Sarah and Her Tribe NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

[grassfed]

There's a moment of near rapture in the video of Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican convention in St. Paul on September 3, 2008. It begins in the eleventh minute, after her Westbrook Pegler quote ("We grow good people in our small towns...") and before her "lipstick" quip about hockey moms and pit bulls. Following a nervous start, she is now entirely at ease in front of the biggest crowd of her speaking life, and riding high on the chants of "Sarah!" "USA!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" Her smile looks ecstatic, as she allows herself a snuffling chuckle at the acerbity of her own wit, then shows off her repertoire of little nods of self-approbation, complicit left-eye winks from behind her glasses, and lips smugly pursed to signal that an unanswerable point has just been made. When the camera cuts to the crowd, face after face is a joyful mirror image of Palin's own, as if transfigured by a shared triumph. (Striking exceptions among the faces include those of Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, and Cindy McCain, all of whom register a cautious agnosticism in the presence of the epiphany.) In Going Rogue, Palin and her ghost, Lynn Vincent, write of the speech, "By God's grace I was having a ball."

In contrast to Barack Obama, who maintained a detachment verging on aloofness from his most fervent and adulatory campaign crowds, Palin achieved an extraordinary at-oneness with her supporters; not least, perhaps, because she appeared to be such an enthralled fan of her own performances. She managed to endow her threadbare homilies about free enterprise, tax cuts, patriotism, and the evil of government spending with the novelty of her own sudden, fresh-faced presence on the national scene. Most of all, she seemed to embody in her person and her life story the accumulated grievances of the heartland and the West: the resentment in the countryside and the exurbs against the liberal tyranny of the big cities; the antipathy of those she calls "real Americans" toward the "East Coast elites"; the surly resistance of states' rights proponents to "the Feds."

Her nasal voice, pitched in the upper register, with the upsy-downsy, singsong delivery of a kindergarten teacher, became, rather improbably, a great electoral asset. Her diction and accent were shaped more by class than region, and spiced with faux-genteel cuss words like "dang," "heck," "darn," "geez," "bullcrap," and "bass-ackwards." It was a voice unspoiled by overmuch formal education and boldly unafraid of truisms and clichés; a perfect foil for Obama's polished law-school eloquence. In the narrative of the McCain campaign, she was the exemplary real American, Obama the phony one, and when people are now interviewed in the interminable lines for her book signings, by far their most common remark about her is "She's real."

Alaska, the particular reality from which Palin hails, is so little known by most Americans that she was able to freely mythicize her state as the utopian last refuge of the "hard work ethic," "unpretentious living," and proud self-sufficiency. Her anti-tax rhetoric (private citizens spend their money more wisely than government does) and disdain for "federal dollars" were unembarrassed by the fact that Alaska tops the tables of both per capita federal expenditure, on which one in three jobs in the state depends, and congressional earmarks, or "pork." So, too, she mythicized the straggling eyesore of Wasilla (described by a current councilwoman there as "like a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other") as the bucolic small town of sentimental American memory. Listening to Palin talk about it, one was invited to inspect not the string of oceanic parking lots attached to Fred Meyer, Lowe's, Target, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot, or the town's reputation among state troopers as the crystal meth capital of Alaska, but, rather, the imaginary barber shop, drugstore soda fountain, antique church, and raised boardwalks, seen in the rosy light of an Indian summer evening.

more http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23532

[Inuca]

1. "a voice unspoiled by overmuch formal education "

Lovely :-)

[virgogal]

2. That wasn't a book review,it was a "hit" piece---and I read it all.

Palin would never make it in the White House but the elitism shown in the "review" astounded me.

It made me feel stupid because I attended a state university,as she did.

I'm sure most will disagree with me and no,I didn't read her book,and won't.

[Inuca]

4. If my memory serves me

She did not attend A state university, she attended FIVE.

[virgogal]

5. Good lord----only Idaho was mentioned in the article.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. Ah, Wasilla...

The armpit of the Mat-Su Valley.

We had occasion to blow through there this weekend on our way to Talkeetna, and I took the opportunity to shoot a few photos for just such a thread as this. Wasilla is so weird in so many ways that I actually told my husband I wanted to drive up there by myself someday just so I could tool around town taking photos of the blight. (Don't get me wrong, there are some nicer parts of town away from the town center, but you have to hunt for them.)







Here is Shooters Billiards, whose proprietor was recently busted attempting to bring 23 pounds of Mexican meth into the state. Our local cooks have been somewhat thwarted by legislation making it harder to purchase cold medicine.


Wasilla at dusk



It's a shame about Wasilla, really. When I first visited Alaska 38 years ago, Wasilla was little more than a crossroads comprised of some rustic old buildings with personality. Its residents were dog mushers, farmers, old hippies, scruffy guys who smelled of woodsmoke. What you see above is Sarah's Wasilla. She must be so proud.

Wasilla's sister town, Palmer, has pretty much retained its old character and is a much nicer place to visit.