Cut, Kill, Dig, DrillJonathan Raban, September 26
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing,
powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see
as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American
accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its
contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the
provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in
its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan
resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that
politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan
profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low
taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’
who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most targeted
demographic in the country. In 1992, Ross ‘Clean out the Barn’ Perot
and his United We Stand America followers looked for a while as if they
were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George
H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat
Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the
same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian,
white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In
2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his
grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests.
It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city with a
population of more than 500,000 voted for Kerry, and that the election
was won for Bush in the outer suburbs, exurbia and the countryside –
peasants with pitchforks territory. For an organisation so wedded to
its big-city corporate clients, the Republican Party has been hugely
successful in mopping up the votes of low-income, lightly educated
rural and exurban residents.
Most large American cities,
especially in the West, are situated in counties that extend far beyond
the city limits. Liberal urban governments with high property-tax rates
and progressive environmental policies wield great power (some say
tyranny) over their rural hinterlands, delivering ukases about land use
and conservation: brush-cutting is to be limited to 40 per cent of the
property; ‘setbacks’ of 100 feet are required from streams and
wetlands; new churches are denied building permission because they are
deemed ‘large footprint items’ in ‘critical habitat areas’ etc. So the
householder or farmer sees ‘the city’ making unwarranted infringements
of his God-given right to manage his land as he pleases, and imagines
his precious tax-dollars being squandered on such urban fripperies as
streetcar lines and monorails. These local quarrels spread to infect
whole states. In Washington state, where I live, almost every ill that
befalls people in the timberlands and agricultural regions, far from
any city, is confidently attributed to ‘liberals from Seattle’, a
nefarious conspiracy of wealthy, tree-hugging elitists with law degrees
from East Coast universities, whose chief aim is to destroy the
traditional livelihoods of honest citizens living on either side of the
Puget Sound urban corridor. Poujade – and Jean-Marie Le Pen – would
have had a field day here; as, I’m afraid, will the McCain-Palin ticket
in November.
Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the
movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders.
Reagan the Hollywood actor, Perot the data-processing billionaire,
Buchanan the DC journalist, and George W. Bush the energy-industry
scion and owner of a merely recreational ranch in Crawford, Texas, have
had very little in common with their rural and exurban constituents,
and their gestures at farmyard, strip-mall or cowboy-boot cred have
tended to come across as phoney and embarrassing. Photographed inside
J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic
than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the
moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican
Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano,
Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real
thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their
national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty
million people watched her speech on television. When she said,
‘Difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick!’
even in the liberal redoubt of Seattle I thought I heard a roar of
delighted recognition coming from my neighbours on the hill. Palin
doesn’t need to say what Poujade used to tell his listeners, ‘Look me
in the eye, and you will see yourself,’ and ‘I’m just le petit Poujade,
an ordinary Frenchman like you’: all she needed was her trademark blink
from behind her librarian glasses, and to turn on her pert,
wrinkle-nosed smile, in order to convince a crucial sector of the
American electorate, male and female, that it sees in her a
looking-glass reflection, suitably flattering in both form and content,
of itself. Sarah, c’est moi.
Found image Via Nicole (thanks!) - link
Like Wally the Green
Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry
creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game,
Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual
performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity
to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she
does in the style she developed as mayor of Wasilla and then perfected
in her triumphant gubernatorial campaign in 2006. Transcripts and
videos from her time in Alaska show her parlaying the barest minimum of
rhetorical and intellectual resources into a formidable electoral
weapon. The least one can say of her is that she quickly learned how to
make the most of herself.
What is most striking about her is that
she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual
processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe
Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby
tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a
limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all
as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she
reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly
proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in
the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a
word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In
the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US,
it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to
answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency
more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.
She has great political gifts, combining the competitive instincts
of a Filipino gamecock with the native gumption she first displayed in
her 1996 race to become mayor of Wasilla, when she blindsided the
incumbent mayor by running not on local but on state and national
issues, as the pro-gun and pro-life candidate. Mayors have no say on
abortion or on gun laws, but Palin got the support of the local
Evangelicals (it greatly helped that her – Lutheran – opponent’s
surname was Stein and her backers put it about that he was a Jew) and
of gun-owners who keenly supported a bill, then pending in the state
legislature, that would affirm the right of Alaskans to carry concealed
weapons into public buildings. On more typical mayoral concerns, she
promised to halve Wasilla’s property tax and ‘cut out things that are
not necessary’, citing the bloated budgets for the museum, the library
and arts and recreation. She won the election with 616 votes to Stein’s
413.
