Frank Rich’s editorial today on Sarah Palin and her book (he has actually read the whole thing) is a good one. Mr. Rich has convinced me that Ms. Palin’s appeal to American citizens is larger and deeper than her entertainment quotient, which I lightheartedly wrote about earlier in the week.
The part of Ms. Palin’s political draw that leaps out at me is its tone of victimization, and anger at so-called intellectuals. Her very ignorance about public policy, world events, etc., makes her an avatar for the anti-elite cause, to use Mr. Rich’s phrase. Ms. Palin’s demographic denies global warming, and refuses to consider the urgent need to limit our greenhouse gas emissions. I suggest that a good deal of the victim status of the Palin camp boils down to their own unwillingness to perform the hard work of American citizenship.
I empathize to an extent. A part of me wants life to be easy, too. This part of me is self-absorbed, and is quite fond of wine, for example. But a larger part of me manages to step up to the rigors of citizenship. It’s hard work to read and think and live up to the original principles of American democracy, in which the citizenry, through voting, takes responsibility for guiding a country. It takes civic engagement and thoughtful consideration of public issues to have a democracy and vote wisely. You certainly can’t understand or address a complex problem like global warming without reading and thinking. But Ms. Palin’s camp rejects that path of careful thought as elitist and intellectual.
I would call it the path of real citizenship that the founding fathers practiced, and expected from us.
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I think all humans have some “faults” and within reason the taking of wine seems to be just one fairly minor example. What seems to be needed in response to Sarah’s anti-intellectual posing, is less a call to a more puritan lifestyle, rather I would point to the increased quality of life that can occur in an information based economy such as ours!
there’s a strong vein of anti-intellectualism running through British society too and some of our politicians love to tap into that. We need a different kind of education, one that builds up people’s knowledge about the world as it is but also builds up their abilities to be genuinely citizens in the ways that you outline, to think for themselves and to develop the type of curiosity that makes them want to find solutions. We also i think need to find a way of making people more active with their leisure time, all that time that the average person spends in front of the tv (which is pretty undemanding stuff intellectually for the most part) could be spent in ways that are more stimulating and more enjoyable.
I agree with you, Ms. Poet.
Green Power Guy, I think my example concerning drinking was unclear, not well expressed. I meant for drinking to be an example of wanting to always feel good and ward away any discomfort. I think the Sarah Palin camp does a similarly undisciplined thing, in dismissing any facts or information that would lead to them feeling uncomfortable. Healthy adults and healthy nations deal constructively with hard things. Being self-indulgent, by whatever means, gets in the way of doing that.
I agree with you that we’re in an information-based economy . . . . . but it hasn’t necessarily led to increased quality of life for most people. I think you and I agree that we would like to see that happen