If Sarah Palin is stupid, Maxine Waters is sub-reptilian and Joe Biden ought to be in an insect exhibition. It's not about stupidity at all. If it were, late-night comedians would place Sarah well below the cut line in their lists of people to mock.
So what is it?
Shannon Love, blogging at Chicago Boyz, has this theory about the hatred for Sarah.
Leftism at its heart holds that a small percentage of humans have a vastly superior understanding of everything compared to ordinary people. The point of leftism is to empower these superior individuals to impose their superior understanding upon society by the force of the state. Leftists must be viewed by themselves and others as superior human beings if they are to have a claim to power and status ...I don't buy this completely. I don't think there is that much fear involved. Instead, it looks to me like smug superiority instead of fear. I think the middle paragraph hits it on the head. "Look at that stupid Sarah! She's all about guns and Jesus and stuff like that. How pathetic." It's not hatred so much as it is their natural reaction to mock the bitter clingers of flyover country as knuckle-dragging troglodytes.
(Leftists) demand that people go to the right elitist schools. They demand that people live in certain communities. They demand that people have the right recreational interests. They demand that people enjoy uniform kinds of art and music. They demand that people have the proper modes of speech, accent and allusion. They demand that people have the right religious beliefs. And so on.
On this basis Palin is a nightmare: She went to a state college. She lives in the “backwoods”. She likes hunting, fishing and sports. She likes country music and representational art. She doesn’t have the right accent. She doesn’t dress appropriately. She’s a Pentecostal instead of atheist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, etc.
Their hatred of Palin is the conversation bigots might have in private where the ethnic jokes come out because the audience is all of the same mind. They talk as if we're all bigots right along with them. To me that suggests cultural insulation. It's OK to make fun of Sarah in public because they don't know anyone who would disagree with them.
I would suggest that the mockery of Sarah Palin is simply raw bigotry on display.
Update: I don't know if this makes sense. Bush was "stupid" and he went to Yale.
Maybe Bush was even more stupid than Palin for getting a "good start" at Yale and rejecting his hallowed education.
ReplyDeleteThere's also an element of feminism in the hatred of Palin. Her female detractors have been much more vicious than the males. In their view, she's had too many children and refused the sacrament of abortion.
It seems to me that Palin is intentionally encouraging the "left" to hate her, needling them at every opportunity. The left is just obliging her by giving her exactly what she wants. That's her chosen career path. And evidently a lucrative one - I understand she's cleared a few million dollars on book sales, speaking engagements, and TV shows. After all, if Beck, Limbaugh, Stern, Moore, and many, many others can make millions by making a profession out of ticking people off on the air, why can't she?
ReplyDeleteShe's certainly no idiot. Parlaying a losing Vice President bid (normally a political kiss of death) into her current high-exposure position was quite a trick.
I really doubt that she's going to mount a serious presidential bid, though, so I'd advise against getting your hopes up. Oh, she might run for president to keep her name in the news, like Jesse Jackson did, but I expect that she wouldn't really want to *win*. If nothing else, it would be a substantial pay cut. She'd mainly do it for a combination of the exposure, and the chance to play kingmaker.
Tim, I really don't want Palin to run for president. I think she's a great piece of intellectual flypaper for the left.
ReplyDeleteAs for encouraging the left to hate her, I don't buy that. She's just living her life the way she wants and it happens. So she's a public speaker and talks about politics and the culture. So what? How many people like that are there who make less sense than she does or have opinions that are far more extreme?
Why hate Palin?