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Through My Eyes... |
On SARAH PALIN
Sep 05, 2008
By Cornelia Spelman
With the steady nerves of a surgeon, Sarah Palin, wielding her scalpel of derogatory remarks, sliced open the wounds of division and hostility which have characterized the Bush/Cheney years and turned Americans against Americans.
She values aggression. She is proud that, as she put it, lipstick is the only difference between her, as a hockey mom, and a pit bull.
The audience loved her hostile remarks about “liberals,” the “elite media,” the “Washington elite,” and the “permanent political establishment.” They loved it best when she ridiculed community organizers--they don’t, she said, with a curl of her lip, have “actual responsibilities.”
Palin claims, for herself and those who share her viewpoint, Americanism. She is, she says, from a small town, where people “do some of the hardest work in America…grow our food…run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.” She is, as an RNC attendee told a TV interviewer the next day, “one of the normal Americans like us.”
“Like us.”
It is this division of Americans into “us” and “them” that politicians and talk show hosts who engage in hostility and derision actively work to maintain.
If we’re not Palin’s—or Giuliani’s, or Huckaby’s, or Romney’s, or Bush’s, or Cheney’s, or McCain’s-- “us,” -- if if we differ-- we’re “them.
I call on Palin's "better angel" to study this line from her speech, “No one expects us all to agree on everything, but we are expected to govern with integrity, and goodwill…”