DENVER, en route to BLOOMINGTON — On Friday late, as the sparkle and glow from
Thursday night’s Obama-rama spectacular at Invesco Field was receding slightly,
to something like mortal dimensions, a group of Democratic stragglers from
Tennessee were hanging in the downstairs lounge of the Marriott Tech Center
Hotel. They fell to talking about Republican nominee-to-be John McCain’s
surprise choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running
mate.
Two members of this tight little group were Will Cheek of
Nashville, a former state party chairman and a Democrat’s Democrat, and his
equally committed wife Joan. Amid what was otherwise a self-congratulatory
chorus of dismissal of Palin as a scandal-marred and ultra-conservative
non-entity, Joan Cheek demurred.
At 44, she observed, Palin was quite literally a fresh
face, not unattractive, and, behind those schoolmarm frames of the governor’s
glasses, and underneath the hint of cascade in her brunette locks, Joan Cheek
thought she saw something else, a still resonant image from vintage popular
culture.
“Wonder Woman!” she announced it, not with relish but with
what appeared to be sober trepidation….
A word or two, by way of context: Consensus judgments in
politics don’t happen by accident or right away – any more than election
outcomes occur that way. The word “meme” is much in fashion right now. It was
supposedly coined by one Richard Dawkins, a believer in (and chronicler of)
science and a skeptic about the Deity or anything else transcendent. Even so,
when people talk about memes, they aren’t focusing necessarily on the
technological (or “viral”) aspects of those instant (and often enduring) popular
mythologies. Like the Londoners of 1944, they presumably know that human hands
have launched the e V-weapons that fall in their midst.
Those that hit and make a lasting impact are generally
those that are well targeted. Clinton of the loose zipper and Dan “Mr. Potatoe”
Quayle of the anti-gravity brain are cases in point. (Warren G. Harding, he of
the ‘normalcy’ neologism, qualified in both those categories.)
“Mythologies,” we said a few lines back. To call something
a “myth” doesn’t belie it. Ask Carl Jung. (OK, his ghost.) But political memes,
like some myths, can start out as malicious (or self-serving) fabrications or as
the careless templates of a lazy press pack.
“Mean Bob Dole,” a truly bizarre way to tag an exemplar of
both wit and warmth, was a clear case of the latter, while “Al Gore the Inventor
of the Internet” ended up as a press meme but started out at some V-2 base near
Peenemunde. The pedigree of “Barack Obama the celebrity” was similar.
Some memes are both concocted ex nihilo and are on
point Almost two generations ago, in late 1967, the Republican governor of
Michigan, George Romney, was a leading contender for the presidency. The
problem was, Romney was a corporate technocrat (as president of American Motors
in the ’50s and ’60s, he had pioneered in the production of compact cars), and
he bored reporters silly.
Rather than say that outright (though a few media folks did
just that), the men of the working press (women reporters were few and far
between, though a few – like Mary McGrory, a kind of Ur-Maureen Dowd, had
columnist’s licenses) looked for some useable objective correlative. When
Romney, an honest soul then tilting against the Vietnam War, confessed that his
military handlers had “brainwashed” him on his first tour of the battle zone,
the media pounced on the term, turning the soon-to-be-ex frontrunner into a
doltish dupe, something out of a sci-fi horror movie.
Not for nothing has that senior Romney’s son Mitt
cultivated an image so Stepfordesque as to leave no edges hanging out.
Blandness, however, is its own punishment, and that fact, along with the obvious
animosity that had existed between presidential-primary rivals Romney and McCain
may have pushed the 72-year-0ld GOP standard-bearer (a Strangelovian fossil in
Democratic memology) into the arms of Sarah Palin.
Yes, she’s relatively inexperienced and maybe a little
naïve, but Democrats, for obvious reasons, have to walk gingerly on them there
eggs. Anything that goes to signify Palin as an “empty-headed woman’ will become
that most treacherous of memes, the kind that boomerangs back onto its
launchers and enables Plain to make inroads, however modest , with a feminist
constituency that her pro-life beliefs and hard-right proclivities would
otherwise preclude her from.
“Wonder Woman,” indeed. Joan Cheek is no sympathizer with
Republicanism or credulous sucker for cartoon caricatures. She is a veteran of
the entertainment industry who worked on the other side of the camera from the
likes of Morgan Fairchild (who, incidentally, made a cameo appearance at
Denver). Cheek has labored on the production end In Hollywood, where meme-making
was first practiced and first perfected. What she sees in Palin is an image that
could go either toward the banal or toward the heroic, but on a giant Imax-sized
screen either way. Depending on the reviews and the audience response (and on
the memers and counter-memers of either side), she could be leading lady or flop, in
either instance transforming the history of the Republic.
Joan Cheek’s fellow Democrats, like Palin’s fellow
Republicans, and like the rest of us, will just have to wait and see.
