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| November Song In the autumnal novel of Maureen Howard’s cycle of seasons, an 80-something narrator shares her inner Manhattan. feeds.nytimes.com |
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin | Book review Alaska shaped Sarah Palin – but her understanding of anything that goes on beyond the frontier state is alarmingly uninformed, says Patricia WilliamsFormer Alaska governor Sarah Palin's memoir needs recipes in the worst way. Admittedly, that's an absurd hook for a book that's supposedly about politics, but Going Rogue uses food, food and more food to create scenes of familial warmth and Mama Bear protectiveness of all those adorable Palin cubs. From the first page, amply baited with halibut tacos and reindeer sausage, to the last, where Palin describes herself as off to bake a cake, I longed for details about how to prepare caribou lasagne, blueberry muffins, fresh-killed seal meat and salmon roe, with strawberry shortcake for dessert.Sarah Palin's snug, snowbound view of the world is that of someone from a very small place. That particular small place, the town of Wasilla, where she first became mayor with only 618 votes, is figured as paradise – with hard-working high-school sweethearts, lolling family dogs and hunky hunter-gatherers who make a mean moose-meat sausage.In Wasilla, everyone is related. They go to the state fair and eat cotton candy. The children wear angels' wings their mothers fashion from pipe cleaners and gauze. It's endearing to some degree – if not for a woman who apparently still aspires to the highest office in a teeming, multilingual, multi-ethnic world.When it comes to that larger world, Palin is alarmingly and belligerently uninformed. You can, she insists, not only see Russia from Alaska, you can actually swim there. Point taken. But whatever does one do with that? The answer depends on a certain teleology. If you are from a very insular place where anyone who isn't somehow related to you must be from beyond the pale – a foreigner, a heathen or a wolf – well then, geography explains everything. To look out beyond your castle walls is to gaze upon danger, chaos, paradise lost.And that is precisely how Palin seems to see life beyond Wasilla: there are tiny pockets of safety scattered across the United States, where beleaguered "real" Americans and gun-toting "true patriots" abide. Everyone and everything else is an opposing force, the danger demarcated by the relentless use of vague indexicals, impenetrable indicatives: "the liberals", "the hit squad", "the obstructionists", "the media types", "the Washington insiders", "the hate-America types", "the Obama-Biden camp and their media friends".In Going Rogue, geography is both destiny and distortion. Wasilla is the centre of the universe, then there's the big city of Juneau, then Russia, and then, way on the other side of the Earth, is Washington DC. Washington is a foreign country to Sarah Palin. As for genuine foreign policy or diplomacy? Simply not on her radar. Yes, her son is in the military, but Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East – all these float like a singular symbol rather than real places on the planet. "Our boys" go off to "distant lands" that she leaves undescribed: invisible worlds whose only function in this book is to toughen said boys into men and to deliver them back as heroes, martyrs, deer-hunters and, yes, patriots.This general distrust has little consistency or ideological mooring. In one telling anecdote, she describes her brother, Chuck, as "all boy" and always up to "typical mischief" – even when he sets the house afire. And when a state trooper pulls Chuck and her over for barrelling down a wintery road on a snowmobile, she describes it as "a couple of kids" being hassled by "a big dude with a gun and a badge". Her words: "I couldn't help wondering about his priorities; I wondered if he really didn't have better things to do, like arresting a bad guy, or maybe helping a poor old lady haul in her firewood for the night. Looking back, maybe that was my first brush with the skewed priorities of government."And so it goes. It doesn't seem to matter to Palin if she breaks the law – when she's at the helm, it's all fun and games, minor transgressions, rollicking rituals of small-town good cheer. What some might see as behaviour in persistent disregard for the safety and wellbeing of others, she frames as exhilarating pioneer prowess. Why did the mean old state trooper have to pick on her? She and her brother were good, God-fearing patriots, not "bad guys". Despite her professed devotion to law and order, police power and military might, the unlucky trooper who stood in the way of her own vehicular misadventures became a threat, a twisted tool of "government".There is no coherence in this kind of world view. There is no consistent principle at the core of this tale. "Common" sense is that sensibility which recognises her and her kind as good, others bad. Palin's supporters are "patriots", her political opponents are not. She says she wants to reform Washington even as she wants no part of it. She longs to be centre stage, even as she longs to go home. She refers endlessly to her patriotism, but seems to loathe the legal system, political parties and the constitutional balance of powers upon which the republic's foundations rest.America's small towns are filled with vibrant, curious, diverse personalities. But Palin is committed to a romantic Disneyesque trope of "small town values," a uniform, folksy fairyland where no one ever has to lock their doors or even disagrees. While that much is surely naive, it is not Palin's greatest flaw. Rather, it is her extraordinary pique every time someone doesn't love her unconditionally. When, for example, media outlets flock to Alaska upon word of her sudden resignation as governor, she retreats to