Sarah Palin is Causing Me an Identity Crisis

I have something terrifying to say: I kind of like Sarah Palin. I watched her speech last night, I scoffed at it, went through the motions of thinking it was really good, and then really bad, and oh wow we're in trouble, and then oh hell no, she's got nothing on Obama, and then I went to bed, and I couldn't stop thinking about her. In fact, I didn't sleep! I couldn't get that hockey mom-pit bull joke out of my head.

From the second I heard her voice on NPR, when it was announced that she would be McCain's running mate, I was immediately familiar with her. Growing up, Sarah Palin was my piano teacher, school principal, gas station attendant, mom's best friend, PTA president, pesticide control representative, and swim coach. I know Sarah Palin. Everyone in my family knows Sarah Palin. Idaho knows Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin, I immediately realized, is going to be someone that a lot of people in America can relate to. And I recognized her most dangerous characteristic--deducted, of course, from this idea that she's familiar to me: her conviction. She is 150% self assured. She doesn't question or doubt herself. Some might argue that this is a defining characteristic of the GOP and of lots of politicians; I think the difference here is that while Rudy Guliani and Mitt Romney--and even Hillary Clinton last week--might have gone back to their hotel rooms and eaten their shit after their speeches, Sarah Palin has no such alter ego. She belives every word she says.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I am a product of the West and using that fact as my reasoning as to why I don't seem to be fully engaged with people in New York anymore (or the fact, perhaps, that they are starting to annoy me a lot. It could also be that the denouement of my publishing career is upon me and I've now looked into the face of New York's cultural elite and shook hands with it and... well, that's the nicest thing I can think to say about it. My regard for "thinkers" has plummeted since college). Many of the people I know here have embraced Obama with a fervor that baffles me. He has appeared to me all along as a politician who is very good at writing and giving speeches. I'm sure he's a good person, and he's accomplished, of course, and a pioneering cultural figure, but more than anything he is a politician, and like all politicians, calculating. I can't help but associate his appeal over here--and the respective disdain for Hillary Clinton as I've experienced it--with the type of endemic idealism that perpetuates the social ills (like racism and class stratification) in New York. Similar to the notion that reading A People's History of the United States absolves one of any classist inclinations.

So Sarah Palin enters my life as something that is in direct opposition to basically everything else that is happening. Even in disagreeing with nearly everything she says, I believe her. She may preach a fucked up breed of morals, but dammit, those morals govern her life, too. She'll look you in the face and tell you that if her daughter were raped, she would still choose life (and, I mean, we forgive Obama his anti-gay marriage stance, so what's one more small concession? It's just politics!), and how can you not believe her? And bitch can kill a moose! Yes, I actually find her kind of refreshing! If it weren't for her pro-life, anti-environment, and delusional-perspective-on-the-war stuff, I might be swayed to vote differently! But there's no reason to worry about that quite yet.