Rambo and the Mean Girl

[sansatman]

"As for Sarah Palin, her spiteful and snarky dismissal of Barack Obama and community organizers recalls the Tina Fey film "Mean Girls." Palin, the former beauty queen who posed in a red, white and blue bikini with a gun, is very like the leader of the Plastics clique in "Mean Girls," the Rachel McAdams character, Regina George. Her clique sets the standard for style at school, establishing itself at the top of the social hierarchy by its regimented exclusiveness. Those who are in any way different are put down by the Plastics, who crow about their superiority just as Palin exults in her (largely non-existent) "executive experience." Although the surface narrative of Sarah Palin is her everywoman small town ordinariness, the subtext is that she is special, as capable of shooting a tiger as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and as at the same time a veritable Miss World. The McCain camp is hoping that the American common person will be seduced into Palin's Plastic clique just as the Lindsay Lohan character was in the film. (Lohan's character was initially an outsider, having returned from Africa . . .)

The classic Mean Girl tactics are snark, put-downs and spreading around false rumors about people you don't like. When Palin falsely charged that Obama planned to raise taxes on middle class people, or blamed Senate majority leader Harry Reid for inaction even though it was the Republican plurality in the Senate that rejected most of his initiatives, she is playing classic Regina, declaring who is in the Plastic clique and who is outside. Even the boasting about being a soccer mom is a claim on status (poor women are not soccer moms, and how many minority women are?)

Palin's put-down of Obama that he lacks executive experience (unlike her own superior Mean Girl self) makes it sound as though she had run something bigger than he had. But Obama has been head of a political campaign with hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers. Doesn't a campaign head organize people and give orders and plan strategy and tactics, i.e., act in an executive capacity? Isn't that what Barack Obama has been doing for two years and hasn't he proven that he is an excellent executive in this endeavor? Only 114,000 or so people voted to make Palin governor in 2006. In contrast, Obama's executive performance as head of his presidential campaign garnered him 18 million votes.

Rambo and the Mean Girl are narratives intended as what magicians call misdirection."

Juan Cole


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/09/05-4

[pnwmom]

1. Thanks. K & R.