A SPECULATIVE HYPOTHESIS
It's interesting to watch Sarah Palin being viciously and gleefully mocked by Sarah Bernhardt, Julie Brown, Saturday Night Live, David Letterman, Garry Trudeau, and so many others in a kind of piling on. She's attacked for her look, background, accent, and culture-- in a way that would never be done to a minority candidate. It's a visceral, undisguised hatred of the white lower-middle class. By contrast Obama is treated by white liberals as one of them.
What's happening?
The white liberal culturati based on their islands of privilege don't see themselves as white Americans-- they're "Citizens of the World"-- ironically enough, as THEY were the beneficiaries of America's racism, and not the gun-toting hard-scrabble citiziens of places like western Pennsylvania, many whose families worked in coal mines, or of Alaska, for that matter. It's because of this very guilt that liberal minds disconnect themselves from their own heritage.
Sarah Palin is everything they hate, in part because she clings to the ideals of America past-- and it must be said that much of affluent liberal hate is self-hate.
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What I'm trying to figure out is the motivation behind liberal vitriol.
There's something starkly neurotic about elite rejection of Palin. To me it's troubling, politics and parties aside-- I belong to neither-- because Sarah palin is so instantly recognizable, so much like the kind of people I grew up with; is so much in her earnest striving, enthusiasm, and small-town/small neighborhood forthrightness "one of us." The very qualities which mark her as such are those which are scorned and mocked. palin is so grounded, so UNneurotic, she's a throwback to a more innocent, smaller, happier America.
p.s. Mention of the words "white America" in a positive way causes squeamishness in the politically correct. It's a touchy subject. Affluent liberals believe in the equality of the races, but they don't KNOW it from experience, as I know it, because they've always lived in bubble zones of privilege and superiority. The matter of race brings on their paternalism-- for example the statement Eggers made with his poor African friend; the Dave in the position of benefactor, classic do-gooder. Picture the Dave with as charity case a refugee from eastern Europe, or Appalachia. The image doesn't work. Why not? Because the paternalism of race is the point, IS the statement, has the resonance for Eggers's affluent white liberal audience.
because of the psychodrama going on in the white liberal mind, overt bigotry of race isn't done, would be gauche-- yet these folks are consumed with their own station and superiority. Their bigotry finds safe outlet then against uppity lower class whites-- against a Sarah Palin, and the true face of these people behind their genteel masks is exposed.
I saw the masks drop at Columbia's Miller Hall when their goodness and rightness, and their hipness, was challenged, and their bland smirks turned instantly into faces of hate.
Their real conflict is within themselves. They're embarrassed at being white. Wearing an Obama button relieves their conflict and announces, Eggers-style, their intrinsic goodness.
p.p.s. Which brings us back to the literary Rebellion.
The ULA's true crime was simply in being a band of uppity lower class white writers who presumed to demand equality with the scions of privilege who so dominate literature now. Not done! Outraged preppies became the result.
It's interesting to see the absolute power the monopoly media has to define a person. Despite the fact she had a capable record as Governor-- actually quite balanced, middle-of-the-road, as well as reformist, she has been defined by the hatchet men and women of the media as being stupid. The same treatment was dished out to the ULA a few years ago.
I frankly was not prepared for the mendacity and bias of these ostensibly "objective," "liberal" people who covered us. The two biggest pieces about us, by Tom Bissell and Bruno Maddox, were absolute hatchet jobs with no attempt to understand what we were about-- though a facade of balance was injected; enough straw men for them to tear down. Maddox outright lied about our being "accepted" by the mainstream, merely because Mr. Plimpton appeared with us once in an attempt to defuse us. The reality is that we weren't accepted at all-- none of our writers accepted, as we now know.
I've found the media machine to be a reprehensible font of bias, a way to keep things-as-they-are propagated by properly "vetted" members of the Club, and have learned not to believe or trust anything which spews out from them, as omnipresent as their noise is.
Our intention was always to represent a truer voice, and more accurate picture, of this land we live in. We're not getting it now-- least of all from our approved and vetted poets and writers.
If we bring forth the true voice of America, from the roots, grounded and real, nothing will stand before us.
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