Daum is typical of her class. An NPR Commentator. Writer for the New Yorker, Harpers, and so on. As well as being a regular contributor the LAT. Daum tells us why she hates Palin:
She forces her critics to choose between the roles of merciless oppressor and guilt-ridden enabler.
But what it really is the hatred of a "lower class woman who does not know her place." This is what drives the hatred of Palin into overdrive. Donald Trump can say what he thinks, most of it far more radical (and therefore common-sense laden) than anything Palin says. Mike Huckabee is an unctuous former TV preacher who you would expect would drive the NYC literati up the wall. Complete with Southern Accent, and overt expressions of Christianity. Alan West all but calls Obama a traitor, and Herman Cain (both Black men, thus "traitors") actually does so. Meg Whitman ran against Jerry Brown, and Carly Fiorina against St. Barbara Boxer of the Botox, aka "Senator Ma'am." Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Walker have cut and slashed Public Employee Union dues, and political organizing. Arizona Govenor Jan Brewer supports SB 1070, the anti-illegal immigration statute, so you'd think she'd be "Women's Enemy #1."
Nope. The enemy, the one that drives them insane with rage (and they're pretty much insane anyway) is Sarah Palin. A TV personality and minor GOP figure. Here's some of the flavor of it:
Even Palin's longtime champion, William Kristol, has said she's "unlikely to be" and "probably shouldn't be" the GOP nominee.
In other words, Palin-a-phobes, the danger is receding. The apocalypse may be averted. You might not need to move to Canada after all.
But even as she edges off the political stage, Palin still has the power not just to fascinate but to obsess us. The woman could probably disappear from public life, retreating to a yurt somewhere off the grid for a second career as a taxidermist, and still get tapped constantly as a cultural and political touchstone.
…
Palin lacks the intellectual, analytical and rhetorical skills to have a competent discussion about policy or much else. She is handicapped not only by a lack of education, experience and curiosity about the world (wearing a Star of David in Israel doesn't count), but by a speaking style that often collapses under the weight of disjointed, undiagrammable sentences. She is, in terms of the political arena, easily outclassed.
Joe Biden had to go easy on her during the vice presidential debates so as not to look like the big bad wolf. Among professional journalists (as opposed to foaming-at-the-mouth partisans), there was a clear attempt not to come across like a browbeater. [Ed -- This would be the same Joe Biden who thought FDR went on Television for his fireside chats. Or many other idiocies no doubt issuing from his aneurism that has left him with the mind of a retarded child.]
…
Traister offers a rigorous dissection of the hypocrisy and incoherence of Palin's platform and persona, but nowhere in the book does she swat Palin with the grizzly bear-like strength she could have summoned. She doesn't come close to doing what my friends and readers (and no doubt her friends and readers) want her to do, which is to rip the lady to shreds and move on.
Alas, we cannot. Not only because it would be cheap and lazy and unbecoming, but also because Palin is too well-shielded by her own incompetence. By casting herself as the less privileged, less polished outsider in the fancy school, she fashions the rest of us into playground bullies (ironic, given her predilection for bullying language) who taunt her with big vocabularies and book learning and obsession with nuance. By playing the victim (ironic, given how closely she associates victimhood with liberal whining), Palin forces her critics to choose between the roles of merciless oppressor and guilt-ridden enabler.
One thing I observed quite clearly was the class obsession of my female classmates at MBA school. To a woman, they were all obsessed with class, and social standing, and being the "correct" way to advance in both. I've since seen this in the workplace, and in the writings of pretty much every professional class (or those with that pretension) White woman in America.
To observe the dog that didn't bark, watch the reaction of Black women to Sarah Palin. They don't even know anything about her, and could care less. As much as Palin creates rage among College Educated White women, she creates mostly indifference among Black women of all stripes, College or not. Black women (and men) just don't obsess and foam at the mouth over Sarah Palin.
Really, the whole thing boils down to the class rage of College Educated White women who are livid that White women without their social standing "don't know their place" and bow to themselves. Nothing infuriates this class of woman more than those of their White peers who have perceived inferior status and don't bow and scrape. Being a College Educated White woman is why they put in all that effort at social climbing and at work, in the first place. So they could have social standing over their lesser (White) female peers.
Note the advice to "disappear" out into the boonies (because life is centered around LA and NYC). The taxidermy dig. And the repeated assertion that Palin is an uneducated dolt. After all, she said that America has 57 states. And called corpsman "corpse-man" twice. And noted that dead veterans were with us today, on Memorial Day. Oh wait. That was Obama!
What Daum is really saying, is that a woman who did not go to an Ivy, or at least Stanford or Northwestern (home of the Live Sex Show called the "F-Saw" [link NSFW, language]) is nothing but an uneducated moron. That University of Idaho, or University of Arizona, or University of Illinois, are all so inferior to the top universities in America (the Ivies, near Ivies like Stanford or Northwestern) that non-elite White women should not even bother. They're just dolts, not going to an Ivy like say, Vassar or Columbia (Daum's undergrad and graduate universities, respectively). Daum grew up in Ridgewood, NJ, so Wikipedia says. Median family income? A cool $147K, and almost 87% White, 1.64% Black, 3.8% Latino. We can assume Daum comes from a well-off to fairly rich (by most people's standards) family, with enough money to send her to both Vassar and Columbia.
What enrages Daum the most about Palin is really lack of deference. This class of women, larger than you might think, is angered by a lack of interest in say, the New Yorker, or the minutiae of the Upper East Side. For most of America, putting groceries on the table beats worrying about what movie Woody Allen will make next about screwing his step-daughter, or which gay designer is "in" this year. Much less maundering on about "authentic" Bolivian cuisine (fried grasshoppers! Yum!) and the tragedy of McDonalds available on the Champs Elysee. Few Americans can afford to go to France in the first place.
Meanwhile, most Americans have a hunger for knowledge outside the confines of political correctness. The Teaching Company, advertises quite often in the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. Not so much in the New Yorker or Atlantic. What would Daum know about Ike's views on coalition warfare, and its implications for Libyan policy? Did she even read his "Crusade in Europe" or Grant's Memoirs, or Churchill's "the River War" (about the Sudan)?
Of course not. No one is more ignorant and deluded than a College Educated White woman when it comes to military history. Particularly the books written by direct eyewitnesses to it. Not only the great commanders, but Daum (and women like her) haven't read anything along the lines of "With The Old Breed" by EB Sledge, or Pappy Boyington's autobiography, or Robert Leckie's "Helmet for My Pillow." Anything military is "icky" and gives these women the cooties, so they run away from it. I'm sure that Daum, however, would know exactly what fabulous gay designer is not shouting anti-semitic slurs this season.
Palin is what she is. A relentlessly lower middle class woman with a midwestern accent, who refuses to eradicate it or her own background. It is a sign of the elites degeneracy and semi-hereditary aristocracy that being lower middle class and refusing to bow, even symbolically, provokes rage. Like that of an aristocratic lady who whips an insolent servant.
An overlooked part of the conflict within White people is the battle of highly educated White women to beat down those of "lesser degrees" into the aspect of a cowed domestic servant. This is not going to end well.
...Read more
Posts
