The Fortnightly Rant for June 17, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 19, posted on Tuesday, August 8, 2011.
Sarah Palin and her amazing Technicolor™ dream bus pulled into Portsmouth recently. The maybe/maybe not Presidential candidate and her entourage checked into an enormous new corporate crackerbox on Maplewood Avenue, then whooshed off in a big black SUV to attend a private clambake at a secure, undisclosed location.
In a one-in-a-million coincidence, Mitt Romney was just ten miles away in Stratham, also attending a clambake and announcing his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination.
Palin, the former half-term Governor of Alaska, had just come from Boston, where Romney served one whole term as Governor of Massachusetts. A TV crew in Boston asked Palin, “What have you seen so far today and what are you going to take away from your visit?”
Palin responded to this softball question by swinging for the fences, saying, “We saw where Paul Revere hung out as a teenager, which was somethin’ new to learn, and, you know, he who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms by ringing those bells, and makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”
Many mocked Palin for her answer, ignoring as it did the historically accepted purpose of Revere’s ride, reversing his intent and including a few gratuitous bells and gunshots. Others rode indignantly to Palin’s defense.
The ensuing furor demonstrates why American politics may be best explained by using what physicists call the “many worlds interpretation.”
Palin herself might explain the concept this way: “When Isaac Newton was sittin’ under that tree there and the old apple fell on his head and he invented Newtonian physics with the bodies in motion and all that, he was saying that there’s only one reality that’s the same everywhere for everybody, which kinda puts a damper on our personal freedoms. That’s why God gave us quantum physics, where the subjective appearance of wavefunction collapse can be explained by the mechanism of quantum decoherence, resolving all those pesky correlation paradoxes like Schrödinger’s cat and whatnot, and every possible outcome of every event defines or exists in its own world.”
Palin was interviewed a few days later on Fox News. In addition to using her as an interview subject, the network also pays her to appear as a commentator. Despite this cozy relationship Fox’s interviewer, Chris Wallace, alleged that Palin had misstated the facts.
Palin promptly refudiated Wallace’s contention. Outnumbered by the two Palins, colleague and candidate, Wallace smiled and let it go.
The National Review is made of sterner stuff. As befits a magazine founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., the Godfather of today’s conservative movement, the Review is more equal than other reactionary media outlets. It’s even more equal than Ms. Palin, apparently. It published a column by Revere biographer Joel J. Miller saying that Palin “got the story wrong.”
Before it’s possible to admit an error, it’s necessary first to perceive that you’ve made one. Palin’s adamant refusal to admit any error is fully in keeping with modern Republican practice. In both cases it’s unclear whether they are blind or just have decided that stubborness is the new bravery.
Great Leap Backward
American conservatives have been fascinated by China ever since the Red Army booted Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland. For the next twenty years the former Celestial Empire was Hell on Earth, according to the Right.
Then Richard Nixon made nice with Chairman Mao, with ping pong and pandas and all, and the tune started to change. Corporate America learned that it could make billions exporting jobs to China and importing Chinese junk to sell at Wal-Mart. Suddenly the Chinese government’s horrible treatment of its people wasn’t quite so horrible anymore.
Or at least the horrors weren’t so important. For decades now, authoritarian Chinese Communists and freedom-loving American Capitalists have been business partners. The Communists have learned to love capitalism, and the Capitalists have learned to disregard the sale of the kidneys and livers of executed prisoners.
For those who learned to duck and cover during the Cold War, this seems strange; but younger Americans don’t give it a thought. And the global peasantry in general should probably be grateful that these former enemies have finally learned to co-exist peacefully.
There is one more lesson, though, that we wish our Right-Wingers would learn from the Commies: It’s OK to admit a mistake.
Even Chairman Mao could do it. In 1959, when the catastrophe caused by the Great Leap Forward could be ignored no more, he said, “The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to fart, fart. You will feel much better for it.”
But no — here we sit, amid the smoking rubble of what was, before its carpet-bombing by Chairman Ronald and his armada of tax-cutting followers, the world’s most powerful economy. The GOP won’t be satisfied until we take yet another Great Leap Backward.