Before I get to business, let me just mention that my return to the topic of John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate is in no way to minimize the manifest importance of other ongoing events, from hurricane recovery to excessive use of police force around the Republican National Convention. Also, you will find no discussion herein of Palin's daughter, and the depressingly trivial and familiar fixation by the media on that unfolding "story." I am, however, delighted to see so many observers in the blogosphere and elsewhere running with the vital and accurate narrative that McCain's picking Palin shows the man's inherent recklessness and disregard for consequences, as I remarked on the day of the announcement.
Nevertheless, through the din of competing headlines and tabloid-style chirping over Bristol Palin, a broader theme has been sneaking into my mind, and I've only recently found a way to describe it. It seems undeniable to me, at this point, that the selection of Palin is in fact a compact and deeply meaningful microcosm of nearly the entire twisted landscape of the contemporary Republican Party. Now, before I go any further, I want to emphasize that I am focusing here not so much on Palin the person or even Palin the politician, but on McCain's selection of Palin. After all, as they say, we vote for the "top of the ticket," and besides, the deeper meaning is most definitely with McCain and the GOP's behavior and mentality.
McCain's choice of Sarah Palin represents a blend of intensely disingenuous political marketing (now in the form of a shallow appeal to Hillary voters and a new "reformer" image), and blatant pandering to the religious right. Add to this McCain's own intrinsic appeal to modern Republicans' insatiable thirst for war and authoritarian power, and the resulting combination concisely captures the nature of the GOP today.
Coming breathlessly on the heels of Barack Obama's resolute defense of Democratic principles, the heavily reactive Palin selection is a multi-layered display of meaning folded within meaning. Strikingly, McCain's abrupt choice itself exemplifies the irrationality, hypocrisy, and callous disregard for real-world implications of the religious zealots and cultural cavemen for whom the pick was primarily intended. But who should be surprised when a poisonous tree bears poisonous fruit? Who should be stunned that this wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP - the usefully pliant John McCain - manifests the true nature of his masters with his actions? (Answer: the establishment media, it would seem.)
Truly, the selection of Sarah Palin is the fruition of the Republicans' attitude toward governance and the world; it is the capstone, the almost singular embodiment of the "modern" GOP philosophy: arbitrariness, secrecy, cynicism, hypocrisy, exploitation, and above all, recklessness and disregard for consequences.
This goes so much deeper than Sarah Palin herself, who may have been a perfectly good and appropriate governor for her home state of Alaska, and who may be an entirely decent human being. This decision - a single, tightly wrapped package bursting with both subtle and obvious meaning - is the almost perfect metaphor for what the GOP has become. Even more significantly, because the noxious medley of ingredients packed into that odious porridge are so radioactively unstable, so violently contrary to reality and human reason, their combination and culmination in McCain's VP pick now tilts the party toward full political meltdown.
With almost literary perfection, this misshapen golem of Republican politics, this hapless Frankenstein of disjointed and failed premises, now threatens to destroy its own creators. The writer in me, more than anything else, finds this narrative arc of nascent justice immeasurably fascinating.