Charming, They say--personable, one of us, real. To me she's cloying and hopelessly artificial.
Still, I watch this election from several perspectives:
Mine: What I want (this perspective comes easiest).
Theirs: What something like half the American voters seem to want (at least for strategic reasons it's useful to track this, given the serious chance that They may win).
Ours: What people everywhere today and tomorrow need (that is, what people here and everywhere will end up wishing we did).
From my perspective, Palin is creepy the way George Bush is creepy. Yes I realize that from Their perspective, she's real. I can see why They'd think that. It's because we define "real" really differently.
Back in 2002, journalist Ronald Suskind interviewed Bush's chief propagandist, Karl Rove. Suskind writes:
"Rove said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,' Rove continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
In a way Rove has a point. In "reality," perception is reality. People mostly operate from their guts and what people's guts perceive as real is what people tend to act upon.
In this context, I put "reality" in quotation marks to define a particular kind of reality. This sort of reality does have real efficacy in terms of shaping the world, but by this definition, Zeus and the Tooth Fairy are equally real. Belief causes people to act in certain ways: prayers are prayed, cattle bled out, teeth slipped under pillows in little envelopes--real choices made in the real world.
But that's not the only definition of reality. Consider the view reflected in this quote from Aldous Huxley:
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Huxley's reality is whatever persists independent of perceptions and the actions that follow from them.
Some attempt to conflate the two definitions. Take "The Secret," which argues that what you perceive to be real (for example, that you'll be successful) automatically becomes hard fact in the world (you will be successful) because of the "law of attraction." Indeed, even if the law of attraction isn't real you can make it real, I suppose, by perceiving that it is.
In Suskind's interview, Rove is making a case akin to "The Secret" (that old New Ager--whoda thunk?!). He believes perception makes the world. He isn't just saying you can make people believe anything. He's saying you can get them to act and to act in such large numbers (since we're an empire) that they actually create the hard reality.
I suppose if the world were composed exclusively of people, of their perceptions and their actions, this could be true. It would be like the virtual worlds in "The Matrix" where it's all a matter of perception and perception management.
What Rove conveniently fails to perceive is that there are large numbers of people whose perceptions he can't shape, and what's more important, there are physical constraints on the role of human perception and action anyway. No matter how many people you successfully convince to perceive and act otherwise, you can't get blood from a stone or enough oil from Alaska to fuel us inexpensively for any length of time. (You can fuel some of the people some of the time. . . . )
Last Thursday night Sarah Palin proved she is perfectly capable of succeeding by Rove's definition. She can spin cutesy cloying charming deceptions that tailor people's "reality" to the needs of her party. For a guy like me who wishes she would fall hard, it's kind of disappointing. In terms of my three perspectives, if she wins Them over to her side, she'll be very bad for Me and Us. In the long run, we'll regret her ascent.
Still, I also view this election from a fourth perspective: I imagine being an alien looking in on the modest natural understandable progress of this fledgling reasoner, H. sapiens.
Born yesterday, muddling through the lessons of history, by necessity gut-driven but also by necessity gut-overriding, trying to figure out when to follow its gut and when to reason. Not evil, just naive. Short-sighted, but not by having lost some long-sightedness it once possessed. It didn't fall from grace; it evolved from slime mold.
It takes tests sometimes, like this coming election or the last one. It gets test results too, like Iraq and the market crash. The test results aren't perfectly correlated. It can't tell for sure what caused what. Still, over time it is likely to discern useful patterns and make fewer mistakes.
From this perspective, the election is lined up just perfectly. McCain may have not been perfectly Rovian before the campaign began, but his readiness to leap into that mode makes him the perfect representation of Rovian "reality." And Palin, rather than being just a bumbler, showed last Thursday night that with a month's training, she too can represent slick Rovian "reality management" about perfectly.
We have that option pitted against the Democrats, who this time managed to send up some guys who indulge in just enough spin to survive, and do so largely in the service of paying due respect to the other definition of reality. Beyond America's love affair with itself ("The greatest workforce in the world," as McCain and Palin coo mawkishly), they argue, certain hard-and-fast limits still remain.
How will this fledgling reasoner choose this time? Will it have learned from the past eight years that Rove's treatment of reality ultimately is undermined by facts that "do not cease to exist because they are ignored"?
Nice to be tested from time to time. One way or another, reality will serve us up the grades we earn and the government we deserve.
