Link: Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury | Vanity Fair:
Sort of a biopic of Sarah Palin as a person.
I have a hypothesis that there is a shadowy hidden political party that knows no allegiance to any set of ideologies. It’s more of an emergent entity driven by millions of people and their media consumption. This entity drives a lot of people to and fro in an essentially chaotic pattern. There isn’t much rhyme or reason because it’s constructed out of a feedback loop — a loop seeded by consumption of itself.
For example: Television tries to show something to catch a person’s interest. Person may watch that thing for any number of reasons. That person is affected in some way. This may influence or alter future Television watching. Now expand this to books, movies, radio, twitter, blogs, etc. It’s not that media is bad per se, it’s that it is treated uncritically by and large and not viewed as a self-referencing and self-reinforcing entity. It should be viewed in the same way as a corporation; e.g. Media has a will to live.
The reason no one does view it so is because it’s exhausting trying to think critically about every single thing you’re exposed to — there’s too much. It is far easier to just think about a few and learn to trust a few other people’s judgement for the rest. It is the savvy (scary) politician who realizes this. In fact, people have realized this for years but it really doesn’t work efficiently unless you have scale. If you’ve read the Foundation series by Asimov this idea will be familiar to you. You can not only predict but control sociological reactions if you know the right inputs.
There’s nothing new under the sun, people have always grasped for power; however there is a novelty for our age in the sheer masses of people involved and the ability for all of them to hear the same message at the same time. People are learning how to use this emergent entity, trying to ride the lightning. Obama did it. Glenn Beck is doing it. Palin is doing it.
That is new and I am curious to see how it is wielded.
Lastly, I’ve long wondered if Sarah Palin was diagnosably borderline personality disorder or at the very least narcissistic/sociopathic. It makes me sad to hear about symptoms that fit all of those diagnoses. Her interpersonal behavior has all the hallmarks of abusive relationships. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many people can connect with her: we’re a nation of abusive relationships.
