I’m not terribly interested in Sarah Palin, though her recent clowning at the hands of Peggy Noonan, who claimed she wasn’t fit to lift Ronnie’s jockstrap, was hilarious.
But I confess to some fascination with her new new television show. “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is perhaps a grandiloquent title (does that make it Barack Obama’s America?) but I guess it makes some sense given the content.
It’s interesting that the conventions of reality show self promotion, pioneered on marginal celebrities and wealthy socialites with pretensions to style, has now been applied to a politician-celebrity. Of course glossy and sanitized paeans to the myth of family life are nothing new for american politics, but Palin appears to be aggressively pursuing the expansion of this genre in cable tv.
The show may bomb, I don’t know, but being a long-time watcher of the TLC/Discovery conglomerate, I know that shows with very small but reliable audiences can stick around for a while.
Secondly, assuming that Sarah is trying to enhance her prestige with this series, it’s interesting (but perhaps inevitable) that she and the producers have determined to do this primarily by showing Sarah in leisure activities. Of course, this mode of consumerist fantasy was slyly perfected in the long-running “John and Kate + 8” program, whereby the gawk-worthy logistics of caring for sextuplets insensibly transitioned to a never ending series of branded outings, shopping trips, and vacations, against the background of real-estate progress from suburban ranch home to semi-rural estate (with no small amount of attendant family-implosion type drama thrown in as garnish).
Finally, and really interesting is that the hook of the series appears to be that Palin is some kind of fearless outdoorsman, perhaps even a naturalist, with her dramatic tribute to a mother grizzly. Of course I’d have to watch the show to really judge that, something I’d rather not do. But so, while I may applaud the appreciation for our natural heritage, can’t the question be posed: does Palin enjoy the natural heritage of federally owned Alaska or of privately owned Alaska?
Or, if she climbs a glacier (sounds like fun), does she also climb the black skree from which glaciars have precipitously retreated?
And so on.
