I can handle people who hold different views from me – when it is apparent they know what they think and why and can engage rather than ignore facts. What I found troubling about the presidential election season was not people wanting to vote for a Democrat. Big whoop. So what. I pushed a few Democrat buttons myself (mayor and House races in case you are curious).
What troubled me far more was the at times display – particularly by the mainstream media – of “grotesque lock-step… bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice”.
That rather pungent description comes from a recent piece by Camille Pagalia, “Obama, Palin, and the next four years”:
How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.
Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.
I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.
Read the whole thing here. You do not have to register. (Hat tip to BJ via BabyBlueOnline.)
I am not much of a Sarah Palin fan and did not understand the enthusiasm of some Republicans. (Perhaps I have been brainwashed by all the anti-Palin propaganda. But surely that would not include Charles Krauthammer!) But I can appreciate Paglia’s critique of how shallow thoughtless and uninformed some of the anti-Palin sentiment was. (I saw a little too much of this at Baptistlife.com.) I also appreciate how a liberal(?) like Paglia demonstrates the intellectual honesty to ask some hard questions that were not asked during the presidential election season.
*And yes for the record – the above critique can and does apply to people who share my views and vote the way I do. Sometimes when reading a conservative blog I hold my nose and roll my eyes. Knee? Meet jerk.