the wilderness of Bristol Bay for a spate of "slaying salmon" and invites the press corps to just try and follow. "I must admit that I really wanted to see the likes of Andrea Mitchell [a reporter for NBC]... sporting fish-slimed waders, banging around in a skiff, stuck in the mud and trying to pull themselves back over the bow..."If her decisions are frequently bewildering when measured against most political ideologies – conservative or liberal – perhaps it helps to see her as resolutely, even smugly, anarchic. Thus, resigning halfway through her term as governor of Alaska becomes her way of "not giving up". As she puts it: "Our government is supposed to work for us; we're not supposed to work for government!"Sarah Palin reports to an impulsively derived and very personal moral order; time and again, she refuses to conform to the conventions of office, the duties of sworn obligation, the limits of legislative law. "I was at peace and confident with my decision," she writes of her resignation. "I felt a renewed sense of excitement and freedom – so, of course, we ate cake."Patricia Williams is professor of law at Columbia Law School.PoliticsSarah PalinRepublicansUS politicsPatricia Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Newly Released Books Books by Brad Parks, Ken Bruen, Julie Powell, Stan Jones, Katharine Weber and Alexander McCall Smith. feeds.nytimes.com |
Sex scandals and Tories: Profumo and Lambton exposed once more New entries in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reveal two politicians reacted in different ways to being caught outThey represented very different ways of reacting to a political sex scandal. One man, chastened and redemptive, became an anonymous volunteer with the poor. The other went on television to defend his marijuana-fuelled cavorting with prostitutes using the explanation: "People sometimes like variety."The two men, Conservative politicians John Profumo and Anthony (Lord) Lambton, are today included in the new crop of great and good – and very often not-so-good – added annually to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.Every January, eminent individuals who died three years previously are added to a publication that now contains biographies of the lives of 57,258 people. So today the life stories of 210 people who died in 2006 – from Freddie Laker to Moira Shearer to Syd Barrett – are added to the online version of the ODNB.Profumo and Lambton were both politicians whose downfall was brought about by sex scandals but they were very different men and reacted equally differently to their exposure. Profumo's relationship with the occasional prostitute Christine Keeler was one of the most celebrated scandals in British political history, made bigger after his blatant lie that there was "no impropriety" between them.He finally confessed all and resigned as war minister. His redemption, by any standards, was impressive. Within a few months he was a volunteering at east London's Toynbee Hall. "He danced with old ladies at tea parties and comforted meths drinkers," according to the biography entry, written by Simon Heffer. He spent the rest of his life working devotedly for charity.Lambton's resignation was somewhat different. He had renounced his entitlement to the earldom of Durham in order to remain an MP and served, unremarkably, as a junior defence minister in Edward Heath's administration until May 1973, when a tabloid newspaper published pictures of him in bed with two prostitutes, smoking marijuana. He resigned but, unlike Profumo, did not disappear. In a TV interview with Robin Day he explained his behaviour: "People sometimes like variety. I think that impulse is understood by almost everybody." Lambton retired to a Tuscan villa where, the biography notes, he "was visited by numerous politicians and pop stars; it was rumoured that Lambton presided over many dissolute parties".Additions are made each year to the ODNB. This year the politicians also include Tony Banks, the man who abolished the champagne bar at the Royal Festival Hall and once called Margaret Thatcher "a half-mad old bag lady".Sport is represented by Yorkshire cricketer Fred Trueman, Chelsea footballer Peter Osgood, and the Saturday afternoon wrestler Jackie Pallo – about whom, on hearing of his death, Dickie Davies remarked that it was "an unprecedented example of Pallo not faking it".Included for their cultural contribution are names such as Freddie Garrity from Freddie and the Dreamers; the musician Desmond "Israelites" Dekker; the comedian Linda Smith; actor and comedian Charlie "hello, my darlins" Drake; DJ Alan Freeman; composer Malcolm Arnold; artist Ian Hamilton Finlay; and actor Tom Bell who managed to blight his 1960s film career by heckling Prince Philip at the Bafta film awards in 1963: "Make us laugh, tell us a joke!"The hard copy ONDB consists of 60 volumes with contributions from 13,333 writers, many of them leading authorities on their subjects, or people who worked closely with them.As would be expected, there are big, important stories but also lots of incidental, but fascinating nuggets. The fact, for example, that the only living person to be included on a limited edition Fabergé egg since Russia's tsars and tsarinas was Celtic football legend Jimmy Johnstone (in 2005). We also find out that the rightwing journalist Frank Johnson did not leave home until he was 32 and up until then, his mum brought him a cup of tea in bed every day.John ProfumoChristine KeelerSyd BarrettMark Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Hardcover Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. GAME CHANGE, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin2. COMMITTED, by Elizabeth Gilbert3. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom4. GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin5. STONES INTO SCHOOLS, by Greg Mortenson feeds.nytimes.com |