I read Christopher Hitchens' Newsweek (Nov. 23rd) article on Sarah Palin, entitled "Palin's Base Appeal".
After reading it, I waited a few days before placing this post on my blog. I simply wanted to think more deeply about my apparent discomfort with the journalist's tone.
So as I began drafting this post, I surprisingly (and accidentally) stumbled on part of the reason for my "flinching".
The virtual-reality gods of Spell-Check provided the reason, unanticipated as it was...
You see, my first draft had the word "uridite" to describe the attempted/faux intellectual superiority of one person (Hitchens) over another (Palin).
The "e-Lords of language" immediately corrected me in the misuse of the word. They demanded a suitable sacrifice.
"Urinate"...Spell-Check told me.
Hmmm...say what?
The sentence I was constructing originally read: "Hitchens faux-uridite behavior left me wondering if Palin could ever receive a fair shake."
The substitution of the suggested Spell-Check word made the whole sentence seem, somehow, even more appropriate...though a bit more "base" (thank you, Mr. Hitchens for that word) and a whole lot funnier.
The word I was originally searching for? You guessed it...
erudite |ˈer(y)əˌdīt|adjectivehaving or showing great knowledge or learning.DERIVATIVESeruditely adverberudition |ˈer(y)oŏˌdi sh ən| |ˈɛrəˈdɪʃən| |ˈɛr(j)ʊˈdɪʃən| nounORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin eruditus, past participle oferudire ‘instruct, train’ (based on rudis ‘rude, untrained’).
So, it may well be that the sirens of Spell-Check sounded the truth of Mr. Hitchens - with its original suggested substitute.
Here's the Hitchens/Newseek article ( with a few comments in red by me).
Den
----------------
Palin's Base Appeal
By Christoher Hitchens
Newsweek November 23rd, 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ernest Gruening: war veteran, former editor of The Nation magazine, and Franklin Roosevelt's nominee for governorship of the then-territory of Alaska in 1939. Having held that post for 14 years, he was elected to the United States Senate for the transition period of Alaskan statehood and went on to hold the seat for a decade. He is best-known to posterity as having cast one of only two Senate votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and also for introducing a resolution to establish a nationwide 911 emergency number.
This brief historical reflection takes care of the lazy charge, made by Matthew Continetti in his new book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin,that liberal dislike of his heroine is no more than "a distaste for those who hail from outside America's coastal metropolises; a revulsion toward people who do not aspire to adopt the norms, values, politics, and attitudes of the Eastern cultural elite." Gruening's career also illustrates the major difference between a solid résumé and a perilously emaciated one.
(Are you kidding me? How long did it take for Mr. Hitchens to find a supposed nationally recognized yet obscure Alaskan dead-politician from the 1930's to the 60's to support his own "lazy charge"? What about Matthew Continetti's well supported charge from, say, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution until now? Give me another "outside the East Coast elite" fellow, please. Disingenuous? Hmmm.)
Sarah Palin herself can apparently never tire of contrasting her folksy provincialism with the pointy-headed intellectuals, and with those in the despised city of "Washington," where her supporters want—it would seem against her own better instincts—to move her. To hear the woman talk, you would imagine that populism was a magic formula that had never been tried before (though Continetti and his colleagues at the conservative Weekly Standard eagerly compare Palin to the raucous demagogue and onetime Klan-fan William Jennings Bryan: remember—they said it, not me).
(Folksy? One-time Klan-fan? William Jennings Bryant? C'mon Chris, WJB predates the Alaskan dead-politician by over 40-60 years. Oh and by the way President Obama hails from the same party that Sen. Byrd does - and Byrd was an active Klan member...dude, your own slip is showing, isn't it? Oh btw, Bryant was a Democrat, too. What are you saying about Democrats, Mr. Hitchens?)
But the problem with populism is not just that it stirs prejudice against the "big cities" where most Americans actually live, or against the academies where many of them would like to send their children. No, the difficulty with populism is that it exploits the very "people" to whose grievances it claims to give vent.
