palin, elitism, and guilt by association

Sam Harris, best-known for his eloquent excoriations of religious faith, makes the case against Palin with his characteristic wit and vigour. She represents, he says, "the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance". He imagines the following conversation:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

He develops this into a lament for America's turn against elitism of any kind:

There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

A gentler version of Harris's anti-anti-elitism, from a commentator more sympathetic to Palin, can be found here.

I have one quibble, about the following passage in Harris's piece:

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal?

I don't buy this stuff any more than I bought it when people claimed that Obama must believe the same  stuff his pastor preached. You can string a similar set of "astonishing irrationalities" together from the services at Trinity United Church of Christ and ask the same question. I'd deem it irrelevant unless I heard Palin herself declaring that The Rapture is approaching or Obama claiming that the government cooked up HIV to kill black people.

Comments

[Roschelle]

The United States is swiftly becoming the laughing stock of the world. Palin has no more business meeting with foreign head's of state than my 7 year old son. McCain clearly failed to put country first in his decision to select her. I recently cyber-snooped info regarding the real reason Monegan was fired. Her lack of knowledge regarding her own country's history plus the horrible troopergate scandal are an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

http://roschellenelson.blogspot.com/2008/09/palins-troopergatethe-real-reason.html

http://roschellenelson.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-and-founding-fathers.html

[David]

Sarah Palin quote

"I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime"

That's a pretty good declaration that she thinks the Rapture is approaching, isn't it?

The quote is from a salon.com article,

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/15/bess/index1.html

[Tony]

agreed about associations, although that salon.com article is a bit scary.