This is not what it first appears, so read to the end. It's a vivid illustration–and an important reminder–about why what most of us think is secondary to what we actually do. From Jonathan Raban's NYRB report of his participation in the February Nashville Teaparty Convention:
I was joined at a table by an intense, wiry, close-cropped, redheaded woman from southern Virginia who dated her conversion to hearing Sarah Palin for the first time.
"She was me! She's so down-to-earth! If Sarah was sitting here with us now, she'd be just a normal person like you and me. You could say anything to her. She's not like a politician—she's real. And Sarah always keeps her word. If Sarah promises something, you know she'll do it. She's just am az ing."
Before Sarah, the woman said, her interest in politics had been limited to voting in general elections. Her one big involvement was with her church. Now she was traveling around the country on behalf of Team Sarah and Conservative Moms for America, a fundamentalist group whose "Conservative Moms Pledge" begins with a quote from the first epistle of Saint Peter:
Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear.
In the last year, she'd marched on 9/12, gone to CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference—and attended a string of acronymic events, which she recited to me. Soon she'd be off to New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
Lighting her second cigarette in ten minutes, she talked about missing her family on these political jaunts. After their own children were grown, she and her husband had adopted two infant daughters, now aged six and nine. The girls were the light of their sixty-ish lives. One was autistic, the other severely developmentally disabled: her birth mother was an "alcoholic" and a "drug addict," and the baby had suffered a series of strokes in the delivery room, where her heart had twice stopped beating.
"The hospital said they doubted if she was salvageable. Salvageable! Imagine talking about a human life as 'salvageable'! You see why I love Sarah? We have so much in common." She rattled on about her girls' accomplishments—how nearly normal they were, how happy, how responsive to the warm climate of affection in which they now lived. "Here, I'll show you…." She found her cell phone in her bag and treated me to a slide show of family photos: her husband, a heavily built man in plaid shirt and jeans, playing with their daughters in a well-kept backyard. She hadn't bothered to mention that both girls were black.
There are so many levels of things going on here, it makes your head spin. The mindset is crazy; she isn't. Her thinking might be confused and based in insupportable fictions, but her soul is healthful and magnanimous.
This is a picture of America today. It's a poignant example of that quote from Wiebe I posted the other day:
they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their
small, familiar environment. They tried, in other words, to impose the
known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the
customs of a personal society. They failed, usually without
recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend a society they were
helping to make contained the essence of the nation's story.
Leave a Reply