A friend sent me this
link to a Palin book signing. Off I go commenting on the topic that I promised myself I wouldn't touch on the blog, but the subject at hand leads me of a more interesting observation of our civilization-humanity so I'll half-heartedly step through a post on this Palin phenomenon.
If you watch the video, you see a people who feel vaguely persecuted, angry and resentful for a world that went wrong somewhere down the line, even though they don't appear to be able to articulate, or know, where or how. They have adopted a certain lingo or jargon, freedom, democracy, etc., as a set of behavioral guidelines. When questioned on specifics or asked to expand on these points, they are lost. The smarter among them might have another set of preprogrammed answers for a follow-up question, but would get lost on a third, and so on. They are like a half-assed automated phone system to nowhere - "Press 1 for freedom, Press 2 for breath of fresh air". For a time in my early 20s, I studied layman's physics and can relate. I understood some basic concepts and points the author's made, but could not apply their insights and knowledge to expand on a distantly related topic.
I do not mean to pile on the Palinites. My point is that their behavior is not surprising at all. We all follow a path of understanding how to communicate and think in any context; struggling to understand the concepts and penetrate jargon (learning the language), retracing the steps of basic application of those concepts (learning how to read sentences), applying those concepts to new problems (forming original sentences), questioning the original concepts (deeper understanding and creating new concepts), and making our own judgement on other's work independent of what the conventional wisdom or how you feel your critique will be received (applying expertise to evaluate peers.)
We also have a need to feel ethical, moral or justified in our behavior. Some of us are more comfortable with a manual or rule book (like religion), others are actualized and evaluate the morality and ethics of their own actions independent of what the rule book says.
The staunchest Palinites, and at this juncture I'd like to expand this to any following of a leader, from Jim Jones to Barack Obama, need an ethical manual and are somewhere down the latter of understanding politics. Which is to say that if 'change we can believe in' resonated with you, then you are not so far from the dunderhead Palinites as you might believe yourself to be. I don't mean this to be a pox on all houses comment, I laid out a loose framework above for development and there are distinctions. The Palinites in this video appear to be about at level one in the context of political thought, the hope and changers are probably about a step or a step and half ahead of them.
A fountainhead like Palin is easy to mock for her apparent lack of knowledge about the world, but as with her immediate cultural forbearer, George W. Bush, it is not clear how much of her folksy moron act is an act and reality, but it is clear that she has a striking knack for cashing in. She has parlayed her position into a multi-million dollar payday. That other prop from last election, Joe the Plumber, appears to be a legitimate meat head down to his toes; he never figured out how to cash in and ended up under fire in a literal war zone lobbing goofy, softball questions to Israeli soldiers.