Palin Using Her Child as Political Prop

[BlueJessamine]

Palin Using Her Child as Political Prop

By John R. MacArthur September 17, 2008

Harpers Magazine

Sarah Palin never had much hope of getting my vote, but when she told the Republican convention that special-needs children would have “a friend and advocate in the White House” in a McCain administration, I felt obliged to give her a hearing. God knows, kids with disabilities and their parents need powerful friends, so I even called my own special-needs daughter to the television to watch.

Unfortunately, the camera kept cutting to Palin’s snowmobiler “guy,” alternately cradling and brandishing the couple’s Down syndrome baby, who appeared to be fast asleep. At first I told myself that this might be a good thing–special education and physical therapy are scandalously underfunded in this country, and some TV images of a cute Down syndrome baby might help to raise consciousness about the problem.

But something about the aggressive theatrics sparked another, quite unpleasant image in my mind. When I visited Hanoi in 1994, beggars, sometimes men, would confront me on the street carrying limp babies that looked as though they were on the verge of death, if not actually dead. I later learned that the babies were drugged into listlessness and that many of them were “rented” by the beggars for their daily rounds. I confess that I was so horrified by this tactic that I recoiled instead of giving them any money. How could anyone, no matter how desperate, use a baby in that way to get sympathy?

I think we should pose the same question to Governor and Mr. Palin. While they certainly deserve consideration for the suffering they will endure as parents of a handicapped child, I don’t see how that earns Palin my vote. More to the point, why should I cast a ballot for a candidate who is so desperate for my support that she’s willing to exploit her unlucky offspring as a campaign prop?

Something ugly about the handsome Palins revealed itself in St. Paul. I’m not in politics, so I can’t fully appreciate the wild ambition that drives people like Sarah and Todd–that makes them do things that ordinary folks would never have the stomach for.

The writer Walter Karp summed it up this way: “Politicians are bolder than you and I.” Clearly, Sarah Palin is very bold. While her husband and two of her daughters passed around the baby for the cameras, she was reveling in the spotlight as only a politician can. Love me, admire me, her smiling face told the throng. I imagine it was the same thing at the high school basketball games and beauty pageants where she first experienced the drug of fame.

But the two mothers of Down syndrome kids whom I knew from my daughter’s old grammar school mostly had to smile through tears of frustration; they didn’t really have the time to grandstand, either about their virtue or their problems. And I’m pretty sure that neither one of them was a Republican, because nobody knows better than a special-needs parent how hostile the G.O.P. has become to the idea of spending public money on the helpless. The party of Reagan/Bush/Palin is famously the party of self-help (except when it’s the party of help-yourself-to-taxpayer-money).

Moreover, the “Special Schools” budget in Alaska isn’t very special. “We add 20 percent to the school districts’ funding to account for the extra costs of spec ed, voc ed, bilingual ed, and gifted ed,” a state spokesman, Eric Fry, told the group MOMocrats. “They can spend any part of their budget on spec ed, as needed.” Oh, “gifted and talented” kids are special ed, too. And as I read it, nothing is guaranteed for the neediest kids with the most severe learning disabilities. Meanwhile, their exhausted and demoralized parents have to compete for resources with the pushy parents of kids deemed too smart for regular education.

To be sure, things aren’t any better in supposedly liberal New York City, where there isn’t nearly enough to go around. The public schools can barely identify, much less educate, the special-ed kids who overwhelm the system. As with everything else in America, the class system comes into play in special ed. Such wealthy white suburbs as Westport, Connecticut, with its extensive public-school inclusion program, put other underfunded districts with big minority enrollments to shame.

My wife and I are lucky we can afford to pay the exorbitant tuition for private special-education schools. But the great majority of parents in our situation have to sue the city Department of Education for tuition reimbursement. Higher-functioning special-needs kids, including ones with Down syndrome, usually get some money; lower-functioning kids often have difficulty finding a school that will take them under any circumstances.

Of course, the Palin baby show was mostly just an advertisement against legal abortion, so why not just come out and say it instead of pretending to support government social spending? But inauthenticity was the order of the day, and advertising, as Daniel Boorstin writes, is “the characteristic rhetoric of American democracy.”

I was finally so sickened by the Palins’ (and the TV networks’) grotesque play for ratings that I abruptly turned off the set. And I told my special-ed daughter, who is smart enough to know better, not to believe a word that Sarah Palin says.

[tblue]

1. How come we've never seen that baby cry?

[BlueJessamine]

2. I've wondered the same thing??

[BlueJessamine]

3. from Health A to Z:

Down syndrome

Causes and symptoms:

While Down syndrome is a chromosomal disorder, a baby is usually identified at birth through observation of a set of common physical characteristics. Babies with Down syndrome tend to be overly quiet, less responsive, with weak, floppy muscles.

