So I’ve been reading about Sarah Palin again. It angries up the blood real nice but the point is, people may hope she gets the 2012 nomination for gleeful, schadenfreude-related reasons (which I won’t fault them for because times are hard and we all need idle revenge fantasies) but that’s not going to help repair the damage, both practical and psychological, that the very idea of our current system of governance has been perverted to inflict. Hoping for the nomination of someone so mind-blowingly inept just so they lose is petty, mean-spirited, and contrary to progress. If in the (near-impossible) event that Palin does secure the nomination for 2012 it’s near-impossible she would win, which would leave Obama in for another four years, provided that the Democrats have stopped injecting acid directly into their brains and don’t fuck up the campaign of an incumbent president. If he and the rest of the Democratic party have realized by then that any time they’re using defending against ad-hominem attacks, or by attempting to reason with (read: equivocate) the outright delusional fantasia of the far right is time wasted, totally and completely wasted, then maybe the potential for progress can start being nurtured again. Of course, if they haven’t (and all evidence thus far seems to indicate how unlikely this realization is), we’ll have more of the same–pandering, waffling, sweaty-palmed and unctuous, as politicians scramble to appease an overblown, overrepresented demographic whose sole purpose, it seems, is to regress the American situation back to some mythical era in which things were cool, some Jacksonian idyll with pig racing on the White House lawn. It’s such a cherished notion, life was easy and the summers were laced with cool green breezes, all the girls were pretty and all the children knew their place, it was a beautiful dream that time never happened, it was been created out of whole cloth, spun from rhetoric, violence, anger, and expert manipulation of the sense of overwhelming helplessness engendered specifically to make the “Average American” frightened and, by extension, malleable.
At this point the American political process so bitter and divisive that the belief in meaningful change in a single election cycle, or from here atop this cliff a dozen election cycles, is just as much of a delusion as the belief that ensuring the basic health care of the citizenry means the terrorists win.
Essentially it needs to be okay, more than okay, it needs to be an accepted practice or a self-evident truth or a plainspoken no-brainer that our leaders are held accountable not only for big things like the economy and foreign policy but for their smaller actions and words. Did you hear about Robert Bentley, governor-elect of Alabama, the man who says everyone is his brother and sister unless they’re not Christian, in which case they’re not his brother and sister, which makes him sad, because he wants everyone to be his brother or sister, so he recommends conversion? Did you hear the outrage? Not just the wait-a-goddamned-minute-when-did-I-get-on-the-bus-to-Crazytown outrage, but the shock and pearl-clutching that anyone would dare to question an elected official? However, it’s not the implications of the action that are getting attention, it’s the man himself and the furor surrounding him, it’s a starving dog’s relentless snapping after meat and these fuckers are pure fat, Religion and Freedom and Choice and The First Fucking Amendment Says You Can’t Tell Me I’m Wrong, they’re already sizzling, they were made especially for you. Nobody will tell you it’s bad for you, because an unhappy fact is first and foremost unhappy. Facts, too, are unhappy in themselves, as they are unchanging, they are just so right there, and as facts have become synonymous with rules and restrictions and it’s always the guy you hate who reminds you that smoking causes cancer, it’s not because he’s got the facts it’s because he’s got a thin moustache, he looks just like that guy you hated in high school, because of these things it’s time to overthrow facts in favor of personality.
It’s easy to understand why the public is so eager to accept the politicians as the story: the story itself is too overwhelming. The story is absolutely terrifying. Governor Bentley’s suggestion of religious conversion with its corollary veiled threat of monumentally unconstitutional exclusion, is the story of a place whose people have chosen to represent them a man who appears to have an inverse amount of respect and regard for the “sacred documents” establishing the place’s foundation to that which he so righteously displays. Hiding beneath that American flag pin, made in China, sure, but it’s just a pin and things made in America are, let’s face it, more expensive, and next time it’s USA All The Way, you know we’re serious about that, lies a PIN pad, its gentle beeping as it waits for him to continue the transaction fooling the best cardiologists his money can buy into thinking he’s a real boy, and this is the man that was chosen by the people. It’s the story of a nation so divided the chasm seems unspannable no matter how many Bethlehem girders we can so rapturously reminisce. However, the Far Right Victimhood Parade, while satisfyingly outrageous, while ludicrously loud and addictively colorful, is doing nothing except churning up vitriol. It’s just more sugar in the gas tank of this bus that was supposed to drive us into the glorious future. We’ve already argued so much over the directions that the map is torn and indecipherable, so now we’re on a service road patrolled by concealed-carry vigilantes, and nobody could afford to keep paying for the OnStar, and Sarah Palin, who was invited along because she seemed cool, like us, like she’d know all the lyrics to the Tom Petty tape that was the only one we could find but hey, it’s good, it’s America, keeps putting all the sugar in the gas tank and then pointing fingers when her coffee is bitter. So now we’re lost, stuck, and arguing about the coffee while some stranger who doesn’t like your face or your name or where you put your cock is feeling pretty good about the new 30-round magazine he got at the gun show, and fuck it, might as well go out a celebrity.
If flammable and inflammable are interchangeable, why not fame and infamy? Sarah Palin’s embrace of this lack of distinction, this manufactured outrage at having the enormity of her legion of small mistakes—itty-bitty, nitpicking, just picking on her, really—pointed out, virtually guarantees her absolute lack of viability on the legitimate political stage. Of course, the legitimate political stage is so boring, there’s no laugh track and there’s never anybody getting kicked in the nuts, and you have to wear nice pants and sometimes the people there use painfully difficult words. Given that sort of opposition, and who needs it anyway, those people aren’t us, they’ve got cars and houses and jobs and passports, Palin has abandoned the stage and run away with the circus. Never mind her portrait hanging in the Oval Office, it’s painted ten times as big as life on a thousand big tops from sea to shining sea. She’s a celebrity who wants to be a politician who wants to be a celebrity, she’s a neophyte with aspirations of Nero, who has a whole saying with his name in it so he must be really famous, something about Rome which smacks of Papism but also fiddles which smacks of the front porch, we’ll call it a wash, Palin’s ersatz martyrdom is a comforting enough replica to warrant a place of honor on the knotty pine mantels of believers everywhere. When the medicine runs out because of the Communists or the Socialists or because of that damned government interference the guns will come out and the gloves will come off and to the last rotted tooth and the last splitting, yellowed nail that good night will be met with the last great bellow of indignant rage, trailing almost inaudibly into sighs of hopes dashed, of opportunities missed, of a lifetime of regrets that things didn’t work out as expected, of every small slight and misremembered grudge, but serene and happy, almost pleased, as the knowledge that there’s nothing I could have done swells within our hearts, those pillars of salt and cholesterol and excess and misery, goodnight, goodnight, I was a better person than anyone will ever know.
Because that’s America. Live fast, die of a curable disease.
Tags: Politics, Robert Bentley, Sarah Palin
