Enter the Palinites

Enter the Palinites

By JT Seravat

I love seeing a Sarah Palin quote in writing. It makes me realize that I wasn’t losing my hearing or going insane when I listened to her actually say it.

"My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars...Never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

But, not to worry; to paraphrase an old self-help book, You’re OK, She’s NUTS.

No one will bother to count whether more words or air time will, when all is said and done (if it ever ends), have been given to Republican vice presidential candidate Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin than to any previous candidate for that office.

The Republican ticket’s loss means, hopefully, that Palin will someday be only a footnote. Her name will be resurrected, as her candidacy resurrected former vice president Dan Quayle, if and when another Palin-type is nominated for one of the two highest offices in the United States.

But, hell, picking on Sarah Palin is as easy as Daytona police officers making public intoxication arrests during Spring Break.

Perhaps there is something much more valuable that we can learn from Sarah Palin than how to laugh really hard and still keep breathing.

People considered for and hired for jobs without, say, less than the intellectual skills necessary, are dangerous to the world.

Sarah Palin clearly does not know her limitations, and perhaps a weekend with “Dirty Harry” to teach her some boundaries wouldn’t be a bad idea.

But, once again, picking on Palin – however irresistible – misses the point.

Although there are indications that she may have sought out the job indirectly, it was John McCain and other intelligent people in his campaign who hired her.

No one could have reasonably argued at the time (or now) that she was qualified or ready to be a “heartbeat” or a “coherent sentence” away from becoming president.

So why hire her?

She was charismatic, good looking, energetic, could repeat a few talking points with parrot-like precision, was accomplished socially and had good taste in clothes.

This is the Sarah Palin Era.

An era in which men and women who possess these qualities alone are hired to do some of our most important work.

Journalism, politics, business and other fields hire these people. Their bosses praise them. For, in the short term, these Palinites bring them the illusion of making more money or attaining more power.

In the long term, when they are hired for positions that affect their communities, states or countries, they damage those communities, states and countries and their reputations.

They are hired because they work for lower wages, their appearances will increase ratings, their salesmanship skills allow them to sell $500,000 houses to people who can’t possibly afford them, or their persuasive personalities allow them to convince others that slightly illegal manipulation of financial markets for their company’s short-term profit is a good thing.

Of course, these people are not new in this country. They’ve been around for decades – some would argue a lot longer than that.

The style-over-substance people — hell, some have even been elected president, twice.

But if we as a society have reached a point that smart people like John McCain thought it was good strategy to hire Sarah Palin to be the vice presidential candidate, that could be a problem.

If the trend continues and, some day, a Sarah Palin-type gets elected president, the 2008 financial upheaval on Wall Street and Main Street will look like a simple historical fender-bender compared with the disasters to come.

“I don’t not, you think, well, you know it could might be, if the time and when it was possible, indeed, that a hockey puck hit, well, ok, you betcha…the good ole U.S of A.”

Beware the future when Palinites rule the world.

First published November 17, 2008

© 2008 Seravat Writers Group LLC