[tblue]

4. Oh........thank you. Poor little sweet baby.

[patomime]

5. does anyone ---

actually have a picture of her holding this child? Most likely, there is one -- but everyone but her holds this precious child. If she's such a super mother, then where is that picture?

Probably, there is one -- I've just not seen it.

Forgive the reference, but it's like the stepford family, complete for the neo-cons.

I can't take it anymore. Ugggghhhhhh!

:shrug:

[stylesnatcher]

6. All Come to Look for America

If you've come to look for America, something that Simon and Garfunkel understood was a fundamental journey in the experience of being an American, then you need not look to the cars of the New Jersey Turnpike but to the Republican National Convention. There, amid such critical signposts as Mount Rushmore and the Gateway Arch, the American Right detailed its beacons for those who navigate not by critical thought but by extended product placement.

So it was that Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin delivered her speech in front of a patriotic backdrop that might as well have included a laser show and scenes from High School Musical. Palin hauled out that and more, including repeat awkward commercial endorsements for four-month-old Trig Paxson Van Palin, the most famous baby in America, second only to Coca-Cola as exploitative American iconography.

Forget about the fact that Trig Palin was born with an extra chromosome, or that there has been rampant speculation about the circumstances surrounding Trig Palin's birth. Each time the camera panned to the infant, the camera became not merely the eye of America but the eye on America as the Republican Party believes we should see it: No child left behind. If this means using a handicapped infant to counter allegedly false allegations as to its parentage, then so be it. Given the overt wrist-slapping, how odd that nothing was sacred in a display of crusty sacred cows.

It's the oldest advertising trick in the book. We love a baby. We love babies in ads for diapers and dog food and stain removers, and now we can love them in specious product placements during political conventions. Poor little Trig, darling in his nappy: This is Madison Avenue at its finest hour and in its manipulative slickness it was both brilliant and repulsive.

Don't blame the cameraman. Babies are actually pretty easy to resist, especially when it is not the baby but the baby's mother who is under fire, and who is herself firing away at rival-party candidate Barack Obama in what is today being called a virtuoso display that leaves no doubt as to whether she can handle a weapon. This pistol-packin' momma whipped out her gun permit, took aim, and fired, in atta-girl tundra fashion. Later, she clutched the baby to her breast. Back off, America, because what you really should be doing is weeping. Palin has now founded her entire nomination on the blessed and inseparable conditions of motherhood and blame.

America loves its guilt, or perhaps more precisely we love being made to feel guilty, and Palin's masterminded speech struck deep in our primitive concsciences. How dare we haul up motherhood, that most cherished of conditions, and call it anything but saintly? How dare we associate it with political machinations? And while we're at it, who are we to question whether our government (of whichever party, really) is doing right by us? Come on, America, that's Mount Rushmore on the backdrop. Would you accuse Thomas Jefferson of not looking out for the little guy and his gas station? Would Teddy Roosevelt tax the pants off a plumber? Shame on you.

Palin's speech was a model of modern choreography and utterly obvious media bedfellowship, cutting as it did from her to the trite iconography of the backdrop to the baby to Cindy McCain's platinum doll wig and back again, through an audience of mesmerized war veterans ("Hoosiers for the Hot Chick") and the average American (overweight), all of whom appeared to be experiencing some type of rapture. If the "Hot Chick" button seemed random, rest assured it was not. What it also was not was semantically sound; there is the implication that there is another female--a not-so-hot one--as a rival.

I watched the speech with a friend who called Sarah Palin "a hood ornament," and I think he's on to something. What he meant was that Palin was the ornament of the broken-down Bush pickup (probably a Ford, our good-ole-boy brand); everyone knows what a difference a snazzy ornament makes to a tired vehicle. Never mind the engine: Ornament or mud-flap girl, here's more relatable Americana dear to the hearts of men everywhere. American men are known to lavish a good deal of attention on their automotive ornaments, polishing and caressing them to a fine gleam, which is precisely what septuagenarian McCain seems to have done.

Palin also attempted to steal back JFK for the McCain camp; as tired as the comparisons are, it's worth remembering that Kennedy just about got us nuked by Cuba while at the same time being hailed for bringing glamour to the White House in the form of the ultimate hood ornament, Jacqueline Kennedy. Believe it or not, Camelot was nearly half a century ago, and our American vernacular has changed. We now speak in sign language. We communicate by means of Star Wars and dancing cans of Coca-Cola and all manner of other venal symbology. Still we look and look as if we've been transported. We've all come to look for an America that we can no longer articulate with words alone, and Sarah Palin is hitching a free ride.

[grasswire]

7. did you write this? (eom)