Your lack of faith, disturbs me
Friday September 05th 2008, 3:56 pm
Filed under: The grim present

Over at Jezebel, Jessica theorizes about what it is about Gov. Palin which inspires so many to spin like murder tops:

For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What’s infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys’ game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen’s mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

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The Jezebel post suggests Palin has no beliefs of her own, absorbing ideas with all the mindfulness of a paper towel soaking up spilled juice, and that she glided to the top by being a cheerleader/priestess for masculinist gods.  Some of that is surely going on (after all, there is a patriarchy and it does like to be petted) but it’s also very likely that she actually likes to hunt moose and wolves from the comfort of low flying aircraft, likes to fish till her pores are salmonized and truly believes that the US should ‘drill now, drill forever and drill on Mars too’…or whatever that silly slogan is.

Hail Darth Palin

Really, I think some people – including a lot of mainstream feminists of the Jezebel variety — are having a hard time accepting that a ‘normal seeming’, attractive woman is a Mayberry Machiavellian.  It’s easy to vilify McCain. For one thing, he’s a genuinely vilify-able war lord and for another, he’s an old white guy who always seems about five seconds away from waving a shotgun while yelling at everyone to get off his damn lawn.

But Palin? The crafty Governor presents an interesting perceptual challenge.  She looks like the woman you had a pleasant conversation with the other day while waiting at the dentist’s office, or, the woman you shyly asked out to dinner at the Olive Garden, or the woman who smilingly rides her Vespa to work (probably while wearing a cute scarf!) because she’s worried about her ‘carbon footprint’.

How dare she actually be a dark lord of the Sith?

Well, that’s one angle.

The other angle is that a lot of her liberal detractors (see, for example, the heroes over at DailyKos) — the ones going on and on and on about the beauty queen thing and the daughter and the baby and I don’t know what else — are simply misogynist assholes (I’m including women and men here). Their camouflaged assholoisty is de-cloaked from time to time to be directed against selected targets.

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