There followed what some Wasillaites saw as her reign of
terror. She demanded resignation letters from all the city managers,
ridding herself of the museum director, the librarian (whom she was
later forced to rehire), the public works director, the city planner
and the police chief, who’d argued against the concealed weapons bill
and had supported a measure to close the town’s bars at 2.30 a.m. on
weekdays and 3 a.m. at weekends (the owners of the Mug-Shot Saloon and
the Wasilla Bar had given money to Palin’s campaign). City employees
were forbidden by her to speak to the press, and during her first four
months in office she provoked a string of appalled editorials in the
local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman:
Wasilla found out it has a new mayor with either little understanding or little regard for the city’s own laws.
Palin seems to have assumed her election was indeed a coronation. Welcome to Kingdom Palin, the land of no accountability.
Mayor
Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth
. . . Wasilla residents have been subjected to attempts to unlawfully
appoint council members, statements that have been shown to be patently
untrue, unrepentant backpedalling, and incessant whining that her only
enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of former mayor
John Stein.
Surrounding herself with fellow
congregants from the Pentecostalist Wasilla Assembly of God and old
school chums from Wasilla High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning
the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher
used to extol. She abolished its building codes and signed a series of
ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and
industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on
a house being built by one of her campaign contributors, she sacked him.
Having
come to power saying that her agenda was to pare down Wasilla to ‘the
basic necessities, the bare bones’, she surprised its citizens when she
redecorated the mayor’s office at a reported cost of $50,000 salvaged
from the highways budget; its new red flock wallpaper matched her bold,
rouge-et-noir taste in personal outfits. Another $24,000 of city money
went on a white Chevy Suburban, known around Wasilla, without
affection, as the mayormobile. She hired a city administrator to
deputise for her in the day-to-day running of Wasilla’s affairs and
employed a lobbyist in DC to wheedle lawmakers into meeting the town’s
ever-expanding list of claims for congressional ‘pork’ (so named from
the antebellum custom of rewarding slaves with barrels of salt pork).
That expenditure, at least, paid off: during Palin’s six-year tenure as
mayor, the federal government doled out more than $1000 for every man,
woman and child in Wasilla. Her pet project was a $14.7m ice rink and
sports complex, which opened in 2004. It is said to be lightly used, it
has left the city servicing a massive debt, and a Jarndyce and Jarndyce
lawsuit continues over the bungled way in which Palin acquired the land
on which it’s built.
Present-day Wasilla is Palin’s lasting
monument. It sits in a broad alluvial valley, puddled with lakes, boxed
in on three sides by sawtoothed Jurassic mountains, and fringed with
woods of spruce and birch. Visitors usually aim their cameras at the
town’s natural surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its
rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is
a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a
four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by
trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most
built since 1990. It’s a generic Western settlement, and one sees
Wasillas in every state this side of the 100th meridian: the same
competing gas stations, fast-food outlets, strip malls and ‘big box’
stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Fred Meyer and Home Depot, each with a
vast parking lot out front, on which human figures scuttle with their
shopping trolleys like coloured ants, robbed of their proper scale. (It
has to be said that Pierre Poujade, champion of the small shopkeeper,
would have been outraged by this sight.)
Wasilla is what
inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no
planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive
and superstitious trust in the benevolent authority of the free market.
Palin’s view of aesthetics was nicely highlighted in 1996, a few months
before she ran for mayor, when a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News
happened to light on her in an excited crowd of five hundred women
queuing up in the Anchorage J.C. Penney’s, waiting to snag the
autograph of Ivana Trump, who was in town to hawk her eponymous line of
scent.
‘We want to see Ivana,’ Palin said, who
admittedly smells like a salmon for a large part of the summer,
‘because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and
culture.’
The blot on the Alaskan landscape that is Wasilla is the natural consequence of a mindset that mistakes Ivana Trump for culture.
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