Sarah Palin emerged from her bunker in an undisclosed location for an interview with Charlie Gibson, and the consensus was that she needed more lipstick.

I really, really wanted to use the deer-elk-moose-caribou caught in the headlights simile, but it’s been done so often that another repetition would bury the poor animal in the the permafrost up to its antlers.

We’ve been through the Bush administration’s creating its own “reality” (until the reality check–and mate). 

We are upgrading.  The  future McPalin administration is creating its own “knowledge”.

Let’s see. She doesn’t believe in the usual qualifications for office–you know—elitist ideas like experience, education and competence.  A “big fat resume” would only get in the way of pure- hearted Mrs. Smith going to town. 

She doesn’t believe in evolution, sex education or sound economic policies (after building a hockey rink for her son in Wasilla, she left the town deeply in debt).  Maybe magical thinking is part of the Pentecostal experience.  Or maybe she just failed math.

History, both ancient and modern has passed her by–unless you count Alexander the Great battling a dinosaur.

And saying she has brought openness and honesty to government while doing the opposite—maybe that’s what they mean by “speaking in tongues”.

What’s left in the governmental toolbox—divination?  Whoopee.  We are going to have another administration that governs on a wing and a prayer. 

Electing her would be the culminating expression of that bedrock principle of glorifying ignorance that runs like an oil pipeline through American history. Knowing anything is viewed with suspicion.  It is not new.  It is deep in our culture and history, and it has made short work of some of most gifted and able leaders.  I don’t have to name them.  You know who they are.

America has become one large vocational school, a place where respect and appreciation for ideas, philosophy, science, the poetry of abstract thought, the history of civilization are as remote as life on Mars.  Remember voters, vocational schools were designed to teach trades so Americans could earn a decent living, and those trades are now at the other end of the world being practiced by cultures that also revere algebra, philosophy, science and, God help us, abstract thought.

The right has embraced this ignorance, ingested it, made it a cornerstone of campaign strategy, vomited it out over the airwaves and owns the copyright.  You would think they might dispense just a little largesse to their constituents by saying, “There, there little ones, be not afraid of education, of knowing things.  The man may know how to spell troglodyte, but he is not one.”  Instead they exhort, “Fly citizens, fly, the monster comes—he knows a participle from a gerund and night is upon us!  Flee!”

And so we have.

We can only run so far.  We are already in Alaska– at the end of our known world.  People here do not wish to know what’s going on. They moved here to get away from what’s going on.

And the Snow Queen reigns over them with her winged monkeys and classified emails.

What she doesn’t know could hurt us.

What she thinks she knows could kill us.

She stands at the water’s edge staring, unblinking, across the 53 miles of the Bering Strait into Russia’s soul, confident that foreign policy expertise will come to her as a gift of God.

That’s guaranteed to keep us staring at the ceiling at 4:00 in the morning– eyes wide open.