Sarah Palin and Other Songs from the Far Right.
From the article by YUVAL LEVIN titled “The Meaning of Sarah Palin”:
Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead–a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.
Ugghhh. Why do so many in this country champion mediocrity. When it comes to our athletes, particularly in our Olympians, we manage every two to four years to find people who are truly exceptional. These people train to exhaustion, settle for nothing less than perfection and sometimes achieve it.
In our politics, we go in the other directions, or at least some sector of the population does.
I think it’s a great achievement that we have a President who is intellectually superior to the average person. I don’t have insecurity issues myself, so I don’t feel threatened by his intellect, or shrug it off as arrogance because I might not understand the abstractness of a particular conversation. But, unfortunately, there are many who do. People who have been conditioned to see intelligence as dishonest and achievement as ugly self-promotion. I just don’t get it.
I must admit, I DO look askew at SOME people, not because of their intellect or lack thereof but due of their lack of curiosity. In George Orwell’s 1984 there is a passage that describes Winston, after a long trist with Julia, listening to a proletariat out the window of their private apartment doing her laundry and singing. The song she is singing is one commissioned by the government, which to them would make the mere existence of it distasteful. For this woman, those kind of ideas are foreign. She doesn’t question the meaning of things. It’s a song she knows and sings it.
The dead-ender neocons are very much like that. They sing the song their given, fear the fear they’re told to fear. Believe the talking points verbatum and question the truthfulness of anyone who merely asks a question. Take a look at the persecution of Scott Ritter and Richard Clarke, both men who as it happened were completely truthful. They were accused of lying for profit or just being insane. Many believed it, never questioned the gaping hole in logic and motivation that would easily exhonorate them.
Now, the argument from the other side is that we, the questioners, are the lemmings. We are the one’s screaming the talking points from our leftist leaders and declining any forethought. Fair enough criticism, but it doesn’t hold up. First of all, the democrats by nature are a fractured bunch. They are a wide spectrum of beliefs, from the blue dogs who are the equivalent of Presbyterian to Catholic - and the far right who are very socialist and whom no one really pays any attention to. To try and forge a movement with this group is laughable. Republicans are always on message and always subservient to the message. That was their greatest power for a while. The power of branding. Say something over and over again until others begin to believe it (well, that’s also the description of propaganda for the nazis as well).
Secondly - and I’ll frame this in regards to the Iraq war - WHEN has a population like ours gone from being pro to con unless the con has overwhelmed the pro. We’ve watched Bush’s approval rating and war approval dive - not due to some mind-controlling manipulation from the mass media, but due to the public’s digestion of the facts, large and small. What the majority of us discovered was there was a link between the bumbling of Katrina and the failure of the war, between the lies of the Valerie Plame fiasco and the lies that took us into Iraq, it all started to click.
For the dead-enders, their stubborness has developed into the opposite conclusion - that nothing is really that bad, the media has brainwashed everyone but them into being against the war and Bush, and that Hannity and Rush are the only truthful voices in a sea of lies. Try to put logic to these beliefs and they fall like a house of cards. But, just like some people who feel Darwinism is a threat to their belief system, they shut out these criticisms and blame someone else.
It’s a very familiar song, one they will ultimately keep singing until there is only one of their kind left. And they will keep on singing it about people like Sarah Palin, George Bush and others who’s motivations for higher office will not be questioned since they are “no better than you or me.”
