From: Sgt Mom
To: Our Various Political, Media and Intellectual Elites
Re: The Appeal of Palin

1.I have to admit all over again, ladies and gentlemen of the uber-elite, if there were ever more proof needed that y’all (and I use the Southernism purposefully) and the rest of us live – if not on two different planets, than at least in two separate yet linked realities – then we’ve collected that proof by the bucket-full over the last week. I speak of course of the nomination of Xenia, the Warrior Princess of Wassila, Alaska to run as the vice-presidential candidate of the Grand Ol’ Party in this suddenly electrified election season.

2. A cat among the political pigeons doesn’t even begin to express the mad flurries this week; first the shock of another maverick, formerly the governor of Alaska, an outside and relatively unknown regional political personality. She appears amidst us - not like Venus wafted ashore, on a sea shell and attended with nymphs and cupids and fluttery draperies… but heralded with the other kind of shell, a whole barrage of them, and appearing out of the smoke mounted on a roaring Harley, dressed in cammies with a hunting rifle and a sniper-scope over her shoulder and a field-dressed moose carcass slung over the back… oh, no – that’s no moose, it’s Michael Moore! You get the idea, this has been a pretty startling week, all the way around. I actually can’t blame the “good ladies”* of NOW for reacting as if a hairy Visigoth had just barged into their board meeting and let out a prodigious fart. (And lit it.) They’re all for women in positions of power and authority – they just have to be the right sort. With the right kind of background, the right sort of friends, the properly vetted positions and opinions.

3. So, Governor Palin – able, charismatic, sharp as a humming-bird’s beak, with a proven record in local and small-town politics – very definitely not the right sort to be enthusiastically embraced by the old-line political, media and intellectual elite. That the rest of us are charmed, energized, and approving, that is just killing the old guard. I mean, really killing them. I picture Maureen Dowd and all the rest of the NY Times line-up, doing the haughty Margo Dumont impression, all evening gown and pearls, looking down their noses through the lorgnette: well, really, how dare those…those peasants approve of That Woman!? Don’t they know what is best for them? How is this possible, they can reject our wise and knowledgeable counsel? (With her pregnant teenage daughter, and her own hasty marriage… and that impossibly dishy blue-collar husband of hers… et cetera, et cetera.)

4. I swear, you must be in such a tiz about this, everywhere from the lunchrooms of the High and Mighty, the boardrooms of the Ivy League, Kos’s mother’s basement, the CBS newsroom and all. Shouldn’t all those (shudder) revelations about Her… shouldn’t all that have sunk Her nomination deeper than the Titanic with all those blue-state hicks in the sticks? You know what those people are like, darling…

5. Matter of fact, it’s become pretty clear that y’all don’t know what it’s like, out here in blue-state-land. No, honestly, I don’t think y’all have a clue at all. You have some bizarre visualization of small-town, blue-state, working-class and middle-class Americans. You appear to be disconnected from Americans who go to church regularly, who serve in the military, who go into a trade or profession without bothering with college attendance. You have nothing to go upon but tired old tropes gleaned from the movies and stale clichés from television shows and novels that someone forced you to read in high school, four decades ago. In that sort of fun-house mirror of the ‘other America’, church-goers are hysterical, judgmental fanatics, women who want to do anything more than marry well and squeeze out offspring are treated like pariahs, being divorced is cause for social blackballing and gays and blacks are regularly lynched and/or flogged. Everyone is a red-neck, hostile gun-worshipper who doesn’t know which fork to eat the salad with and reads on the 5th grade level… and lusts after their sister, and can’t wait to murder the next stranger who drives into town.

6. Pointing out that small-town, flyover, other-America is nothing like that at all is like spitting into a hurricane. There is nothing so granite-like in its’ certainty like well-established prejudices. It’s coming back to bite you. Yes, you, our very own home grown elites. My dear people, you live in a bubble and have come to believe what you have created, in the vision you have of the ‘other’, your own countrymen and women.

7. The problem is that for you elites, the ‘other’ America can see clearly and very well, thank you. They can see past the vision, or is it the hallucination? And they also vote.

Hoping this is of help to you all
I remain,

Sgt. Mom

* As always, viciously skeptical quotemarks