Living It: The Palin Pick

I have to confess, I am obsessed with Sarah Palin. (Who isn’t?)

It is also time to shake up my blog. (Anyone know of a vice-blogger I could hire—maybe one from Alaska? No experience required.)

I have written to the edge of my plan—spending two months each making the case that there is wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and then spirit in turn. All along I have hinted that our desires are entwined—that we cannot address our dissatisfaction or find the wisdom in one realm without involving the others. Now it is time to investigate.

Which happily brings us back to Sarah Palin, McCain’s VP pick. Hers is a story in which human desires for sex and spirit are enchantingly entwined. We are missing the significance of it.

Palin eloped with her high school sweetheart and gave birth to her first son eight months later; she continued her pregnancy with infant son Trig, knowing he had Downs, and her 17 year old daughter Bristol is 5 months pregnant and planning to marry the father. At every turn Palin’s attitude to sex and its fruits is guided by her Christian faith: abstinence-only sex education, no abortion (except where a mother is in danger), marriage as one man-one woman, with child/ren.

Of course, her personal life is irrelevant to her ability to lead, say Republicans and Democrats alike. What counts is her executive experience, her intelligence, her charisma, her promise. Except that they don’t. For every bend in Palin’s personal story is further proof of what matters most to the social conservatives who rally around her: namely, her belief.

Representatives of the religious right are embracing her joyously with open arms as one of them—as someone who believes. To them she is someone who values life, commitment, family, love, and God. There is no one better for the White House. Period.

How can this be?
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Democrats and some republicans are dismayed, calling McCain’s move a distraction from the major issues (e.g., economy, environment, health care and the war in Iraq); a sign of weakness (caving to the religious right), cynicism (who cares whether the VP has any experience), or desperation (the Hail Mary pass of a losing team).

Yet the fact is, McCain’s breathtaking move scored every point he wanted to make. He wrested media, web, and public attention from Obama; energized his campaign, his party, and its conservative base; refreshed his image as a maverick and change agent; undercut Obama’s case against him, and made his ticket as potentially-historic a reign as Obama-Biden’s.

Even more important, however, is what is implied in the response of social conservatives and the religious right. McCain shifted the race to a terrain where Reagan and Bush won regardless of their (lack of) international experience or positions on the issues—a terrain where what counts is what you believe. McCain made the race about whether we live in a world where life is holy, good triumphs over evil, and the progress we want is assured. It is not an easy position to oppose.
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In a thoughtful essay on the Palin choice and the political mind, George Lakoff makes the distinction between “realities” (issues named above) and “symbolism.” He argues that McCain had no hope of winning based on the former given his ties to Bush and so had to rely on the latter. With the Palin pick, Lakoff argues, McCain’s ticket is now strong in symbolism. Palin not only believes what she believes, she lives it. She is thus a symbol of integrity, of the power of belief in our lives, of what is possible when you, as an individual, believe.

Lakoff praises Obama for being strong on symbolism too—with his descriptions of a democratic America as a place where people care about one another and help one another to succeed. Nevertheless, he urges Democrats not to fall into the trap of arguing over “realities” while ignoring the symbolic dimension of what they offer. Democrats must also provide frameworks and narratives—visions of who Americans are—that enable people to affirm the solutions offered as moral and right, and not just effective. Otherwise, their arguments will fall short of what motivates people. Heart. Love. Desire.
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So too, there is even more at work here than symbolism—which is where sex and spirit come in again. In choosing Palin, the network of belief that McCain is tapping is not solely conservative or Christian. It involves patterns of sensation and response common to Americans across parties: namely, the lived sense of ourselves minds dwelling in and over bodies whose best recourse in facing any problem is to use the power of those minds to exert control over our bodies and those of others.

Palin’s story authorizes the mind over body belief system that underlies McCain’s policies. She lives it in relation to our most basic human desires for sex and spirit. She confirms for us that all we need to do is to exercise the power of our minds over our desiring bodies—or over the bodies of women, terrorists, animals, earth—in order to get the physical intimacy and love, the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging, that we most want.
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Still critics howl: none of these strategies—abstinence, war, or more petroleum fuels—works! The evidence is clear.

To those who share a mind over body sense of self, however, the fact that these strategies don’t work does not necessarily invalidate the framework, for it might be that they just haven’t worked yet. For those who believe that belief is what matters, the apparent failure is a call for more—more restraint, more war, more drilling. They want that world in which life is good, pleasurable, and meaning-full.

In response, simply arguing for abortion rights, an end to the war, or energy independence does not go far enough in addressing the underlying issues. What we need in addition is a vision of life that allows us to believe in these responses as right--not just because they fix a problem, but because they create the conditions within which we, as humans, can thrive, to the extent they do. What we need is a vision of life that allows us to welcome the failures of the noted strategies as vital information about how to move differently to do what they intend: honor and protect life.
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Moving beyond this impasse requires the kind of experience shift I have been describing, where we dislodge the sense of ourselves as minds over bodies and learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of discomfort. It involves articulating a moral universe rooted in a sensory awareness of ourselves as the movement that is making us.

Next week: What would that look like?