The Palin Hypothesis: Sarah as Cinderella

I just couldn’t get it. What was all this ranting and raving over Sarah Palin? Sure she beat looking at an Alaskan king crab but she wasn’t that hot. I just couldn’t see it, especially after seven-years exposure to the dark, sultry, come-hither femininity of Thai cuties and another two years surrounded by the sirens of Samoa, women who were so knockdown gorgeous they didn’t waste time with make up or enhancements of any kind.

No, this Sarah Palin phenomenon was deep, subtle, even a mite vexing. So I started to look and to listen to her more closely. I didn’t much care what she said but how she said it. I didn’t much care what she looked like but how she used her hands, body, voice, and facial expressions to charm, to flirt, to win folks over. Way back in the dark recesses of my mind a Sarah-like being began to take shape, began to emerge– someone who did not turn me on, someone who rather scared the living bejesus out of me.

Then it hit me. Sans the Japanese specs Sarah was the spitting image of the homecoming queen at my pre-integrated, all-white, long-gone high school in Jacksonville, Florida. Indeed she was the spitting image of every home coming queen at every Aryan dominated high school in the United States circa 1960. And therein lay her baby-boom appeal, to wit she was the Cinderella of our adolescence, the young lovely of our wildest sexual fantasies, the babe we collectively most wanted to bang.

Did I say “Cinderella?” Hey, what triggered that? Surely it was not an original thought. From whence did it come? It was then that the intellectual Mac truck struck me: Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942, 1955) Chapter XI– the one dubbed “Common Women,” to be precise.

Any hypothesis however is only that: a hypothesis. To be scientific one must gather data, test the hypothesis, and evaluate the results it to see whether the notion is valid or not. So I set about to do just that.

To gather data I reread Wylie’s “Common Women” and reviewed Palin’s most memorable quotations– the ones that best defined her as Alaskan governor, as a political diva, as the darling of dolts everywhere.

To test the hypothesis I aligned Wylie’s ideas as they appeared chronologically in the text with Palin utterances at various times and at various locales. At all times I strove to be objective, to stay above the fray, to be completely apolitical. Indeed there was no space for subjectivity with Sarah Palin and her dysfunctional family– not when I didn’t know them. Like most people they seemed decent enough, especially in the context of our rapidly expanding rectal world.

No, like any good scientist my only goal, my sole objective, was to ferret out the Truth, to see if Wylie’s “momism” was still alive and well in America. I therefore invite you, dear reader, to peruse the following in a similar spirit– with detachment, with indulgence, with reason, and with fair play. And please note: all the Wylie quotes come from the 1955 revised edition of Generation of Vipers, whereas the Palin quotes are cited after each entry:

Wylie:

MOM IS THE END PRODUCT OF SHE.

She is Cinderella … the shining-haired, the starry-eyed, the ruby lipped virgo aeternis, of which there is presumably one, and only one, or a one-and-only for each mate, whose dream is fixed upon her deflowerment and subsequent perpetual possession.

Palin:

“I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.          
–Acceptance Speech
Republican National Convention
September 3, 2008

Wylie:

The pretty girl then blindfolded her man so he would not see that she was turning from a butterfly into a caterpillar. She told him, too, that although caterpillars ate every damn leaf in sight, they were moms, hence sacred.

Palin:

“Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!”

– The Other McCain
August 1, 2009

Wylie:

Mom is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just mere men… Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires.

Palin:

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

–Acceptance Speech
Republican National Convention
September 3, 2008

                                   

Wylie:

I have been foolhardy enough to try, on occasion, to steer moms into useful work … I got a gaggle of these creatures behind a move toward a pasteurization law, only to find, within a few weeks, that there was a large, alarmed, and earnest committee at work in my wake to prevent the passage of any such law.

Palin:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

–Statement
Current Health Debate
August 7, 2009

Wylie:

Mom also has patriotism … the going of her son (to war) is only an occasion for more show … I have a firsthand account by a woman of unimpeachable integrity, of the doings of a shipload of these super-moms-of-the-gold star, en route at government expense to France to visit the graves of their sons….

Palin:

“My son Track … he’s gonna be deployed in September in Iraq. Pray … for this country, that our leaders … are sending (U.S. soldiers) out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

– Speech
Wasilla Assembly of God Church
June 2008

Wylie:

… (Mom) has become the American pope.

Palin:

“When (John McCain and I) hear along the rope lines that people are interceding for us and praying for us, it’s our reminder to do the same, to put this all in God’s hands, to seek his perfect will for this nation, and to of course seek his wisdom and guidance in putting this nation back on the right track.”
– James Dobson Interview
October 22,2008

Needless to say I was rather stunned by these near-perfect parallels. Without question Sarah Palin is Philip Wylie’s quintessential “Mom,” even though he gave birth to his essay a good twenty-two years before she was born. In fairness I sought out something – anything - that had skewed the results. Surely Wylie was one of those loony liberals for only a liberal could write with such flair, with such reckless abandon.

But here too I was stymied for Wylie - like Palin - was a staunch political conservative. Indeed he and his brother Ted had traveled to the USSR to see the soviet system firsthand. The brothers came away appalled, determined to document the horrendous living conditions they had witnessed upon their return to the United States. They never made it. On the train out of Russia Philip contracted cholera, whereas Ted mysteriously jumped to his death from a sixth-floor hotel room, just minutes after cheerily bidding “good night” to his brother. You figure.

The Palin Hypothesis was therefore valid, rock-solid– both from a scientific and historic point of view. For each and every thesis however one can find an equally strong antithesis. Who then is the antithesis to the fair Sarah? Ah, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure the cosmetic wizards had nobly cinderellafy her in preparation for the marathon race against Barack Obama. But looking like Cinderella is a far cry from being Cinderella. Did you ever see that picture of poor Hillary with soon-to-be hubby Bill at Yale Law School? Talk about Coca-Cola specs. Talk about geekdom. Talk about pathetic.

So don’t count Sarah out in 2012. Indeed she stands a great chance of becoming our first woman president with Todd our first gentleman. Sure Todd is no Prince Charming but the GOP is working like hell to make the glass slipper fit.

Right now I’d say the shoe is at least halfway on.