Does Palin really think the average housewife in Ohio who can’t pay her bills is going to load up on ammo, board two different planes, camp out for two nights with a film crew and shoot a caribou so she can feed her family organic food? It’s amazing that Palin patronized Neiman Marcus during the campaign. Couldn’t she have spun cloth to sew her own clothes?…. The poor caribou in the Arctic Circle, a cousin to Santa’s reindeer, had to die so Palin could show off her toughness to voters and try to boost ratings on her show that have slipped since its premiere. (Next Sunday, she’s dragging up nine Gosselins to go shooting and camping.) Sarah’s view of America is primitive. You’re either a pointy-headed graduate of Harvard Law School or you’re eviscerating animals for fun, which she presents as somehow more authentic…. In “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” they should have a line at the end assuring that “almost every living creature involved in this show was harmed.”
Interesting, isn’t it? People from sea to shining sea get all sorts of exercised over whether or not convicted dog abuser and NFL quarterback Michael Vick deserves to ever again be allowed to move in polite company. Yet Caribou Barbie gets to masscaree all sorts of sentient beings on her TLC reality show…and Americans continue treating her as if she’s some sort of Right-wing Annie Oakley come to save America from the Evil Libruls.
It would be easy to chalk up such blatant and obvious hypocrisy to racism- Palin is a White woman, and Vick is a big, scary Black man. While I’d imagine racism is absolutely part of the equation, I think that this has more to do with the reality that America is evolving into something resembling the set from Idiocracy. We neither know nor care enough to ask tough, reasonable questions of political hacks like Palin, but pick on a few dogs and you’re the Devil Incarnate. Not that I would ever even begin to justify Vick’s horrific, inhuman mistreatment of dogs- but the man did his time, right? He paid his debt to society, and he thus far has complied with every aspect of what is expected and demanded of him by our criminal justice system. Vick tortured and killed animals, and he paid (and continues to pay) the price for his actions. Palin tortured and killed animals…and she’s laughing all the way to the bank. Anyone care to explain to me how what Palin is doing is any different from what Vick did? You can argue degrees of cruelty and inhumanity all you want, but killing is killing, is it not? Both Palin and Vick killed for sport and their own edification and enjoyment. So why is Palin treated like a queen while Vick is treated like a pariah?
The moral of the story is, I suppose, very clear. Run with a group of Black, thuggish men, and you can expect to be held to a much tougher standard than an attractive, reliably Conservative, folksy White woman with a gift for self-promotion. And here all this time I’d been thinking that we’d been able to move past using race as a measuring stick.
