CAMPAIGN OUTSIDER Alaskan Gothic
By Muhammad Cohen
UBUD, Bali - Perhaps sensing his 15 minutes of global fame waning, Levi
Johnston gave an interview in front of his family's home in Wasilla, Alaska,
last week. In case you've only followed relevant issues in this US presidential
campaign, Johnston has been fingered as the parenting partner of Bristol Palin,
the 17-year-old pregnant daughter of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah
Palin.
Johnston's yak, amid the antlers of game he's bagged, paints a frightening
portrait of where Palin and friends would lead America. Guided by fringe
religious ideology that promotes belief over accomplishment, and faith over
learning, it's a country that would be condemned to ignorance and failure with
zealotry as its sole measure of success. It would horrify a self-proclaimed
"****ing redneck" like Johnston to know that his closest counterparts inhabit
the radical fringe of Islam. Both groups pose danger to their own societies and
beyond.
In his interview, Johnston denied that his National
Rifle Association lifetime member future mother-in-law forced him into a shotgun wedding with
Bristol. "We were planning on getting married a long time ago with or without
the kid," Johnston told the Associated Press. He also said that he wasn't
pressured into joining the Palin family on the campaign trail. He said Bristol
invited him to take part, and he was glad she did. "At first, I was nervous,"
he said. "Then I was like, 'Whatever'."
Know nothing
"Whatever" aptly sums up Johnston's politics. Asked about Senator Barack Obama,
the 18-year-old said, "I don't know anything about him. He seems like a good
guy. I like him." But rest assured, Johnston won't be voting for the Democratic
presidential nominee. He won't be voting for the Republican ticket either,
though; local officials say Johnston missed the registration deadline for
voting.
But Johnston's most startling revelation in his interview was that he's dropped
out of high school to work as an apprentice electrician in Alaska's North Slope
oil fields due to his impending fatherhood. Back in school, Johnston was
reportedly a big man on campus, star of the school hockey team. Now he's
playing out the great American loser cliche embodied by Al Bundy in the TV
series Married ... with Children, , a dead-ender doomed to a life of
drudgery and bitterness by an accidental high school pregnancy. By all
accounts, Johnston seemed marked for better things.
The Christian right can talk all about the blessing of life, but teenage
pregnancy is really a cruel curse, and Johnston won't be the only victim here.
Unless her mother wins the vice presidency, it's a good bet that Bristol Palin
won't be going back to high school either. In the days before Christian
morality held sway in the Wasilla school district and decreed abstinence-only
sex education in high schools, Sarah Palin managed to avoid having her first
baby until after she'd attended five colleges in six years and gestated a
diploma.
Standing up for what's wrong
The real shocker is that in this modern time, and with a woman who could be a
heartbeat away from the presidency directly involved, no one has stopped Levi
Johnston from making the absolutely suicidal choice of dropping out of high
school. Even after becoming governor, Palin has kept fighting to cut the
dropout rate in Wasilla. While she was adamant about forcing her anti-abortion
views on her daughter, she's apparently flexible about her view on education.
But unlike abortion, education is an issue where right and wrong are crystal
clear.
A high school graduate typically earns 50% more than a dropout. You would think
that the Palins and the Johnstons would have the good sense to insist that a
teenage mistake - this pregnancy was, ahem, unplanned, and the blessing of
birth aside, last time I checked, the Bible calls what Levi and Bristol did a
sin - doesn't ruin their futures.
But that sort of logic and confidence in education rather than faith runs
against the core message of the McCain-Palin ticket. In last week's debate,
instead of talking about Joe the Plumber, whom he'd never met, McCain might've
addressed someone he does know, Levi the Dropout. Without criticizing the
accidental parents in waiting or their families, McCain could have at least
made the humanizing point that the US's educational needs must be modernized to
be ready for a host of 21st century situations, whether technological or
personal, so that everyone can keep learning. Instead he trotted out the
traditional right-wing appeal for school vouchers.
Right-wingers like the idea for its politics, not its educational outcomes.
Giving public money to private schools is a blow against government services,
government employees and labor unions, and a boon for religious groups that run
many private schools.
It's the mission, stupid
For Palin, it would appear the issue is not about knowledge but faith, not just
in your religion, but perhaps because of that religion, in yourself. If you
love Jesus or Allah or whatever you call your god, and that god loves you back,
then there's nothing you can learn in school or books that matters because
you've passed the big test.
Palin laid it out in her interview with Charles Gibson when asked what she
thought about her readiness for the presidency when McCain asked her to join
the ticket. "I answered him yes, because I have the confidence in that
readiness, and knowing that you can't blink," she said. "You have to be wired
in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on,
reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't
blink then, even when asked to run as his running mate."
As long as you have faith that you'll do the right thing, then whatever you do
is the right thing. It's that simple. America now has a president who thinks
that way, and he's been an unmitigated disaster, from the fall of the New
York's Twin Towers to the collapse of America's standing in the world to the
near meltdown of global financial markets.
Even people who say they support Palin because "she's just like us" probably
don't want to see their children drop out of high school to marry another drop
out and raise their love child in a yard full of animal bones.
On the other side of this increasingly connected world, tens of millions of
Bristol's and Levi's generation in Asia are staying in school for their
advanced degrees in engineering and sciences in part because someone taught
them which is the business end of a condom.
The children of Palin's America are prepared only to be the drones for the
Asian century or cannon fodder for a futile struggle against it. And McCain
endorses that message.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America's story to the
world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
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