An Invocation

I spent a lot of time being mad at Sarah Palin, which is weird to think about now. A half-term governor from a state that's on the same coast as I am and is still 2,000 miles away, populated mostly by seasonal fish cannery workers and caribou who hunt them, who never missed an opportunity to be inarticulate on television... I'm embarrassed about how much ire I was willing to let her draw out of me. I'm sure it was just misplaced as it was harder to direct all that anger at broken, grumpy John McCain knowing how he got that way (the broken part anyway). And part of it might have just been some regular unreconstructed latent misogyny on my part. In my defense though, she did objectively also suck.

What always pissed me off was her doubling down on the idea of America as essentially bifurcated, divided in her words between "the elites" and "the real Americans." It was kind of hypocritical I guess because I was on board with the John Edwards 2004 sloganeering about "two Americas," but he was talking about the gap in opportunities and standards of living between the rich and the poor, whereas Sarah Palin was mostly (and I'm pretty sure this is true) talking about how Jewish people are scary. But in the end she got a reality show and he faded into obscurity after he knocked up a filmmaker because his wife was too cancer-y for his taste to bone. I'm not sure if any of that proves or disproves that karma is real.

In the Palin construction, I was never a "real American." It's not because I'm Jewish,* it was because I lived in a coastal state with a population density that couldn't reasonably be measured in an "all y'all." In order to be a "real American" you had to live in a place with a Main Street, one diner, measurable tractor traffic and a halo of space around the town so sparsely populated you'd think it had been fucking irradiated. If you close your eyes you can see them now. You know who they are. And none of them are wearing enough sunblock.

It's weird to be excluded by the racist dog whistle when you're also a white person, but as people way smarter than me have pointed out, whiteness doesn't really have anything to do with color. It's a category that exists within a belief system, a taxonomy, that you must accept whole and undiluted if you want to be counted among the Real Ones. And then the sneaky part is, if you are physically white, they just toss all the privilege and carve-outs on you whether you asked for them or not. Luckily the act of disentangling only takes the course of an entire life, plus about 10 days.

I'm less mad about Sarah Palin generally these days though. First of all, it's easy to stop being mad at someone when you've been afforded the luxury of losing track of them entirely. Hey, just in typing that sentence I reminded myself one of her kids I think was called Track. What a relief it is to realize I'd purged that whole thought from my head for a time. Having it re-inhabit my brain now would be a tragedy in another timeline, but it's 2020. It's not even the grossest thing that happened to me this evening.

Secondly, it turns out she was probably right. And it's the reason why you get the Big Mad Anti-Mask Brigades and the loud-ass Obama-hating enemies of tyranny who have precious little to say about the sudden appearance of actual American secret police. It's no longer feasible to argue that the right wing position isn't the more authentically American, historically speaking. Slavery was a required belief system, debasing half population of the southern states. You can't believe black lives matter if you have proclaimed yourself the heir to that grand tradition. The stark gap between "all men are created equal" and the Three-Fifths Compromise was codified not just into law but into the tradition of thought that has proven upsettingly persistent. It's a blindness, a handicap that can be taught to the young but must be actively bought into by every adult who practices it. But there's no question that it's fundamentally us. It is, inarguably, really, really American.

The difference between illusion and delusion is that the second one you impose on yourself. How far are we from shattering the funhouse mirror that keeps us from seeing ourselves as ourselves? Well, the nominee of the "progressive," left-leaning party (or which I am a registered member) just suggested that in 2016 we elected our "first racist president."** Even though the very first one in 1789 actually owned some of his countrymen based on some very specific justifications. I will let you speculate what those might have been while I go and stare at the lines wiggling over at fivethirtyeight and contemplate whether anything means anything.

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*I'm not, though there are a few very specific ways you could be forgiven for making that mistake.

**You can argue that I'm missing some nuance here or deliberately misunderstanding the quote, but nope, I think it pretty much sums up the point he was trying to make. It was stupid from conception and not saying so is a level of partisan boringness I'm not quite ready to go to. Hit me up again when the race tightens. I'm your huckleberry.