Like Lucy from Peanuts, there is something impressive about Sarah Palin's refusal to kowtow to the expectations of others
The most magnificent cartoon character of all time is, obviously, that renowned psychiatrist Lucy van Pelt from Peanuts. In a blog published last year on Psychology Today's website titled The Charlie Brown Theory of Personality, James C Kaufman PhD posits the theory that Lucy represents "disagreeableness". With all respect to Kaufman and his PhD, this is cobblers. What Lucy represents is staying true to one's own character. Even though she knows that her bossiness drives her beloved Schroeder away, she never changes a jot. In a world in which a TV show called Bridalplasty exists, in which women compete to get all-over surgical MOTs "to be perfect for their special day", there is something truly inspirational about a girl who refuses to bend herself to the expectations of others, consequences be damned.
Which brings us to Sarah Palin. Have you heard of this Palin person? She seems to be kinda famous. Palin came in for a bit of flak last week ? something about crosshairs on a map, I believe? Well, rest assured, Palin is not letting the turkeys get her down. Instead, on the last Saturday of this month, Palin will be making a keynote speech in Reno, Nevada ? at a gun rights convention. As the woman herself has said, many times: "Don't retreat, instead ? reload!"
This speech does the seemingly impossible and tops ? or perhaps bottoms ? her response last week to the shooting when she took to the airwaves to whine that people were saying mean things about her. It was adorably reminiscent of the behaviour of another Republican, George W Bush, when he claimed that the worst moment of his presidency was not 9/11, Afghanistan or Katrina but when Kanye West dissed him.
As masochistically enjoyable as it is to hold up Palin as a liberal boogeyman, this is neither effective nor enlightening. True, it does take a special lady to decide to spend a weekend talking to a bunch of gun fans three weeks after an attempted political assassination, but it is not difficult to fathom what it's like to live with such an utterly blinkered mentality.
As Matt Bai wrote in the New York Times last weekend, "There is very little shared experience in the nation now; there are only competing versions of the experience, consumed in such a way as to confirm whatever preconceptions you already have, rather than to make you reflect on them."
And not just in America. Technology and media have both advanced and splintered so that everyone can customise the world according to what Bai calls "preconceptions" and I call prejudices. Far from expanding one's knowledge, modern technology often narrows it. Most people listen to the TV stations and read the publications and websites that parrot their own political and moral beliefs ? from MSNBC to Fox News, from the Huffington Post to the Drudge Report, and never do the twain meet, leaving both open to caricature the other side as deluded villains, not least because both sides heighten their emotions to gain attention in an increasingly crowded market place. Never before has one had access to so much information and yet still been so badly informed. If one is lazy, anyway.
Social media, too, has an unexpectedly narrowing effect. I left Facebook last year mainly because I didn't need to know what the ex-girlfriend of someone I met at a wedding four years ago thought about the Chilean miners on an hourly basis. What was worse was that her thoughts were exactly the same as those of all my other "friends" on Facebook. No matter how tentatively connected to those "friends" one might be, chances are their lives and beliefs are not that different from one's own.
When one is awash in so many corroborating opinions, it is hard not to be persuaded that one's own view is the right one and everyone else is wrong to an immoral degree. Which brings us back to Palin and, more pleasingly, Lucy. There is something impressive about Palin's impolitic refusal to kowtow to the expectations of others; one could argue that it is almost canny of her to stick with her hardcore base considering how much flak President Obama got for his misguided hope that he could ever get the Republicans on his side by compromising.
But at least Lucy had an interest in those who were different from her: she spent her afternoons leaning on Schroeder's piano, not talking at gun shows. And that is why there was always hope she would one day win Schroeder, and why Palin will never be president. Sarah, go find a nice piano.
Yet another female character with a weight issue
So what is David E Kelley's problem with women anyway? Kelley is behind pretty much every American drama you've watched since the 90s that features lawyers, and he is best known for Ally McBeal, the show that confused "looking successful" with "looking anorexic". Two actors from that show, Courtney Thorne-Smith and Portia de Rossi, have blamed their eating issues at least partly on the programme.
And now he's back with Harry's Law, starring lovely Kathy Bates, which debuted on US TV on Monday night, and the repeated joke here is that Kathy Bates is fat. Fat. I said fat. Hey, did I mention Kathy Bates is FAT?! The opening scene shows her surrounded by snacks and by the third scene she has survived being both hit by a car and a person jumping off a building. But she is unharmed because, she says, she's "mostly soft tissue". Ha ha! Because she is F-A-T!
Depressing as it is to see Bates accept this nonsense, more depressing is that, for the third decade running, there exists another Kelley show in which a female character's weight is apparently her defining characteristic.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/19/sarah-palin-modern-day-lucy
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