Charming, they say--personable, one of us, real. To me she's cloying and hopelessly artificial. Still, I watch this election from several perspectives:
Mine: What I want (this perspective comes easiest)
Theirs: What the American voters want (at least for strategic reasons its useful to track this, since outnumbering me, they'll win.)
Ours: What people everywhere today and tomorrow need. In other words, what people here and everywhere will end up wishing we did.
From my perspective, Palin is creepy the way George Bush is creepy. Yes I realize that from Their perspective, she's real. I can see why they'd think that. It's because we define real really differently.
I stumbled upon this quote this week in which journalist Ronald Suskind describes an interview with Bush's chief propagandist Karl Rove back in 2002.
Rove said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,' Rove continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
In a way Rove has a point. In "reality," perception is reality. People mostly operate from their guts and what people's guts perceive as real is what people tend to act upon.
In this context, I put "reality" in quotation marks to define a particular kind of reality. It's real in that we act upon it. It has real efficacy in terms of shaping our actions. By this definition of reality, Zeus is real. A belief in him caused people acted in certain ways. He really affected people's choices.
There's another definition of reality though, reflected in this quote:
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley
In other words reality is whatever persists independent of perceptions and the actions that follow from them.
There have been attempts to conflate the two definitions. Take The Secret, which argues that what you perceive to be real (for example that you'll be successful) automatically becomes a real hard fact in the world (you will be successful) because of the "law of attraction." Indeed, even if the law of attraction isn't real you can make it real I suppose by perceiving that it is.
In the quote above, Rove is making a case akin to The Secret (that old new ager-whoda thunk?!). He believes perception makes the world. He isn't just saying you can make people believe anything. He's saying you can get them to act and in such large numbers (since we're an empire) that they actually create the hard reality.
I suppose if the world were comprised exclusively of people, their perceptions and their actions, this could be true. It would be like the virtual worlds in the matrix where it's all a matter of perception and perception management.
What Rove conveniently fails to perceive is that there are large numbers of people whose perceptions he can't shape and more importantly there are physical constraints on the role of human perception and action anyway. No matter how many people you successfully convince to perceive and act otherwise, you can't get blood from a stone or enough oil from Alaska to fuel us inexpensively for any length of time. (You can fuel some of the people some of the time...)
Last night Sarah Palin proved she is perfectly capable of succeeding by Rove's definition. She can spin cutesy cloying charming deceptions that tailor people's "reality" to the needs of her party. For a guy like me who wishes she would fall hard, it's kind of disappointing. In terms of my three perspectives, if she wins Them over to her side, she'll be very bad for Me and Us. In the long run, we'll regret her ascent.
Still there's a fourth perspective from which I view this election from which I imagine being an alien looking in on the modest natural understandable progress of this fledgling reasoner, homo sapien.
Born yesterday, muddling through the lessons of history, by necessity gut driven but also by necessity gut-overriding, trying to figure out when to follow its gut and when to reason, not evil, just naive. Short-sighted, but not because it lost some long-sightedness it once possessed. It didn't fall from grace; it evolved from slime mold.
It takse tests sometimes, like this coming election or the last one. It gets test results too, like Iraq and the market crash. The test results aren't perfectly correlated. It can't tell for sure what caused what. Still, over time it is likely to discern useful patterns and make fewer mistakes.
From this perspective, the election is lined up just perfectly. McCain may have not been perfectly Rovian before the campaign but his readiness to leap into that mode makes him the perfect representation of the Rovian interpretation of "reality." And Palin rather than being just a bumbler showed last night that with a months training, she too can represent slick Rovian "reality" management about perfectly.
We have that option pitted against the Democrats who this time managed to send up some guys who while by necessity will indulge in enough spin to survive, do so largely in the service of paying due respect to the other definition of reality arguing that beyond America's love affair with itself ("The greatest workforce in the world," as McCain and Palin coo mawkishly) there remain still these hard and fast limits.
How will this fledgling reasoner chose this time? Will it have learned from the past eight years that Rove's treatment of reality ultimately is undermined by "facts that do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Nice to be tested from time to time. One way or another reality will serve us up the grades we earn and the government we deserve.


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