Palin: No Laughing Matter?

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: September 11, 2008
No Laughing Matter
Judith Warner

....For the McCain/Palin rally in Fairfax, Va., on Wednesday....I was out with the “real” people. Which meant that I could hear everything from the podium and from the onlookers around me....

Fred Thompson had warmed up the crowd, his familiar old district attorney’s voice restored to full bombast, and he’d been in fine form, denouncing – to loud boos from the crowd — the “lawyers and scandal mongers and representatives of cable networks” (boos from the crowd) who were at that very moment descending upon Alaska looking for dirt on their Sarah. “I hope they brought their own Brie and Chablis with them,” he’d said, to raucous laughter, as I willed myself to disappear, remembering, with a shudder, that my children had demanded Brie for breakfast only that morning.

I should have been finding this funny. My whole plan, after all, had been to write something funny this week about the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon. I’d arrived at an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-laugh-at-’em kind of a juncture, I suppose....(F)orced to make new friends on the spot, (I) discovered that the Palin Phenomenon is no laughing matter. Those who think that it is — well, as Thompson warned on Wednesday, “they’ve got another thing coming.”...

***

I heard a lot (of) talk that day about the need for respect – and about arrogance and selfishness and about Democrats and liberals who think way too highly of themselves....I heard, repeatedly, a complaint about sterile individualism, about selfishness and the desire for a revalidated “us”....

***

No, it wasn’t funny, my morning with the hockey and the soccer moms, the homeschooling moms and the book club moms, the joyful moms who brought their children to see history in the making and spun them on the lawn, dancing, when music played. It was sobering. It was serious. It was an education. “Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind....Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview....

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/no-laughing-matter/index.html

[TwilightGardener]

1. I'm tired of journalists and scholars trying to make something noble

and even desirable out of the ignorance, greed, fear and hatred these people display. Tired of progressives, Democrats not only being bashed by the right, but now getting bashed by our own side, because we don't "get" these fucking hicks and religious crazies and racists and dittoheads, we don't take the time to "understand" them. They've been in power, they've gotten their way for 8 years now, they don't understand what a fucking mess they've made of our country with their corrupt and incompetent leaders--it's time to tell them to eat shit and die.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. I think you make a good point. nt