Palin Passion Play: Acute Observations by Thomas Frank on the Crucified Sarah (...and Call for Art)
The following are acute observations on Sarah Palin as professional victim and martyred conservative saint by author and Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank from the Huffington Post, well worth reading in their entirety:
"...The ['liberal-elite'] culture's fantastically unfair treatment of middle Americans is the main lesson that many will no doubt take away from Ms. Palin's time in the national spotlight. In fact, it may be the only lesson. We don't really know where the former vice presidential candidate stands on most issues. We know only that she is constantly being maligned, that when we turn on the TV and see her fair face beaming, we are about to hear that some liberal someone has slurred this noble lady yet again.
"Indeed, if political figures stand for ideas, victimization is what Ms. Palin is all about. It is her brand, her myth. Ronald Reagan stood tall. John McCain was about service. Barack Obama has hope. Sarah Palin is a collector of grievances. She runs for high office by griping.
"This is no small thing, mind you. The piling-up of petty complaints is an important aspect of conservative movement culture. For those who believe that American life consists of the trampling of Middle America by the "elites" -- that our culture is one big insult to the pious and the patriotic and the traditional -- Sarah Palin's long list of unfair and disrespectful treatment is one of her most attractive features. Like Oliver North, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas, she is known not for her ideas but as a martyr, a symbol of the culture-war crimes of the left.
"To become a symbol of this stature Ms. Palin has had to do the opposite of most public figures. Where others learn to take hostility in stride, she and her fans have developed the thinnest of skins. They find offense in the most harmless remarks and diabolical calculation in the inflections of the anchorman's voice. They take insults out of context to make them seem even more insulting. They pay close attention to voices that are ordinarily ignored, relishing every blogger's sneer, every celebrity's slight, every crazy Internet rumor.
"This has been Ms. Palin's assigned role ever since she stepped on the national stage last summer. Indeed, she has stuck to it so unswervingly that one suspects it was settled on even before she was picked for the VP slot, that it was imposed on her by a roomful of GOP image consultants: Ms. Palin was to be the candidate on a cross...."
Call for art: Were I the painterly kind, I should like to produce something in a Medieval or Renaissance image of the martyred Saint Sarah of Wasilla, perhaps on a cross, or undergoing cruel scourging by wicked liberals, or pierced by arrows like Saint Sebastian. Oh, would that some talented soul be the conveyor from Heaven's heights of such a work...!
Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com
That would be a liberal rallying point, that painting.
But I propose another one, to be used in tandem with yours. Have a painting of Sarah, dressed as the female version of Jesus, walking away from various mendicants, with each of them in worse shape then they'd been in than before she'd laid hands on them.
Maybe several scenes in one painting of the moment of the laying on of hands and another as the results. One can be of her 'miraculous' construction of the Bridge to Nowhere (results picture shows it half finished) another with the bills for her change from 'the same old politics', another with her dead lake at her back door that her development caused, and so on.
July 16, 2009 9:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Win or lose she obviously sees cash in this strategy. Her strength isn't her knowledge of what she claims to care about but being damn good at playing the suckers that she has fooled time after time. She even has McCain falling in line. Credibility is lost on them both.
July 16, 2009 11:58 PM | Reply | Permalink