The Tea Party’s leader has opened the doors of her house, staging her private life on TV. So the story of the vicissitudes of the ultra-right’s paladin strategizing to ascend to the White House.
The daughter dances, the mom roars, the sister-in-law gossips on the web. The possible future first family of America, appreciated by the right of the Tea Party, pure and hardline, has become a reality show for gullible spectators-electors. The Palins’ gang: led by the 46-year-old matriarch who launched her first TV reality show (“Sarah Palin’s Alaska” has been watched by five million Americans), while her daughter Bristol dances among the stars in a lacy mini skirt.
And the quasi-sister-in-law, sister of the primitive high school student who made Bristol pregnant, speaks evil of everybody. If this will be the situation after Obama in 2012, which is by no means impossible, America might have to regret the Bushes.
The show of the “Big Sister” — in this tribe of “white” Alaska, clearly the women lead the dance while men are relegated to small appearances with boots, axes, sledges, dogs, steaks for the grill and the occasional need for procreation — tries to capture the most rustic bottom of public opinion. And it tries to capture that regurgitation of anger, anxiety and xenophobia which heats up the water under the Tea Party.
From the new, virulent but strong minority of anti-government protesters, Sarah, “Mama Grizzly,” prophetess of those who call themselves, as she does, the “grizzly mothers,” the show is a long and teasing spot on a peripheral cable TV network, TLC (The Learning Channel), produced by the creator of the reality TV show “Survivor” as a documentary on Palin’s superb Alaska.
Behind the fake rock climbing, the camps with huskies and malamutes, sled dogs and the barbecue, with her husband as a drone bee in front of the sunset over the ocean, Palin’s ideological proposal is so childish and cheeky that it is potentially effective. Nobody, P. T. Barnum said, has ever gone bankrupt betting on the gullibility and stupidity of the American people.
Sarah did not hesitate to shamefully exhibit her youngest son Trig, a baby with Down syndrome, to the Republican Congress two years ago. The heedless daughter, Bristol, forgot the maternal sermons on chastity and got pregnant. And now, as it were, she is dancing, after that boyfriend-father quickly fled at the foot of the altar.
On the show of the stars, to keep the devoutly militant base of her mom steady, the 18-year-old girl first dressed in sort of Christian clerical apparel; black jacket and trousers, black flat shoes and a white shirt with a clerical collar. But, for the second appearance, she has already thrown that modesty into the bonfire of the audience, swaying her hips impiously in her short and tight dresses with lace hems — “I can see and I can’t see” (I see, I see) and with generous shaking of her not ignorable female attributes.
Nevertheless, from the mixer which is the Internet, Mercede, the almost sister-in-law and still aunt, has accused Bristol of being a witch and a heartless shrew on her blog, infested by little hearts, bears, butterflies, in line with the mystical philosophy of women regressed to the childish condition of “teddy she-bears.”
A nation astonished and obviously divided — 52 percent of Americans consider Palin, with her tribe of sow bears for elections, as a real shame, though there is a 40 percent that worships her — watches the irresistible rise of a woman trying to be the representation of those who do not know what they want. But they know what they do not want: taxes, foreigners, Obama and the Democrats.
Palin is like the [Italian political party] Lega Nord, though she is even more on the right than the Lega might be. Palin, with her chirpy ignorance and her coquettish ego-latry, is abhorred by traditional Republicans. They remember the infamous quips she made in her interviews (“I can see Russia from my house,” she said, having no idea of where Russia is and how far it is from her house).
They know her dilettantism, but they recognize the charm she exercises on a public that is not much different from her. 65 percent of her electorate consist of women uneducated and without any self-respect, under the thumb of reality TV shows and daily acrimony.
The first episode of “Alaska,” the electoral spot camouflaged as docu-reality, did not go well. Even the actions of her daughter, that made her involuntarily a grandmother, have not attracted many spectators, considering the outright competition for shows of the moment with other reality TV shows about “desperate housewives.”
The candidates that Palin supported did not do very well and two of her top pupils lost in Nevada and Delaware. This happened despite the high wave of opposition and hate against Obama. In Alaska as well, a female senator who Palin has fought with every grimace and fluttering of false eyelashes won.
Underestimating this falsely childish teddy she-bear and dismissing her as a goose with lipstick rather than a little beastie with long and very ambitious fangs would be a snobbish mistake. Rangers of her Alaska beg visitors to never be deceived by the lazy and stout air of bears, especially of mom-bears. Every year a few incautious campers fall into the clutches of a grizzly bear.
Indeed, the docu-reality spot of Sarah Palin shows, thanks to the obvious metaphor, how quick and ferocious these animals can be when they detect prey. Just ask Alaska’s salmons. In the eyes of Sarah, in 2012, American politics will be populated entirely by salmon-electors in a suicide spawning.
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