Anchorage Daily News

It is surely ironic that Garrison Keillor, creator of Lake Woebegone, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve," where "the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average," has registered his disgust with Sarah Palin, America's new small-town heroine.

In a recent column, Keillor wrote that "dishonest, cynical men" put forward a "clueless young woman" for vice-president, "hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning." It is not working, Keillor averred. "The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about," and the American people "have an ear for B.S."

Palin has trumpeted her small-town roots and notion of America since her triumphal speech at the convention, appealing to listeners with exhortations of how "we do it up there in Alaska," and in "my little town of Wasilla." But Alaska outdoorsman and writer Nick Jans commented recently that he cringes every time he hears that evocation. Palin, Jans wrote, is not a typical Alaskan. She is genuine, but only of a kind, "the kind that flowed north in the wake of the '70s oil boom" and transformed the state from a "free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality." He particularly resents that Palin "has hijacked our state for political purposes."

"Main Street" is another phrase that has been invoked in recent weeks, by both campaigns, to suggest identification with the middle class, particularly a certain segment of the middle class, "Joe six pack," as Palin styles it. She may not know that "main street" has a rich history as a symbol of ordinary America. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1930, made the phrase a household word with his novel of that name, published in 1920. The connotation was entirely negative, Lewis's plot and intentions satirical.

Moving to rural Gopher Prairie, a town of about 7,000, the novel's main character, Carol Milford Kennicott, is appalled by the ugliness and smug conservatism of the town, its wealthiest, leading citizens confident that they know all they need to know, yet blissfully uninformed. When Kennicott joins the women's club, she discovers that the topic of the year is European literature, and the discussion at her first meeting is to be of poets. She asks which of the poets they're discussing that day. All of the English ones, she is told, and several ladies in turn proceed to recount the birth and death dates of a handful, and the fact that Robert Burns (sic.) was poor, and didn't have any modern advantages. Satisfied that they have mastered the English poets, the ladies move on to Chinese furnishings.

Lewis continued his theme of empty materialism in "Babbit," published in 1922. George Babbit sold poorly constructed houses at inflated prices to the unsuspecting. He owned a comfortable home with all the latest conveniences. But he was utterly ignorant of social and economic conditions outside his immediate circle, only vaguely aware of other lives. That the houses became unlivable and soon created financial hardship for the purchasers moved him barely at all.Babbit became a potent symbol of life spent in pursuit of mass-produced, material possessions, without the social and intellectual context that might give serious, thoughtful meaning to the comfort they facilitate. Both novels were popular.

Radio sitcoms such as "Fibber McGee and Mollie," and "Vic and Sade" (they lived "in the small house halfway up in the next block") in the 1930s and '40s helped to rescue "Main Street," and Garrison Keillor has built on that legacy. One of the redeeming and endearing characteristics of the people who lived on "Main Street" was that they knew their limitations, or if they didn't, they got told.

Over-intellectualized academics and stuffed shirt attorneys shouldn't be vice-presidents, either. But anti-intellectualism and romanticized ignorance masquerading as common virtue are no brief for leadership. Their most serious flaw is a lack of enlightened vision, one realistic about constraints, manifestly respectful of the rules and caring of others in society. That's what people are listening for in this election.

Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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