The Divine Sarah

 The most perceptive description of the Sarah Palin ruckus came, I think,  from Matt Damon.

"It's both a 'bad Disney Movie' about the hockey mom from Alaska facing down Vladimir Putin" And the epistemological point. "I know nothing about Sarah Putin. And I'm not going to learn anything about her in eight weeks."own Vladimir Putin" And the epistemological point. "I know nothing about Sarah Putin. And I'm not going to learn anything about her in eight weeks." I cautioned myself about really seeking perspective too soon on this whole thing: a massive publicity 

rollout always has effects that are just about the sheer blast of the publicity bomb. As someone who lent his humble graphics and production skills to McDonald's rollout of the disastrous Arch Deluxe (now an official unburger), I saw how even a company so careful about their test marketing as McDonald's could be swayed by the sheer semi-autonomic reaction of the populace to all that rollout hoopla: They spent more money than anyone in history for their supposed 'adult' sangwich debut--and I was set to work laying out revised menus as the higher-ups decided to make the Arch Deluxe the cornerstone of the burger line, based on the initial reaction. A couple of months later, the AD was selling worse than the worst sandwich in the line (which was, in case you want to know, the fish sandwich). Why it bombed was no mystery to me: Among other things, they had a bun that was shaped like a Kaiser roll, but was actually gooier than their normal bun, made as it was from potato flour. But enough people tried it simply because of the publicity that it looked like, momentarily, they had a hit on their hands.

And so with Sarah. it was a big and dramatic rollout, and had a rather weird shape to it--the near-immediate announcement of her daughter's pregnancy, and the strange combination of triumphal procession and hissy fit was something rather baroque. But even as the rapid deployment of Governor Palin stomped on the train of the Democratic Convention, the catastrophic crumbling of America's financial institutions has forced things out of marketing mode and into real-world whaddawedonow mode, and neither McCain nor Palin are coming out of it looking like first responders. It's not a fecking movie after all, much as the marketeers want it to be.

There's little remarkable about the idea that advertising techniques have distorted our political process--ya think?--nor the desperation and bank-shot strategies the Republicans are trying to win an unwinnable election--covered elsewhere--but does the Sarah Palin sandwich say anything about who we are and where we're going?

One of the things that struck me about this election in the midst of all the lipstick and quadrupeds was the fact that we have one candidate from Hawaii, one from Alaska, and one from the Panama Canal Zone (Poor Joe Biden from Baltimore breaks the symmetry.) But the fact that this is an election from the margins is, I think, not the trivial pursuit it seems. It does answer the general question, where do these people come from?

Barack Obama's birth in Hawaii seems to have at least one important aspect: Hawaii was the one place at that time in America--and may still be--that a white woman with a black baby would not be remarked upon. There was more to it than that, of course, but I've seen the American Cultural Beast growl and swipe at an interracial family at close quarters, and it's not to be minimized out of either hope or defensiveness. number of people I've met who've felt they're not racists because they're OK with separate but equal ethnic enclaves would fill a large train station, and I don't get out all that much. Barack Obama's very existence is something that Bob Jones University, to choose only one example, seeks to prevent. It is everywhere, if you put on your Rowdy Roddy Piper sunglasses. So Barack Hussein Obama grew up on an edge.

John McCain? He grew up in another margin of America: flag-rank military America. An admiral or a general participates in a culture very different from the democratic norm: in contrast to a vast number of rich Americans who have no servants and find the idea somewhat distasteful, an admiral has aides who will dress him, drive him, make his phone calls, and pick up his kids from school. This is thought of as part of the job, as part of the concept of Command. The military's constant motion also ensures that military families are not anchored to place, or to the kind of uncategorized friendship that forms American daily life, but ultimately the corps. The military tradition links to aristocratic practice directly, largely unaffected by the powerful processes that have forged a democratic American culture. There are good reasons the military uses these concepts--but the fact remains that, growing up in an admiral's house, Things Are Done For One, and One Is Deferred To. phenomena that don't necessarily prevail even in very very rich civilian American households. It would explain, if one is not going to be overly scrupulous, a lot about John McCain: his computer illiteracy, his ignorance of details even while having strong opinions on generalities--all characterize someone who unconsciously expectss to have staff for those things--even his loose grasp on geography can be seen to arise from an upbringing where the Canal Zone, Subic Bay and Pearl Harbor are seen as just another naval base, and the orientation is not to the map but to the Service. Douglas MacArthur, the only other Presidential candidate I can think of who came from a high-ranking military family, did not visit America proper for over 40 years, during which time he became de facto shogun of a defeated Japan--yet never thought that this made him anything but an American--nor even that this might put him at a disadvantage in running for President. And even if John McCain was utterly abased as a POW, and as an adult he built decks and barbecued, He still grew up on an American edge.

And as for Sarah--well, there's Alaska.

My older brother, may he rest in peace, may have grown up in and around New York City and gone to college in Rockford Illinois, but he fled to the mountains of Colorado as soon as he could. Creede, Colrado, by the source of the Rio Grande, was above the timber line and, to my eyes, altogether unlovely, but he loved it, in great part because of its isolation. Although he was friendly, gregarious, and charming to an almost insane degree, he found a positive value in not being hemmed in by people. For him, freedom and solitude were inextricably mixed.

