“like watching Gidget address the Reichstag”
There’s a lot of smarts and good writing in Matt Taibbi’s piece on Sarah Palin. Most of those talents are directed inward, an attack not on her, but on the kind of culture that could not only accept but embrace her as a vice-presidential nominee.
Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant. Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.
He’s scathing and crude and usually brilliant, but the piece itself is as much a symptom of our cultural illness as it is a diagnosis. The other side of self-absorbed meanness to others is self-absorbed meanness to yourself. They’re both destructive.
Tags: cultural malaise, good writing, meanness, politics, sarah palin