yes, robert, that's amazing. [robert's link] it's amazing, overall, what's happened to sarah palin, and the fact that she's a conservative republican has been part of what has opened her up to more bile and abuse than any american politician of my lifetime, a festival of viciousness, where we've got a-rod fucking her 14-year-old daughter, or where we're photoshopping her into porn. the only real analogy i could think of would be someone like clarence thomas. yes, choosing clarence thomas or sarah palin to occupy eminent positions was cynical. yes, they have their conspicuously mediocre aspects.

but what's really pissing people off is that clarence thomas and sarah palin fuck up the progressive narrative of progress. mind-bogglingly, this releases all the pent-up racism and sexism that is even the progressive's cultural legacy, gives it a safe target. these are the sorts of people that the progressive movement has purported to speak for, so now they're ingrates, traitors, and victims of false consciousness. it's not their positions that's the problem, it's their race and sex: we can wave off some conservative white guy. how can they not see that they're working against their own interests and betraying their own kind? from women and black folks, we demand unanimity, we demand to be their voices. the palin phenomenon is fascinating, and could make people think all sorts of interesting things, about the relation of sexuality and power, for example. but folks are not capable, seeing sarah palin, of a single coherent thought: they are overwhelmed by the need to erase her, ridicule her, expunge her, annihilate her, silence her, turn her into an inanimate object and then light her on fire.

it's the opposite end of the impulse to coddle, nurture, and help people, for example through affirmative action, to make black people or working-class women our proteges, in order to display our generosity and decency. well, you better respond rightly to that, with gratitude: you need to come out of our affirmative action program mouthing the slogans we fed you. you'd better come out of our progressive institutions sounding like sonia sotomayor. or else we'll fucking kill you.

a black guy who's opposed to affirmative action, or a woman who's opposed to abortion rights, is an extremely interesting figure, takes up a rich and complex position. and whatever their drawbacks, you can't tell me that clarence thomas or sarah palin don't possess tremendous guts. they are subversives, radicals, dissenters. and how we deal with their entry into public discourse is an index of how well we deal with actual liberty. in the osama bin laden tradition, the people who would silence them or dismiss them as irrelevant or as having no people out there hate our freedom.

clarence and sarah, according to themselves, are being victimized. palin is always on about what the media is doing to her. well, they are being victimized. just think for a second what it would be like to undergo what sarah palin has undergone. really, i know this sounds absurd, but perform the exercise of trying to enter into sarah palin's experience for a moment. you don't actually have a moment for that, do you? they are outside the realm of human connection. they have been deleted from the human species.

what's remarkable is that their gender or race are a necessary condition for the procedure: what thomas called the "high-tech lynching." that is, they are being annihilated in virtue of their sex or race. it's like an insane mirror image of the far right, a redeployment of its old values. in its treatment of palin, the left becomes everything it rejects: proudly, fully. it takes people like palin to show the hysterical edge, the screeching intolerance, the incoherent unanimity, the reactionary darkness, at the heart of progress.

you know, affirmative action has a certain, i don't know, genocidal aspect. we're welcoming you into our culture, but of course that means that you have to leave yours, which is now a kind of valuable museum-piece. as soon as black leaders embraced affirmative action, blackness was over. now there are various possible responses to this besides just nodding along, and thomas/palin represent one possibility, one node in the taxonomy. i think we need those voices, even though i disagree with them in many respects. i think they show something central to the culture. and the people trying to erase them think they show something central about the culture too, or else they wouldn't need erasing.