No Need to Read Sarah Palin

Rudolph Delson over at The Awl has read it for you, in a real-time blog reading this weekend, with fabulous comments from The Awl’s witty subscribers.

My favorite bit from Saturday’s posts: Delson compares the cover of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (“The Memoir that Began the Decade”) with the covor of Palin’s over-hyped memoir, Going Rogue (“The Memoir that Ended the Decade”).

Here’s what he has to say:

So. What we have here on the dust jacket of the last best-selling memoir of the decade is a photograph of Sarah Palin.

She is wearing a red zipper jacket (of some unknowable fabric blend) and a tri-color flag pin (from some unknowable metal alloy). She is gazing left and beaming brightly (and something bright is beaming back at her, illuminating her face with a soft and unnatural glow). The photographer must have been crouching when this photograph was snapped, must have been aiming the camera upward at Palin, because the horizon behind Palin is low in the frame, which makes Palin seem to tower down from blue and optimistic heavens. The effect is worshipful.

Or, the effect is mock-worshipful: The last memoir to feature this much gaudy red fabric, this many maudlin blue clouds, was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

And so, before even opening the book, I am wondering whether Palin is being lampooned. HarperCollins, her publisher, is headquartered at 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York. This means that the editors and designers and publicists who have spent the last dozen Monday mornings ushering Going Rogue into print have also spent the last dozen Saturdays walking the variegated streets of Brooklyn and shopping the encyclopedic stores of Manhattan, have spent the last dozen Sundays reading only pertinent magazines and eating only well-researched meals. In other words? In other words, these people at HarperCollins—even the dullest of them—are not unsophisticated. They are versed in the national semiotics, are familiar with the elements of portraiture. They know that this photo of Palin is mocking. They know this photo will make half the world recoil, or snort. And yet no one at HarperCollins stopped Sarah Palin from being made a laughingstock by her own dust jacket.

And here is one of the witty Awl commenters had to say:

So you;’re saying the decade began with a self-indulgent half-true memoir by a character with a victim complex put upon by a society that doesn’t understand him while he self-consciously manipulates a cult following and that it ended with a self-indulgent half-true memoir by a character with a victim complex put upon by a society that doesn’t understand her while she self-consciously manipulates a cult following?

Read the full live blogging session (which continued today).

For less snarky coverage of Palin, check out Frank Rich’s column in today’s New York Times. But I found The Awl more entertaining.

Ok–so this post has nothing to do with economics. So here is my economics observation: Last Wednesday, D&S had a fundraiser in New York City, at the Graduate Center for Worker Education of Brooklyn College. The speakers (who were both fantastic) were Saru Jayaraman, co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (www.rocunited.org), which organizes immigrant restaurant workers, and Michael Zweig, professor of Economics at SUNY Stonybrook, director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life.

I didn’t want to bring down the level of discourse in the discussion period by asking about Palin, but I was tempted to ask Mike Zweig what he thought about Palin’s taking on, as part of her efforts to present herself as an ordinary person, the mantle of the working class. She emphasizes in the book (I’ve read) that she and Todd have worked blue-collar jobs, and have been union members. That the kinds of policies she advocates are uniformly bad for workers and (especially) union-members doesn’t seem to matter.

But this observation is much blander than what you will find at The Awl or in Frank Rich’s column–I encourage you to check them out.

—CS