Well, there she is. No blog can really be called a blog without a picture of Sarah Palin and some commentary either for her, about her, or against her – maybe something about her book. I haven’t read her book. What I want think about is living in a country that takes her seriously, about anything. After two terms as mayor of a small Alaskan town, she ran for Lt. Governor of Alaska and lost. Then she was appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, quitting after less than a year. Then she was elected Governor, quitting after 2½ years of her first term. Quitting things in in her nature. She changed colleges five times before getting a degree. The thing that perhaps best describes her is her winning the Miss Wasilla beauty pagent in 1983 and coming in third as Miss Alaska [she won Miss Congeniality in that competition]. So, why are we even talking about her?
She’s sort of pretty. She’s "sassy." She’s congenial. She has virtually no understanding of the political issues of the day other than what most of them are and where people like her are supposed to stand on such things. Apparently, people liked having an idiot for a President over these last eight years, and are looking for another idiot to take his place. She is a perfect candidate to follow George W. Bush.
I went looking on Amazon for this silly tune that I remembered from way back – it’s called “Only in America” by Jay and the Americans and you can buy it for $0.89 on Amazon. 2nd verse:
“Only in America,
can a kid without a cent
get a break and maybe
grow up to be President”
Even vacuous pop musicians fastened on to the idea of Abraham Lincoln and resonated, as it were, with the idea that this, our country, was indeed a pretty special kind of place…finally liberated by the impervious unchanging shackles of serfdom so typical in the old monarchical societies…heck, a very few people wound up with all the land pretty early on and their heirs are still nurtured and calling more than a few shots 4-500 years on! So it’s a good thing, this enduring democracy and the permeable membranes that allow at least some movement between economic strata. At the same time, I’m reminded of the Greeks’ and our founding father types deep reservations about the limits of democracy. These concerned, principally, the likelihood/inevitability/potential for the rabble to kind of take over the reigns…in Russia they called them lumpenproletariat an apt and descriptive term. I doubt very much that Sarah Palin recognizes that if she represents anything at all, it is her bonafides as a member of the lumpenproletariat and she is thus a kind of vanguard for the destruction of the world’s longest experiment in democracy. John Adams lost a lot of sleep over people like Sarah Palin-as did Plato for that matter. Really, that we seem to have to be concerned about this puerile, underachieving, unscrupulous dullard is unsettling. I’m not about to read her book and expect the remainder table at the Strand bookstore will be groaning under the weight of unsold 1st printings in no time.