White Person's Shuck and Jive
Am I the only one who finds Sarah Palin's Homespun-on-Steroids demeaner to resemble a sort of 'whiteface' vaudeville? I mean, if Chris Rock or Eddie Murphy were to dress up in drag (well, Eddie does... a lot, but never-mind) and over-play a white midwesterner to the hilt, wouldn't this be it?
The recent conundrum that SNL faced in parodying the Couric interview underscores the extent to which Palin is the perfect self-contained self-parody. They wisely chose to repeat her answers almost verbatim. I mean, how can you improve on the laughability of Sarah Palin?
But the debate performance was in a class by itself, with her shout-outs, winks, and you-betchas. I found her intolerable from the first second - saccharine-infused cool-whip, ersatz, non-dairy to the hilt. Where's the beef, Reagan once famously asked. Sarah Palin brings to mind where's the human? To me, she really does come across as a cheery android, something the Disney anamitronics lab cooked up to steal the election.
Or perhaps she's really some sort of Stepford-Evangelist? Programmed in the subaltern pulpits of Wasila by an anti-semitic witch doctor and a slew of angry, seccesionist fishmongers?
Alas, she is the real thing, albeit theatricalized a bit: a poster child for the unrepentantly ignorant, incurious, anti-intellectual provinciality that runs more deeply in America's fabric than I ever imagined. They like her! There are millions of Americans who think she is a) genuine and b) inspiring.
And yet, every time I see her, I ask myself again: does she really believe her own shtick? Or is she swinging for the fences by blowing it up to the point that she now patently resembles a black comedian's take on white middle America?
The truth is, it doesn't matter. Sure, her shuck and jive disgusts most of the readers here @ Kos, maybe even the majority of Americans, but still, a sizable minority find her wonderful. They wait eagerly with bated breath for every soundbite.
In the bizarro world we inhabit, her stupidity is 'honesty', her unmarried pregnant teenage daughter, paired with her support of abstinence-only sex education is 'family values'. Her determined ignorance is 'common man'. This inversion is the heart and soul of satire.
And the broad wink-nod sleight of hand of the entire McCain campaign (she not only has foreign policy experience because her state borders Russia, but McCain is in touch with the needs of Latin Americans here in the US because he a) was born in Panama and b) once dallied with a Brazilian woman, and he also knows technology because he piloted a jet 40 years ago) is the heart of vaudeville - everything pumped up to a preposterous degree, and played to the hilt, all the while acting the straight man until the final gag is revealed, to boisterous laughter.
Unfortunately, if the vaudevillian show now ramps up the 'dangerous terrorist-muslim-foreign' character, replete with an implicit Koran and AK-47, the laugh may be on us.
This is what America has become during my 48 years on the planet.
I find this profoundly dismaying.