[lbo-talk] Mclemee: Palintology - Inside Higher Ed

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Nov 21 04:17:40 PST 2009


http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee265

Palintology

November 18, 2009

By Scott McLemee

Important as it was, the campaign of Barack Obama was not the only

history-making element of the 2008 presidential election. With Sarah

Palin, we crossed another epochal divide. The boundary between reality

television and American politics (already somewhat weakened by the

continuous "American Idol" plebiscite) finally collapsed.

Her campaign's basic formula was familiar: members of an ordinary

middle-class family turn into instantly recognizable national

celebrities while competing for valuable prizes.

But like any contestant at this late stage of an already decadent

genre, Palin seemed much less conscious of the stakes of the game

(power) than in how it let her broadcast her own sense of herself.

At that level she could not lose - the ballot box notwithstanding. I'm

not sure what Sarah Palin's favorite work of postmodern theory might be

(all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean

Baudrillard's Seduction. Other political figures use the media as part

of what JB calls "production." That is, they generate signs and images

meant to create an effect within politics. For the Baudrillardian

"seducer," by contrast, the power to create fascination is its own

reward.

Watching Palin respond to questions about her book Going Rogue (or not

respond to them, often enough) is, from this perspective, no laughing

matter. She grows ever more comfortable talking about herself. If no

more capable of simulating knowledge of public issues, she is getting

her story straight, more or less. And this matters. For now she does

not have to be accurate, just coherent. She is consolidating her

presence, her "brand." Teams of professional ideologists can feed Palin

her lines later.

Is this too cynical? I fear it may not be cynical enough. For it

assumes that Palin will eventually be integrated into her party's

apparatus and turned into a mouthpiece of old-school Republican

electoral politics -- a basic platform of tax cuts for the rich and

unregulated handgun ownership for everybody else.

That is not the only possible outcome, however. Someone with Palin's

developing command of the arts of media seduction -- and whose knack on

that score is largely a matter of her performative maverickiness -- has

the potential to change the rules of the game.

<snip>

An example is the item Palin posted on Facebook in early August: "The

America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with

Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's `death panel' so

his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their

`level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health

care. Such a system is downright evil."

This was fantasy. But it was effective fantasy. To borrow again from

Baudrillard, it seduced -- abolishing reality and replacing it with a

delirious facsimile.

The editors of _Going Rouge_ give Palin credit for the rhetorical power

generated by her words, and perhaps also by her canny use of the

social-networking venue: "With remarkable economy of prose, Palin cast

health care reform as an assault on the country, put a face on its

supposed victims (her baby Trig), coined the expression 'death panel'

(linking it directly to Obama), raised the specter of euthanasia in the

service of a state-run economy, and rallied the troops around a fight

against 'evil.' In short, she personalized, popularized, and polarized

the debate. Never mind that Democratic health care reform bills merely

funded optional end-of-life consultations that had heretofore been

almost universally acknowledged as a good. (Indeed, Palin herself once

championed them in Alaska.)"

Well, consistency is, after all, the hobgoblin of tiny minds. Sarah

Palin is playing the political game on a much grander scale -- with

rules she may be rewriting as she goes.

<end excerpt>



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