Look at the charges that surfaced against Palin during the past election, and then look at how they played out. It was alleged that she was a member or supporter of the Alaska Independence Party (AIP); that she had been an endorser of Pat Buchanan's "Reform" Party candidacy in 2000; that she was a skeptic about man-made global warming; that she thought God was on our side in Iraq; that she favored the teaching of creationism in schools; that she attended a wacko church where exorcism of witches was enthusiastically celebrated. Later fact-checking modified a number of these allegations—Continetti is on better ground here—and we can now say that Palin did no more than attend a couple of conventions of the AIP, of which her husband was a member, and send it one friendly video message while she was governor of the state in question. It further turns out that she attended that Buchanan rally, wearing a pro-Buchanan button, only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. As for Iraq, all she meant was that she hoped God would be on our side, or we on his. On global warming she now splits the difference: it could be cyclical or it could be man-made. As for the theory of evolution, the most she really asks is that both sides of the discussion be taught. (On the witch-exorcism stuff, not even her stoutest apologists have been able to help her out: it's all on YouTube, as is the quasi-coherent speech with which she bid farewell to her governorship without a word of warning to her voters or backers. I would urge you to scan both links and see if they don't make you feel suddenly much more elitist.)
(Attacking a person's religious beliefs about demon possession is fair game? Why not attack President Obama's Kenyan brother? I bet you'd find some interesting religious beliefs out of Kenya. Apologists? Quasi-coherent speech? "Feel suddenly somewhat more elitist"? That slip of yours may just be a bit of a cape...)
So there it is: anti-Washington except that she thirsts for it, and close enough (and also far enough away to be "deniable") to the paranoid fringe elements who darkly suspect that our president is a Kenyan communist. If you object to Kenyans interfering in the internal affairs of these United States, you really ought to raise an eyebrow at a candidate for the governorship of Alaska who accepts anointment from "Bishop" Thomas Muthee, a weird person who claims that witch removal in his Kenyan parish led to a reduction in crime, booze, and traffic violations.
The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation's capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected. In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It's also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down. Many of Palin's admirers seem to expect that, on receipt of the Republican Party nomination, she would immediately embark on a crusade against Wall Street and the banks. This notion is stupid to much the same degree that it is irresponsible.
(Cynically incites? Duping the hicks? Discredited ides of WJB? Hmm...like what? Starting up the Dept of Labor, women to vote, popularly elected US Senators...which discredited ones?)
Then there's the question of character and personality. Decades ago, Walter Dean Burnham pointed out that right-wing populists tended to fail because they projected anger and therefore also attracted it. (He was one of the few on the left to predict that the genial Ronald Reagan would win for this very reason.) Let's admit that Sarah Palin is more attractive—some might even want to say more appealing—than much of her enraged core constituency. But then all we are considering is a point of packaging and marketing, where charm is supposed to make up for what education and experience have failed thus far to supply. We are further obliged to consider the question: exactly how charming is the Joan of Arc of the New Right, who also hears voices speaking to her of "spiritual warfare"?
I admit that I have winced at some of the lurid speculations about Governor Palin's family life, and thought them unkind and tasteless even as I lapped them up. She now claims that Levi Johnston is a fabricator when he describes a wildly dysfunctional Palin household. So then: what if she's right about him? It wasn't the liberal elite media who dug up this scapegrace and nudity artist. It was the Republican nominee for the vice presidency who hauled the lad before the cameras and forced us to look at him: a fit husband for her beloved daughter and an example to errant youth in general. Once again, one is compelled to ask which would be worse: a Sarah Palin who really meant what she merely seemed to say, or a Sarah Palin who would say anything at all for a cheap burst of applause.
(As I lapped them up? Nice...Cheap burst of applause? Is that a referral to the anti-Palin folks who are reading your article's content (your own "base" - to whom you wish to appeal)? Not sure what you meant...or maybe I am. Your cape seems to be sprouting a pointy-headed hood...)
This is not a small matter for the Republican Party. (And again: it was senior Republican operatives, and not jeering liberals, who told my Vanity Fair colleague Todd Purdum about the hectic atmosphere, of hysteria and collapsing scenery, that accompanied their lame attempt to present Sarah Palin as plausible during the last campaign.) The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast. Modernity can be wrenching, as indeed can capitalism, and there will always be "out" groups who feel themselves disrespected or left behind. The task and duty of a serious politician, as Edmund Burke emphasized so well, is to reason with such people and not to act as their megaphone or ventriloquist. Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.
("...pass the rest of her natural life span"...Please don't tell me that you are hoping for her early death. Are you suggesting your "political lynching" turned real? This new type of faux-liberal Klan-ism insults true liberal thinkers as well as others of us.
The difference between Hitchens' world view and Palin's is another case of Spell-Check-itis. Hitchens may be desiring to type in " hysterical" when the Deity-of-Doing-words-right, Spell-Check, forces him to write "historical.)
Base appeal? Yes, someone in this article is searching for and supporting a "base appeal", but I don't believe it's Sarah Palin...
Then again, according to many in the East Coast press, this whole issue of supporting Palin may just be a little too erudite for people who think differently than they do...
Den
© 2009
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