Sic transit gloria mundi

One of the peculiar experiences of growing old is that events that seem quite recent turn out to be ancient history not merely to children, but to young and maybe not so young adults.

I had the startling experience this morning of discovering that a non-trivial percentage of the students in my class, made up of second and third year law students, had literally never heard of Sarah Palin. After I described who this once-famous figure was, one student pointed out to me that she herself was six years old in 2008. I turned five during the fall of 1964, and to be perfectly frank, as Richard Nixon used to say, the only reason I know William Miller was Barry Goldwater’s running mate is, ironically, because of an American Express commercial from, I think, the 1980s, that starred him as somebody whose name you might not know, but who had an AMEX card (I did not and still do not understand the commercial logic of that advertisement, but Don Draper I ain’t).

Of course Miller was an obscure politico when Goldwater chose him, and remained more or less so after their campaign’s epic face plant. As for Palin:

While McCain’s selection of her might have hurt his campaign, it did wonders for Palin’s previously non-existent career as a national media celebrity.  She published a memoir, Going Rogue, exactly one year after the election, and it was smash hit, selling an eye-popping 300,000 copies on the day of its publication, and more than one million copies in the first two weeks.

For a time she became a huge right-wing media star, hosting two reality TV shows, starting her own (short-lived) personal TV network, charging massive speaking fees to share the wisdom of the common clay of the west with trade associations and the like, and basically making a fortune as the kind of infotainment political celebrity that we have since come to know so very well in another guise.

What Palin was selling that the greater American public was so eager to buy was the idea that what the country really needed was a no-nonsense tough as nails small town girl: wife, mother, wielder of a Remington rifle, and purveyor of insights such as this one, from her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, which she, or more accurately her speechwriter, lifted without attribution from anti-FDR blowhard Westbrook Pegler:  “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.”

The public – specifically the right wing, overwhelmingly white, heavily evangelical public, that was about to coalesce into the Tea Party movement, and from there into Donald Trump’s base – swallowed Palin’s populist schtick pretty much whole.

A big part of that schtick was an all-out attack on smarty-pants experts, fancy college graduates, and effete coastal elites –  indeed anyone who likes books without pictures or conversations, sub-titled films, or any of France’s 256 varieties of cheese (Charles de Gaulle:  “It is impossible to govern a country that produces 256 kinds of cheese.”)

At the time, Jacob Weisberg didn’t have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind was already blowing:  “Palin’s exuberant incoherence,” he remarked, “testifies to an unusually wide gulf between confidence and ability.  She is proud of what she doesn’t know and contemptuous of those ‘experts’ and ‘elitists’ who are too knowledgeable to be trusted.”   If that sounds like an all-too prescient preview of coming attractions, consider this evaluation of Going Rogue, by Jonathan Rabban, in the hyper-elitist New York Review of Books.  Palin’s memoir, Rabban concluded, was essentially “a four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance.”

That’s from a chapter entitled Sarah Palin: Joan the Baptist of the Cult of Stupidity, from my forthcoming Munchesque scream.

This post is not, I should emphasize a comment about Kids Today, but rather one regarding the essentially Warholian character of fame in an Instagram world.

Sarah Palin was a huge deal for 15 minutes, a medium-sized phenomenon for a year or three, and today she’s a trivia question, and an increasingly obscure one.

At least here at LGM we’ll always have Trig Palin and Andrew Sullivan’s womb with a view. Remember that one? That was weird.