Myth

Just finished reading a piece in Time magazine by Joe Klein in which he explores the phenomenon of “Palinmania” (or whatever he called it). As usual Klein is succinct in his pinpointing of the reasons Republican VP pick Sarah Palin has not just electrified the evangelical base but appears to have energized the GOP across the board, and in so doing probably changed the direction of the election. About a minute ago it was Barack Obama and his meteoric political fortunes the media couldn’t stop talking about, now it is Palin, and through her the resuscitation of John McCain and his chances for the White House.

All this, of course, is crushing news for the Democrats, most especially African-American Democrats, who saw an historic January inauguration so clearly we could practically reach out and touch it; now it seems, at this writing, to be slipping away.

I think this is bad news for the country as well. As Klein has assessed, it is nostalgia, in particular a nostalgia for a vanishing, Main Street, “Morning in America”-type past (that in fact never really existed) that Palin—the Sarah Palin we sort of-kind of know right now, at least—embodies for those so taken with her; a Reaganesque nostalgia with a twist: Rosie the Riveter Goes to Washington. She is selling herself—a ferociously determined GOP is selling her—as just an ordinary working mom (from a last-frontier-type state yet) who has made extraordinarily good; it is an Americana fantasy, it is the way Americans, white Americans especially, loooove to see themselves.

And it is an “uncomplicated” America--where people of color knew their place (mostly in the background or out of the picture entirely) and were okay with that as far as anyone bothered to know, an America as it was before those trouble-making, smarty-pants liberals with their radical notions about racial equality and queer identities and women’s rights started stirring things up--that Palin represents.

That America never had to contend with a Barack Obama, an urbane, educated black man with an exotic name and mixed-race life history to match, and what he represents. His is not the myth white Americans, of a certain age and upbringing anyway, know and love. If anything Obama and his candidacy signal a culturally complex, changing world, a world changing way too fast for an America more comfortable with fable than fact.