Members of the Democratic Party, independent voters and non-Religious Right non-zombie Republicans listen up: underestimate Sarah Palin at your peril! Mock Palin, dismiss her intelligence laugh about her "airline stewardess" qualities or make more cracks about how many times she changed colleges or went moose hunting, and you just will wind up believing your own bullshit and lose the election. Because this election isn't about one weird woman, but about one weird country.
As a former lifelong Republican (check out my book: CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back) the son of a founding member of the Religious Right and now an avid Obama supporter, let me tell you something: Sarah Palin and John McCain are not funny, they're dangerous. And you life-long Democrats just don't get it.
The two most vicious trends in American politics combine in the McCain/Palin ticket: the cult of the abused to warrior and the cult of the abused fundamentalist. We're dealing with two candidates (and their followers) who have a terminal cases of self-pity. One "martyr" languished in a Vietnam prison while America went to Hanoi Jane's movies. The other "martyr" has spent a lifetime licking her psychic wounds while intelligent and educated people (all those big city folk!) looked down on her and her kind. The result is a man with a psychotic fix on not losing wars, and a woman with a psychotic fix on not losing her faith. McCain/Palin bottom line: we know what we know, damn all evidence to the contrary! What we have are principles and if we have to sacrifice the country to them so be it!
What we have in McCain/Palin is a paranoid mix as toxic as the inferiority complex that has been driving Saudi Arabian Wahabist Islam, combined with the most powerful military and economic base in the world. And Palin and McCain aren't stupid. Worse; they are sincere and smart.
To understand the 2008 Republican ticket you have to understand that it's driven by, and supported by, a terminal sense of everlasting grievance and self-pity. Victory was "stolen" from McCain in Vietnam. And respect for creationism, speaking in tongues, a literal interpretation of every word of the Bible, a Jesus-hates-gays outlook, a Jesus-wants-us-to- fight for every square inch of Israel Rapture mantra, was stolen from good hard-working simple American folk.
The media, slick Washington politicians, liberal professors and universities; the same crowd that robbed McCain & Co. of victory in Vietnam, did the stealing in both cases; they stole respect from good simple folk and military victory from true patriots. Now once again these people are aligned to rob Palin and her followers of the respect they crave and McCain of the victory he "deserves" in Iraq.
The 2008 election between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin is a choice between reality and the alternative universe of American resentment. It's the ear shattering "loud pipes make safe bikes!" Harley-Davidson crowd against the people who want to be able to sleep through a summer night. It's the ordinary American going about her daily business, versus those Americans on a mission to change all other Americans (and the world!) into people just like them, so that they won't feel so isolated and stupid. It's lift-up-our hands up in prayer and scream at the Holy Ghost until you drop America, versus people who go to church for quiet contemplation and communion with other human beings and God. It's the military is the last resort of national defense sane Eisenhower America, versus W. Bush's American exceptionalism that sees our country as "called by God" to wars-without end to "liberate" the rest of the human race from the worst thing "they" can be: different from us.
To the members of the alternate America if you're different from us there is something wrong with you. Why? Because it's self-evident that we are the best country on earth! We're the best country on earth because we have the freedom to scream at God, elect people just like us and always blame our "elite" for whatever ails us!
We blame them instead of blaming ourselves because to blame ourselves would be to admit that maybe we're not so exceptional or great after all. And to do that would be positively un-American, as un-American as it would be for the Republicans to take "credit" for the mess we're in and to stop blaming everyone but themselves and the fool they elected-twice!
So please don't think that by simply mocking the McCain/Palin ticket you have somehow "taken care of business." These are people and their followers are folks with a martyrdom complex and they revel in and are fed by, mockery. Rather somehow, we have to get to the issue of this election back to the issues.
The issue is not the personality of the candidates but the personality of our country. America is rapidly turning into a self-absorbed, semiliterate, anti-education, anti-science, anti-intellectual bastion of we're-proud-we're-dumb-as-shit, know-nothing Bible-thumping reaction. Stay on this path and we're doomed.
If Democrats, independents and thoughtful Republicans can't somehow make the issue of this election the issues that actually confront our country-the economy, a wrong war, the torture of prisoners, the decline of education, the destruction of our military, the warming of our planet, the fumbling of the war on terror, the total failure of our energy policy-instead of simply firing late-night-style stand-up comic shots in the culture wars, we will lose this election. Correction: America will lose.
Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.
Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer
