Enter Miss Congeniality, stage right
Future historians pondering the failure of the American experiment should ponder a recent AP dispatch from Hollywood. Headlined “Fame-seekers find celebrity, notoriety on reality TV,” it explains how despite falling short of winning first prize on programs like “Survivor” and “The Apprentice,” some contestants achieved sufficient notoriety to command handsome lecture fees, collect book advances and host shows like “The Real Housewives of New York City.” Consider one Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, a villainess on “The Apprentice” – “reality” shows being as spontaneous as professional wrestling – who once accused a rival of racial bigotry for using the expression “pot calling the kettle black.” (How this prodigy missed working for the Obama campaign escapes me. But I digress.) Now she’s compiling a “book” called “The B**** Switch” and lecturing rapt audiences of Moron-Americans for $10,000 a pop.
It’s all but official: In election year 2008, the game-show culture rules. A high school softball coach responding to a casting call for “Survivor” explained the American way to the AP’s Ryan Nakashima: “I want to walk down the street or in the mall and have someone come after me and ask for my autograph. … I want the paparazzi to come after me.”
Sic transit gloria Americae. (Translation: We’ve had it.)
Enter Sarah Palin, stage right, dandling an infant swaddled in an American flag and dragging behind her the eviscerated carcass of a moose. Two weeks ago, Alaska’s preposterous governor was less well-known than the last man in the Kansas City Royals bullpen. Today, she’s the universally acknowledged dominatrix of the Republican Party’s influential Magical Christian wing and the presumed savior of its presidential hopes.
More populous than the GOP’s powerful Save the Millionaires faction, Magical Christians read Jesus’ ambiguous admonition to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” to mean that God has uniquely blessed us with pious leaders such as George W. Bush, and take a partisan view of American elections.
How anybody professes to interpret riddles literally remains a puzzle, but Palin herself goes further. Witness her appearance at the Wasilla (AK) Bible Church last June, her home congregation.
As seen on YouTube, Palin informed the faithful in disconcertingly girlish tones that “God’s will” favors a $30 billion natural gas pipeline her administration wants to build. Moreover, her efforts could fail “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.”
Palin also hinted that God sent our brave soldiers into Eye-rack, not President Bush and an easily stampeded Congress, as the unholy believe.
So was it the Lord who cooked up that phony intelligence of Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs, rather than Ahmed Chalabi and Dick Cheney? Palin evidently thinks so, defining the war as “a task that is from God … That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for – that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”
That this happens to be precisely what Osama bin Laden tells his own deluded followers, that American “crusaders” seek the destruction of Islam, needn’t detain us. Except to notice, as Middle Eastern scholar Juan Cole points out in Salon, that theocrats commonly “confuse God’s will with their own mortal policies.” Citing chapter and verse on a broad range of social issues, he asks, “What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.”
But hasn’t Alaska’s one-time “Miss Congeniality” a right to believe anything she likes? Absolutely. But the rest of us are no more compelled to take her views on Biblical “prophecy” more seriously than rival forms of soothsaying, such as Tarot-card reading, crystal-ball gazing or examining the entrails of sheep.
Persons who practice such rites, whether in the wholesome suburban confines of the Wasilla Bible Church or a cavern in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, are frauds, fools or both. It’s time the rest of us quit being polite about it.
So is Palin merely Elmer Gantry in a bathing suit? Let’s put it this way: A Miss Alaska contestant who falsified her credentials would be asked to turn in her sash and tiara. Consider Palin’s dramatic claim to be a bold fiscal reformer.
“I told Congress thanks but no thanks on that ‘Bridge to Nowhere,'” she claimed. “If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we’d build it ourselves.”
At issue was a proposed $223 million span to connect Ketchikan, Alaska (pop. 7,500), to an offshore island with fewer than 100 inhabitants – a useless boondoggle if ever one was.
So useless that Congress actually canceled the earmark in November 2005, a full year before Palin, running for governor, vigorously championed the project.
It wasn’t until she took office that Gov. Palin reneged on her campaign promise. She kept the federal money for other projects.
Why am I not surprised?
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.