He drove the AlCan Highway once, and came back with trays of slides of the trip, and wouldn't stop talking about it. I have no idea whether he seriously entertained the idea of moving there--I know my parents both were vehemently against the merest shadow of the idea--but I knew he had an Alaskan state of mind. It was both the best of him and the worst.

Americans, it's been pointed out, for all their mythologizing, have never developed the bond to the land that Europeans have. Land in Europe was both the source of life and the source of nobility. For all of Jefferson's extolling of the self-sufficient small farmer, the settlers of this enormous land quickly became commercial farmers of cash crops, and within a few generations had skedaddled back to the cities, to be replaced by corporate farms as alienated from the mystic ground as Neil Simon characters in a high-rise. The peasants of Europe may not have exactly done it by choice, but the bond made by farming a plot for twelve hundred years givess rise to something different from the opportunistic approach of American land-settlement. I've long felt that if the Native Americans could just have held out another century--say, in some Shoshone Brigadoon--that they could emerge sometime in the late 21st century and find the Great Plains empty of white men once again.

Francis Parkman's observations on the American Frontier as a safety valve have become standard issue, but that safety valve works in many ways--and are reflected in the many types who gravitate to that margin. The obvious function--allowing population growth by expanding land--seems to me, weirdly enough, to be more psychological than Malthusian: the great influx of immigrants that enabled American industrial expansion, after all, stayed in the Eastern cities for the most part--but would they have come if the wide open land of the cowboys was not there? Would they have so eagerly traded Bremen for Baltimore? Maybe not so much. America could also empty out its ragged warriors from the Civil War (the Indian War can be seen as an anodyne to the War of the Rebellion: a fight that wasn't brother against brother, and easily won), the speculators, the transformative Christians and cheapjack empire builders into it, even after it physically disappeared.

As long as we had a frontier, America had a 'none of the above'--and had necessary spiritual ventilation for all the stinks involved in hammering out a new way of living together. So even after the frontier closed physically and the Native Americans chained to their rocks where the American Eagle ate their liver forever, the Joads could head out in their Conestoga jalopy for Beverly Hills to pick oranges--where young beautiful girls could don their buckskins and grubsteak themselves at St. Louis and ride out for the placer mines of the Hollywood Hills--and how in the wake of a global war, the future got turned into the semi-final American Frontier.

I have no doubt that my brother Jan equated his life on the upper edge with the future--which was why his solitude was so full of hope. Until the brain tumor brought him to his long descent, it was that American Frontier that brought him hope and joy, because he was as hopeful and joyful a man as ever lived.

We wove the frontier into our culture, where cowboys and spacemen were equated, and where science fiction languished in its ghetto until that TV show with 'frontier' in its intro showed up--where the Cowboy Way gets laid claim to by everyone from Jersey Mental Hospital Attendants to ultra-privileged preppie Yalie cokeheads. By and large, it works.

And for those for whom it doesn't, there's always Alaska.

In any real sense, Alaska is not an American frontier. We are not as a nation expanding into Alaska; it isn't a safety valve for population pressures, nor is it part of the American Mythology. There is no vision of the vast reaches of Alaska cris-crossed with highways and towering cities. Nobody wants Alaska more fully into the American web. Not white Alaskans, not native Alaskans, not the denizens of the lower 48.

Alaska is, culturally, a permanent frontier--which is to say, not a frontier at all. It's simply an edge. To call it a trailing edge would be unnecessarily insulting--but it's non-dynamic. It's still a safety valve, but the pressure is not that of American evolution or change.

There are those for whom the escape to Alaska is for the glory of arctic nature. There are those for whom the escape to Alaska is simply an escape to solitude. And there are some for whom the escape to Alaska is an escape from America as she is constituted.

So we have three people from the edges: One who was brought to the edge for protection, one who accepted life on the edge, and one who sought out the edge. (and poor ol' Scranton-to-Baltimore Joe.) In a very real sense, three outsiders. Three people who want to change America from (in one way or another) the outside.

A lot of the wingnuts thump against Obama because he comes from the edge and is moving towards the center. They have chosed to hate that edge, call it Muslim, and scare others with it.

A lot of people look at John McCain abd see that this is a man who has been on the edge his whole life, aand who stays removed, not quite there, a stranger to American culture and with seemingly no intention of ever getting closer to it--his life of huge wealth dovetailing into his career military youth.

But the one that scares me is the one who fled the middle for the edge (as far as Idaho is part of the center.) By the accounts coming forward, she moved to where her faith would not be interfered with and where it was easier to shape herself into Judge Roy Bean and not bump up against thousands of politicians just as ambitious as she, and much smarter and much better informed.

Hawaii, Panama Canal Zone, Alaska; A place that isn't considered the frontier but really is; a place that doesn't exist any more; and a place that is considered the frontier but isn't.

Brahma, the creator; Vishnu the Preserver; and Siva the destroyer in the shakti of Kali, the Black Destroyer.

And Joe from Baltimore. What a universe.