Resembling, as she does, one of those hopped up zombies featured in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, or Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, Sarah Palin is out to shove those here come the injuns, circle the wagons values of fear and righteousness down the world’s throat.
Yep, with the addition of this square-jawed, gingham-wrapped, rootin’ tootin’ female hombre to the Repuglycan ticket, we are about to witness the mother of all polarizing culture wars. If Bush-Cheney failed in the attempt to divide Umeruhca between small-town xenophobes and world-embracing progressives, McCain-Palin will do so, perhaps terminally.
In order to retain power, the Repuglycans are going to whip up the redneck conservatives’ innate hate of that engine of change, the dreaded intellectual, to the point where the country could be at cold war with itself. Then again, because Small Town Umeruhca is armed to a man, woman, child and baby, there could be some modern form of civil war. Look what Pol Pot did to “suspected intellectuals”. As we’ve said many times before: Ol’ Pol Pot just had ‘em shot.
To me small town values combine suspicion of outsiders, intolerance of difference and a flabbiness of spirit; in short, a life which is lived by rote from birth to death, sunrise to sundown, and is punctuated by roundups, rodeos, and the 4th of July. It’s a great life, if you like that sort of thing, but it has more in common with the past than the future.
Guy Rundle, Sic ‘em Sarah, has this to say:
For 20 years the right had insisted that there was one cause for unmarried motherhood: poor parenting. Here’s Fox News supremo Bill O’Reilly in 2007: “On the pinhead front, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant … here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her.”
The ironies are almost too great to catalogue here. The right has insisted that teen pregnancy has nothing to do with ignorance or lack of opportunity, and everything to do with virtue and good parenting. For this reason they, including Palin, had voted for abstinence-only education, a course of action that doesn’t tend to survive six tequila shooters on prom night.
Yet suddenly teen pregnancy was a morally neutral act, and everything politicised in the past 20 years, was a matter of privacy. Hilariously, family values conservatives suddenly morphed into choice freaks. The desperation for a symbol of an imaginary Middle America meant that everything else could be thrown overboard.
And this hilarious piece by Jonathan Porter, Peaceniks bleat as McCain gets just the shot he needs:
The US is a warrior nation. Wait, you say, the Yanks are all obese, stupid or they are all left-wing, bleeding hearts, blah, blah.
No, no, no, no, no and no. Those are the Americans you see on television or meet over here.
The great heartland of America rather likes the smell of cordite, and the snake-eaters they send into harm’s way are very far from obese. Nor are they mincing merlot moderates.
Recall in the last election America had a choice between a decorated veteran who rather disliked war and a cocaine-sniffing draft dodger who wanted to keep fighting. Guess who America picked?
Then there is the following corrective to my rant. Linda Grant, The great divide of US politics:
The conviction by the left that the right is stupid is one of the defining and least attractive characteristics of contemporary politics. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is too dim to get your point is not itself a particularly brainy way to win others over to the essential correctness of your views. But it is true that to small-town Republicans the world is not a complicated place, because they have seen so little of it.
Small-town Americans have values, and a lot of those values are good ones: neighbourliness, family life, a knowledge of the land and what grows in it. The other America they see on TV seems without ethics — crime, violence, drug addiction, pornography and prostitution — and they don’t want any part of it.
The problem is that when they’re running the whole country, they want to take away abortion rights, drill for oil in Alaska (a Palin policy), ignore climate change and start unwinnable wars. With the small-town Republican mindset in charge, the rest of America and the rest of the world is forced to live by small-town values, which aren’t much help when you’re trying to decide what, if anything, can be done about Iranian nuclear ambitions or, more humbly, workplace date rape.
Finally, all of the above may mean little. Read David Hirst, US waves goodbye to prosperity and democracy.
