Sarah Palin Is a Mary Sue (meta meta meta)
A couple of weeks ago, on Twitter, I called Sarah Palin "the Plebefic queen of US politics," citing this line (copied character for character) from the transcript of her farewell address to the Alaska governor's office:
*((Gotta put First Things First))*
But thinking about it again yesterday, I realized that Sarah Palin isn't the plebefic writer, she's the Mary Sue.
How can a real person be a Mary Sue, since she is by definition impossible? On the other hand, how can a Mary Sue not be a real person, given that the whiff of self-insertion is one of the tell-tale properties of the Mary Sue?
A number of years ago I read an old book by a psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut, who did some very smart and influential writing on narcissism back in the '50s. One of his preoccupations, which isn't terribly surprising coming from a mid-century European, was narcissism in public and political life. He wrote about demagogues and cults of personality of his era, when hugely powerful autocrats turned the world upside down trying to remake it in their own images (e.g. Stalin and Hitler, but there were tremendously larger-than-life figures on "our" side also, including the US's only 4-term president).
Kohut wrote about the personal narcissism of public figures based on his readings of their memoirs (Churchill, e.g.). But he also wrote about how citizens (members of the cult, so to speak) participated in the narcissism of leaders and invested their own narcissism - their own sense of self worth - in identification with them. The metaphor he used for this involved the idea, common in discussions of narcissism, that the narcissist experiences other people as extensions of his or her own body, like limbs, and thus expects to be able to command them, control them, and expects them to be dependent and available. If others participate in this fantasy, that's how the narcissist gets his/her power. He argued that members of the public experience the grandiose leader as part of themselves, as enhancing their identity, especially if they feel weak or vulnerable.
Certainly, I think Sarah Palin is a narcissist, in fact more or less crippled by her narcissism. But that doesn't make her a Mary Sue - a Mary Sue is the fantasy, often noticeably different (e.g. in eye color, name, & telepathic ability) from the fantasist. That's where the narcissism, or the narcissistic lack, of the public comes in. Most of the credit for "Sarah Palin" goes to the talented fantasist "S," from Wasilla, AK. But she/it only came into being as we know her when other people started participating, when sparks flew into Bill Kristol's pants or whatever it was, when thousands chanted "Drill baby drill" and a million AP photo pool photos started appearing in gossip magazines.
This sounds like an etiology of either Sarah Palin or Mary Sue, but I don't mean it that way. I don't think "Sarah Palin" begins in Sarah P's mind or in the minds of her admirers. Her origins have a longer, more complicated history, in which the textual and the material are interwoven. I guess I'm asserting a negative and/or tautological ontology. Sarah Palin is a Mary Sue. And neither is wholly textual, or wholly fantasy, or wholly real.
--
Realized when writing that this relates to
driscoll's eloquent, and differently formulated, recent post on identification and on mourning celebrities - Remembering Farrah Hair". Highly recommended.
PPS: I went through a spate of picking up icons when I joined DW because I had space for them, and I'd lost all my own. I didn't expect to use this one more than once or twice a year, in comments. But I seem to use it all the time - it is amazingly appropriate for the kinds of things I post about.
This entry was originally posted at http://idlerat.dreamwidth.org/228310.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
*((Gotta put First Things First))*
But thinking about it again yesterday, I realized that Sarah Palin isn't the plebefic writer, she's the Mary Sue.
How can a real person be a Mary Sue, since she is by definition impossible? On the other hand, how can a Mary Sue not be a real person, given that the whiff of self-insertion is one of the tell-tale properties of the Mary Sue?
A number of years ago I read an old book by a psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut, who did some very smart and influential writing on narcissism back in the '50s. One of his preoccupations, which isn't terribly surprising coming from a mid-century European, was narcissism in public and political life. He wrote about demagogues and cults of personality of his era, when hugely powerful autocrats turned the world upside down trying to remake it in their own images (e.g. Stalin and Hitler, but there were tremendously larger-than-life figures on "our" side also, including the US's only 4-term president).
Kohut wrote about the personal narcissism of public figures based on his readings of their memoirs (Churchill, e.g.). But he also wrote about how citizens (members of the cult, so to speak) participated in the narcissism of leaders and invested their own narcissism - their own sense of self worth - in identification with them. The metaphor he used for this involved the idea, common in discussions of narcissism, that the narcissist experiences other people as extensions of his or her own body, like limbs, and thus expects to be able to command them, control them, and expects them to be dependent and available. If others participate in this fantasy, that's how the narcissist gets his/her power. He argued that members of the public experience the grandiose leader as part of themselves, as enhancing their identity, especially if they feel weak or vulnerable.
Certainly, I think Sarah Palin is a narcissist, in fact more or less crippled by her narcissism. But that doesn't make her a Mary Sue - a Mary Sue is the fantasy, often noticeably different (e.g. in eye color, name, & telepathic ability) from the fantasist. That's where the narcissism, or the narcissistic lack, of the public comes in. Most of the credit for "Sarah Palin" goes to the talented fantasist "S," from Wasilla, AK. But she/it only came into being as we know her when other people started participating, when sparks flew into Bill Kristol's pants or whatever it was, when thousands chanted "Drill baby drill" and a million AP photo pool photos started appearing in gossip magazines.
This sounds like an etiology of either Sarah Palin or Mary Sue, but I don't mean it that way. I don't think "Sarah Palin" begins in Sarah P's mind or in the minds of her admirers. Her origins have a longer, more complicated history, in which the textual and the material are interwoven. I guess I'm asserting a negative and/or tautological ontology. Sarah Palin is a Mary Sue. And neither is wholly textual, or wholly fantasy, or wholly real.
--
Realized when writing that this relates to
driscoll's eloquent, and differently formulated, recent post on identification and on mourning celebrities - Remembering Farrah Hair". Highly recommended.
PPS: I went through a spate of picking up icons when I joined DW because I had space for them, and I'd lost all my own. I didn't expect to use this one more than once or twice a year, in comments. But I seem to use it all the time - it is amazingly appropriate for the kinds of things I post about.
This entry was originally posted at http://idlerat.dreamwidth.org/228310.html. Please comment there using OpenID.