The Sarah

Mark Moe stirred up a hornets’ nest with a recent Denver Post piece talking about “The Sarah”.

In more than 30 years of teaching, I’ve seen all sorts of student “types,” from the manic grade calculator, to the obsequious over- achiever, to the brilliant but dysfunctional slacker.

It recently dawned on me that one of the most predominant types — especially among female students — has as its avatar a political celebrity who has made a raucous re-entry onto the national stage. Therefore, I’m calling it The Sarah.

The Sarah has three basic characteristics: a lack of self-evaluative skills; a tendency to parrot whatever she thinks her immediate audience wants or needs to hear to gain validation, and the mistaken belief that popularity implies importance.

I’ve only been around 59 years, and throughout all that time I am at a loss to come up with a politician/celebrity as dumb as Palin. What does it say about us? As I remember it, “The Sarah” types were relegated to sitcoms, and ridiculed by the writers. These types included Betty White as Sue Ann Nivens on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Bouffay in Friends, and Shelley Long as Diane Chambers on Cheers.

But never in real life have the truly stupid taken such prominence on the serious stage or in politics.

The Sarah also craves acceptance and validation from whomever happens to be her audience at the moment. Thus, The Sarah attends to information not to necessarily evaluate it critically, but so that she remembers to parrot it later to seem knowledgeable to the right people. Student essays are rife with this sort of confused regurgitation of lecture notes and secondary source material.

Many times The Sarah believes that repeating whatever the teacher or critic said is sufficient to earn a good grade, even if the context is wrong or, worse, its use is contradictory.

This tendency to parrot for validation with imperfect understanding of the information is one of the real Sarah’s hallmarks, seen in her many interview retractions, Facebook flip- flops, “death panel” rants, and her recent confusion over the cause of global warming.

If I say something that is obviously true about Palin at a conservative website, they rise to her defense. Her popularity transcends common sense. She’s hitting a nerve. What is it about her that so captivates them?

Finally, The Sarah believes that popularity implies importance. It’s been my experience that certain high school girls view popularity as a way to gain preferential treatment, the benefit of the doubt, and a kind of unspoken “rounding up” of their efforts, especially grades. They confuse popularity with the kind of status that can only be earned by hard work and actual accomplishments. Sarah herself is similarly confused. Her current media blitz and Facebook shout-outs, while bolstering her popularity with her base, aren’t nearly as important as finishing the hard work of governing Alaska would have been.

I am scratching my brain to come up with a political player in American history that was such an obvious buffoon. Spiro Agnew was a source of ridicule, as was Thomas Eagleton. But these were intelligent men. George Wallace certainly appealed to base instincts, but the man was nobody’s fool.

I know that others don’t see Palin as I do. Certainly she has gumption and a kind of flair, even if that flair is more celebrity than cerebral. But if The Sarah in her is dominant, and I think it is, then her rise in the serious business of governance seems more like a deluded teenage girl’s bid for acceptance to a position of authority for which she is neither ready nor qualified.

One blogger said that Palin was more likely aiming for a shot at a FOX News show than political office. That may be, but I cannot see even that having much success, as FOX viewers would shortly realize that there is not much there there.

I don’t recall in all my years either the right or the left reveling in someone so truly stupid.

P.S. No sooner did I put this up than did I remember “The Jane.” Fonda was a prominent figure during the Vietnam war, but I recall her on the Tonight Show one night claiming that the U.S. had no foreign assistance during our revolution. The audience laughed at her. Fonda was a sponge – an attention-craving Daddy-starved starlet with a fabulous body. She went from Roger Vadim, who made her a sex goddess, to Tom Hayden who turned her political activist, to Ted Turner to Christianity and every liberal cause in between.

I suppose you could say that Sarah is a right-wing Jane, though I feel obligated to defend Jane as more intelligent and courageous.