going to happen for them. It's the green
light at the end of the dock. It's the ship that never comes in, gals,
as Palin would put it. But she won't because the lie works for her. It
helps her scramble, without compassion, above all those other tense
no-hoper ladies in the audience.
American politics isn't short of smart women. Susan Eisenhower, Ike's
granddaughter, who just endorsed Obama, made an extraordinary speech
at the Democratic convention (and a terrific casual appearance on The
Colbert Report as Palin was speaking). The Republican party has
already consumed nearly all of its moderate "seed corn," she said
aptly. Time to start again.
Eisenhower, a scholar and journalist, has a point. Or am I only saying
that because she's part of the thoughtful demographic that I'm trying
to reach here? Think, Heather, think like a Republican! The Skeptics,
shall I call them, are my base, and I'll pander to them as ardently as
the Republican patriarchs tease their white female marginals.
This Week
Mad Men is scaring me (AMC on Sunday nights). What has Matthew Weiner,
a writer from The Sopranos, created, a period soap opera about reality
and façade or a horror series on a localized war between men and
women? Was Episode 6 of Season 2 a costume drama about the
Madonna/whore complex or the operatic rendition of one simple thing,
human cruelty?
Or maybe I'm seeing too much into it and it's just a sexed-up version
of the Republican convention.
D. Spencer Hines
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DSH
Lux et Veritas et Libertas
Vires et Honor
The Alaskan who went 'outside'
Sarah Palin's Wasilla is beyond small-town. The woman who could be
president is someone with no grasp of the wider world
Heather Mallick
guardian.co.uk, Friday September 05 2008 18:30 BST
I was born in a northern Canadian settlement so small it was
accessible most of the year only by a Bombardier, a sort of huge
military tank built for passengers. It was like a transport plane, a
big iron bulb with caterpillar tracks. I swear we had a paddle-steamer
for supplies in the summer.
Take that, Sarah Palin. The place was six times smaller than Wasilla,
Alaska, the town that birthed John McCain's strange vice-presidential
"soulmate", as weird as that disconnected eerie smile that floats on
his face as he stands next to her.
My credentials are solid; Palin cannot out-hick me. Until I fled at
18, I never lived in a northern town of more than 12,000 people. My
towns were full of Sarah Palins. These types are fine, such as they
are, until they leave town and turn fraudulent. They label themselves
"the salt of the earth". It's when they try to make that a
qualification for a greater glory that things turn unpleasant.
I never claimed a higher moral standing for coming from a great big
empty on the map. Small towns are places that smart people escape
from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin
should have stayed home.
Canada has lots of hockey moms. They're called Fran and Nancy. They
have cruel haircuts and their voices shake the rafters of the rink as
their rink-rats play. How can I translate the hearty, jollying-along
Palin for British audiences? She's a working class Joan Hunter Dunn.
It's those volleyball shoulders and field-hockey thighs, the energy,
the bullying, and the utter self-confidence in every lie she tells.
Salt-of-the-earthers don't lie! But Palins do. I watched Palin last
night, my mouth open, my eyeballs drying out, my hand making shaky
notes. I read them aghast.
Did she really joke, "You know the difference between a hockey mom and
a pitbull? Lipstick."?
Did she just blow kisses to the audience?
Did she just say, "We need to produce more of our own oil and gas.
Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope. We've got lots of
both."?
Yes, she did lie about billion-gallon slurps of oil and gas available
for Americans to blow, about her support of Alaska's notorious
pork-barrel "bridge to nowhere", about which particular citizens will
see tax increases under Obama (only the richest, and she knows that).
She also lied when she slobbered over small-town folks (an American
version of British farm life, except British farmers have a point).
The granite honesty of hicks is a cliché, a fantasy, a meme of
American life, as much as the working-class solidarity of Tony Blair
was in 1997, and where did that get anyone?
But most of all, she lied about the north and the virtues it
supposedly confers on citizens. Canadians watch this with horror. To
us, Alaska is the back of beyond. Americans feel the same way.
Alaskans are a bunch of Ted Stevens, that enraged screaming old
senator who explained that the internet was not a big truck, it was
more like a "bunch of tubes". He was arrested and charged with taking
bribes, but handily won the August senatorial primary.
We love our own north to the point of covering our eyes and humming as
it melts (yesterday the BBC headlined the collapse of Canada's ice
shelves; Canadian papers and websites missed the story) but Alaska is
different from our north. We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier
state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built
structures bring to a glorious landscape. Canadian firms invest
billions in the place and mine its ores. One hundred thousand
Canadians visit Alaska every year, and we like to pass by in cruise
ships. But it never goes further than that. Alaska is our redneck
cousin, our Yukon territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God
he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line.
Palin got her first passport last year. (Americans didn't need a
passport to enter Canada until recently). She seems to have visited us
precisely once, not surprisingly since Alaskans regularly refer to the
rest of the world as "outside". We are so foreign to her, this woman
who might become US president.
What is native to her is smugness, her certainty that what's good for
Wasilla is good for the world in all its infinite variety. It's a
variety that Palin will never begin to grasp.