Palin

Liberals are easy to manipulate. They are, as a rule, more likely to "unite" over which enemies to detest than they are over policies and practices. Not that liberals do much uniting or unionizing. They're merit class townies, after all. Like their conservative opponents, they've got a vested interest in the right words. They believe in speeches and books that confirm a worldview which interprets the world as a management seminar. Truthfully, they have no control. Control tends to accumulate for people who have a different ideology, instead. People who believe that the extraction and possession of material, goods and labor is their right, and due. Liberalism is a sustained attempt to pretend to control in the face of its possession by others, and it differs from conservatism only in so much as its pretenses have slightly less Jesus, slightly more gay and a willingness to pretend that politics is ennobling. I think if you ask a conservative if politics are ennobling, in whatever idiom best suits the circumstance, you'll find that he or she is less likely to validate the conviction. Liberals, who are easier to manipulate because their view of society is generally more trusting, cease to be liberals at precisely the moment they stop taking the spectacle seriously.

Which is, thankfully, almost never.

Sarah Palin, who is no idiot, knows this. She understands which canons to violate while portraying herself, softly and with a deft touch her critics often fail to appreciate, as the lady protector of sacred canon. While she was governor of Alaska, she managed a resource extraction state as if it was an entertainment consortium. She did it well. It was also a job she refreshingly abandoned when it no longer served her needs. A bold move, widely criticized by people who no longer comprehend the body politic, but convince themselves and television networks that they do because they still know how to read the palm lines of the Beltway set. Perhaps she was bored with the role. If so, that's impressive. It takes a woman supremely confident in her own image, and how she manages that image, to dispense with position as a means to wealth and influence. This is a woman who reads the text of the American society better than her counterparts. She walked away from a position of power and influence, because it limited her prospects and her influence. 

I have no doubt that Palin is a vain, proud and profoundly self-centered woman. She's also a lot smarter than her legion of tsk-tsking critics seem to understand. And it's not that "the media" sensationalizes her. It's simpler than that, in fact. Her comprehension of the limits and uses of the medium of exchange exceeds that of the liberals who hate her, the conservatives who adore her and the network execs who sell Viagra off her back. She's in control of her own movement.

They follow her. Because Palin is post-modern. She's taken a gander at the fourth wall, winked her eye at the audience, and leapt off the stage. Which has only increased the size and scope of that stage.

I'm not jesting, here. Try watching Hardball or Lawrence O'Donnell on the teevee. Watch them without belief, reverence or seriousness. Do not take them at their stated face values. Laugh at them.

What do you see?

Embarrassing self-conscious performance art, as imagined by prolonged adolescents. Basic cable community television, with big box budgets and ad revenues. As soon as you laugh at them, you can see all their make up.

Sarah Palin is laughing. She's down in the seats, and she's laughing so hard the band has stopped playing.

And like a pyrotechnic gyrovague, she broke out from the cloister of politics the minute she realized her god was a god of wide open spaces.

The Palin Phenomenon explained?

I don't know. I'm almost vain enough to think so. But not completely. And not yet.