Sarah Palin versus the liberal loons
My literary tastes aside, nothing changes the fact that Going Rogue is 413 pages of religious homilies, cheery bromides, clichés and hackneyed
froth.
As in its first page: "I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."
As in Palin's Alaska, a place where girls played dress-up under a wild crabapple tree, where good people didn't cuss, where Dad wisely limited
access to "what he called the boob tube," making his kids watch it outside in a shed in minus-30-degree cold (that must have been some TV set).
She describes a place where churches offered "what people used to call 'good clean fun,'" and where even children appreciated the value and
necessity of work.
After a Palin-family supper, she writes, the routine was always the same.
"I'm washing!" Heather would say. "I'm rinsing!" said Molly. "I'm singing!" I said.
And so on. A Norman Rockwell painting, in print. Actually, this book makes Rockwell look like a nihilist.
To read this book, Sarah Palin is not ambitious. In fact, ambition is not a word I was able to find in its pages.
The closest allusion was her declaration that, as every sled musher in Alaska knows, "If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes."
Otherwise, her intentions are always couched in terms of service.
"All I wanted," she wrote of her time as Alaska governor, "was the chance to work as hard as I could, serve the people honourably — and I figured
that maybe between changing state government and changing diapers, we'd help our corner of the world."
Uh-huh. Remember, this is from a woman who, a few months ago, halfway through her first term as governor, abruptly quit and collected what's reported
to be a multimillion-dollar advance for this book.
"In politics," she declares, "You're either eating well or sleeping well. I wanted to sleep well."
At a guess, Sarah Palin is eating very well right now, too. But of course the question on everyone's minds is whether this book is actually a
platform for a run at the White House.
