Going Rogue (you knew I had to write about it)

Tonight I'm presented with two options: clean the bathroom or write on my blog. Difficult decision there. The way I'm justifying this arguably lazy decision is that, one, writing is edifying, and two, my book group's coming over on Sunday and the bathroom will just have to be cleaned again. (I'm omitting the fact that I could also be grading papers tonight, but somehow managed to avoid that task by cleaning the kitchen and living room, buying 3 songs on iTunes, making tamale pie in the slow cooker, and checking my email.)

So, Going Rogue, otherwise known as The Longest Campaign Message in American History. We listened to 3 hours of it today at work out of a collective perversity for bad literature. First of all, Sarah reads it herself, making for a peppy and gosh-darnit authentic Palin experience. Her perkiness is as eerie and disingenuous as a Stepford wife; this vocal tone is particularly disturbing when she chirps her way through an account of her miscarriage. But more irritating than Palin's cheerleader delivery is the superficiality of her memoir. This is a woman with a potentially interesting life story. She was raised in Alaska just a few years after it gained statehood, and probably did have an unusual childhood compared to most Americans; after all, few of us hunt and eat bear or have parents who were modern pioneers. She could have written in detail about life in early Alaska: relationships between Native Alaskans and settlers, domestic hardships, natural wonders, what it was like to be a member of an tiny gender minority, etc. Instead, what we get is a Little Igloo on the Tundra, snow globe fantasy of life in America's coldest state, where all the men are men, all the women are men, and the children are named after motor vehicles.

According to Sarah, life in Alaska is big, fat snowflakes and pink, fat babies. It's also the locale for her heroic battle against "politics as usual" (the repetition of which phrase could inspire a drinking game). Despite the hundreds of pages in Going Rogue, all the reader gets is the old campaign mantra of a maverick soccer mom. If the memoir reveals anything new, it's Palin's inability to accept criticism and her predilection for thinly veiled character assasinations of people who think critically about what she says and does. She uses her book to lambast Wasilla critics, campaign critics, and any government official who ever made it difficult to get her way. Apparently Sarah is of the Cheney-Bush camp, which reviles the checks and balances process as obstructionist and views independent thought as tantamount to treason.

Perhaps actual autobiography was too much to expect from Palin, but as my friend Katie noted, the book has no depth. There is not one iota of frailty, or bildungsroman failure and growth. Judging from Going Rogue Sarah Palin came out of the womb the wolf-shooting, glasses-wearing, grammar-eschewing, baby-producing cowgirl she is today. And every step along the way was idyllic. (If a little bit chilly, gosh darnit.) Sarah Palin represents herself as the least likable character an author can create--one who is perfect and therefore unrelateable. Her reduction to political ideologies of real-life hardships like miscarriage or having a baby with Down Syndrome (in this case, both anti-abortion messages) made it hard for me to care about her. And her sunny gloss of life in Alaska made me want to puke.

Nothing is that perfect, and no ideology is that cut and dry. The utter absence of difficulty and emotion in Palin's memoir should make any reader suspicious.

But it won't, and that's the hardest part of her story to digest. Right now millions of men and women are reading Sarah Palin's memoir and agreeing with all of her simple, cheery pronouncements. Despite the fact that every sentence in Going Rogue can be re-written more concisely as "I'm a maverick, vote Sarah for president!," this book has generated over 200 million sales.

I'd rather get a lump of coal in my stocking. At least coal, given time, becomes a diamond, whereas Palin will always be a sack of scat.