Sarah Palin’s narcissistic America
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The fact that she looked at notes on her hand isn’t the issue; it’s that she was even there in the first place. Sarah Palin’s appearance at the National Tea Party Convention this past weekend has already spawned a flurry of discussion, mostly focusing on the fact that she looked down at one point at a few notes scribbled on her palm. But who cares about that?
At the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Lola Adesioye wondered, “I don’t know if Palin is in it for the people or the publicity. But if there’s one thing you can be sure of, it’s that when opportunity knocks, Sarah Palin goes running. Is this the type of future “leadership” that America wants or needs?”
Presumably, what some of America wants is Sarah Palin, and perhaps she’s what America needs as well. After all, she’s the embodiment of a cultural mythology that refuses to die, and it seems that for a lot of people this is very comforting. Even though most Americans haven’t been a state governor, a vice-presidential candidate, or a commentator for Fox News, her image as “one of us” remains intact because of our culture that forever urges us to expound our own personal greatness to the world.
In his Vanity Fair piece last year, Todd Purdum wrote,
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.
Numerous times in her speech on the weekend, Palin referenced former President Ronald Reagan, reminding the audience several times (as if they needed it) that had he been alive, Reagan would have been turning ninety-nine years old on that day. Reagan will probably be nostalgically remembered as one of the Good Guys, no doubt partly due to his own biography of the movie star-turned-President. And as an example of where popular culture has ended up in the last twenty-five years, he’s basically the perfect specimen. You want to be a movie star? You can do that. You want to be an author? No problem. You want to be President? You can do that, too.
Enter Sarah Palin, stage right, and let’s look at Adesioye’s question again: is she in it for the publicity or the people? The answer is probably that there’s no difference – people are the publicity. They love Palin because she publicly says everything they want to before she even opens her mouth. She’s Made It and now the haters will just have to deal: the basic war cry of a society fueled heavily by the cyclonic, self-reinforcing grandeur of the online world.
In fact, just by writing this, I’m playing into Palin’s Greatness Machine. The media chatter stokes the idea that her rousing of the conservative rabble might be something more than a collective desire to hang on to what was once thought to be the American Dream, rather than the culmination of twenty-five years of me-first thinking, embodied by an overgrown ninth-grader who got caught cheating on a test that she should have studied for two years ago.
Whoops, we’re back to the notes. And back, again, to the question of What Is Sarah Palin? A grassroots political leader, or a cry for help from the narcissistic soul of America – a country that was loved in the “morning” of Reagan, but that now can only love itself? That even Palin herself appealed in her speech to God, suggesting the leaders of future look to the skies for guidance, is probably an affirmation of the latter.
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Palin’s political perspective or, to employ her preferred, populist parlance, “that fear-y, status quo thingy,” seems to be working out just fine, at least for her. This self-centered strategy has proven extremely effective in the short-term, upping Ms. Palin’s media profile while lining her pockets at the same time.
However, appealing to people’s irrational fear of change generally brings out the worst in them (a fact demonstrated by the many misguided and offensive slogans spouted at tea party events last summer).
And assuring voters that we can continue consuming resources at or above our current rate is as reckless as it is dishonest. To use a tired metaphor, at a time when Americans must get leaner, Palin is scoring political points by telling us we can eat ice cream every night for dinner and never gain weight or run out of milk.
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The We Party
A liberal progressive response to the tea party.
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THIS WOMAN WILL WIN THE NEXT PRESIDENCY.
if you think she not powerful, think again; for she winning the hearts of not only republicans, but the people who not vote at all.
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Talk about the perfect storm, climate change, recession, unimaginable deficits and Sarah P at the helm!
Maybe she would surprise us all with a sudden fit of clairvoyance and be the one to convince us that unless we seriously change our lifestyles right now, we may not be able to climb out of this mess.
Or maybe she will help accelerate us past some crazy trigger points in both the climate and the economy and it will all be over for humans for a while.
Talk about time of need, exceptional leadership would really help…..
BHO is a pathological narcissist and he got elected.
Don’t be tough on yourself for writing about Sarah Palin – everyone else does. I’m always hoping some major dirt will plug the toilet of her career – but that is not objective reasoning. Sometimes it seems that half of America wants the other half dead. I walk the aisles of the same market I’ve shopped for over thirty years and more than half of the upper middle class shoppers would like to see Obama fail miserably – which means we all fail. Tom Medlicott