Sunday 7 September 2008

To The Rest Of The World, He's An Exotic

“To the rest of the world, she’s an exotic”, the American Stryker Maguire graciously informs “the rest of the world” about Sarah Palin.

“She is a fundamentalist Christian”, apparently, although that term is not defined, and by any reckoning there are plenty of those in “the rest of the world”.

“She advocated teaching creationism alongside evolution in Alaska’s schools”, except of course that she never did any such thing.

“Her right to life convictions extend to stem cell research, which she opposes”? Really? This is presumably a reference to embryonic stem cell “research”, which has never yielded the slightest result and shows no sign of ever doing so, whereas ethically unproblematic adult stem cell research really does deliver the goods. Whatever happened to science?

Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Muslims and all the other opponents of stem cell “research” make up really quite a sizeable proportion of “the rest of the world”. Add in, among others, Orthodox Jews (also mostly pro-life, Joe Lieberman and Robert Winston notwithstanding) and America’s particularly numerous Conservative Jews, and rather a lot of “the rest of the world” is also “opposed to gay marriage”.

If “She does not believe that human behaviour is responsible for global warming”, not in the least, then it is true that she is in pretty limited company, although of course that need not necessarily make her wrong. But out here in “the rest of the world”, there are plenty of us who share her real view, a synthesis of observation that human behaviour is not the only cause and determination that the people of the developing world shall not be denied their chance to develop, that travel (never mind heat or light) shall not be re-restricted to the rich, and that there shall be high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs for our own workers, not least as the economic basis for the position of many of them as the patriarchs of households and communities.

I bet it is not true that “She supports home schooling and other alternatives to traditional state education” on principle, but rather that she supports the traditional state education that, for example, can now be accessed over here almost exclusively in the local fee-charging days schools, or by sending one’s children to live with any relatives in the Caribbean. She will find many a very loud echo in “the rest of the world”.

“In praying that a natural gas pipeline would be built in Alaska, she used traditional Evangelical language”? Oh, the horror, the horror! Nobody ever prays, still less uses “traditional Evangelical language”, in “the rest of the world”. Of course not.

Still, “she kept a campaign pledge not to push as governor for mandatory inclusion of creationism in her state’s school curriculum”. In other words, contrary to Maguire’s previous assertion, she never did “advocate teaching creationism alongside evolution in Alaska’s schools”.

And although “Palin has said she would not force her views on others” (then why contest an election?), “she cannot pretend always to divorce her personal views from matters of state and governance.” Unlike politicians such as are more favoured by Stryker Maguire, of course.

What a thing it must be to live entirely in an environment in which the presuppositions are so entrenched as to be invisible from the inside. How very, very sad. So to live is indeed to be “an exotic”. But it is only possible if one has absolutely no contact whatever with “the rest of the world”.

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