Friday, November 27, 2009

One Life To Live

Jack Cashill contrasts the differing cultural/political receptions given to the memoirs of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin: The Competing Narratives of Barry and Sarah
In the spring of 1964, Sarah Heath, then just three months old, flew into backwater Skagway, Alaska (population 650) aboard a 1930s-era Grumman Goose to start a new life with her parents, brother, and sister.

At that same time, in America's other new outlier state, Hawaii, two-year-old Barry Obama was just getting used to a fatherless existence in the otherwise-comfortable world his white grandparents and occasionally his mother would make for him.
At the time, not even Nostradamus could have foretold that the paths of Barry and Sarah would intersect in the "historic" 2008 election, Barry as the first major party presidential nominee of African descent and Sarah as the first woman with a real shot at the vice-presidency.

(snip)

How the literary/media establishment would respond to the respective memoirs of these two political figures would reveal far less about the authenticity, honesty, and literary quality of the tales the authors told than it would about the collective mindset of that establishment.
As Cashill points out, Sarah Palin had to overcome personal, financial, and physical obstacles that Barack Obama, the smooth intellectual making his way on diversity and progressive omerta, never faced. But, the desire among the cultural and political elite to believe the narrative is much stronger than their willingness to face the facts.

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