News

I visit my parents every Christmas and give my mother all of the magazines and tabloids I bought through the year.

Looking through the pile merely depresses me as the news, so fervently read at the time, is depressingly useless. Pop-cultural remembering is merely a pointless manner of restating incidents that are valuable only because they are ephemeral.

Yet, traditionally, newspaper writers spend the weeks before another year passes rounding up this year's events, those that shocked and amused us. One is tempted to do such things because one is desperate for ideas, and the column “John Ritter: Still Dead” just won't do.

Desperate to discuss Michael Jackson's lungs, or the “Santa” killer, or “Caylee's remains!” I must turn instead to the most played event of 2008, which was Sarah Palin's doomed run for the vice-presidency of America.

And it is not Palin, that non-entity, who intrigues me, but our continued interest in her, and how much time was wasted slashing at someone who, insanely, merited more attention than the president-elect. The fading arch-conservative celebrity Ann Coulter, who seems to be going the way of Camille Paglia (as in: We get the trick, you hate everything we like, like everything we hate), was recently thrust into the news for a column she wrote damning Palin with faint praise.

Coulter states: “Palin was a kick in the pants, she energized conservatives, and she made liberal heads explode. Other than his brave military service, introducing Sarah Palin to Americans is the greatest thing John McCain ever did for his country.”

Yet even she, the long, blonde contrarian, is clearly bored of her subject, whom she ultimately characterizes as a naif illiterate.

One might assume that liberals did such a good job scourging the heartless family-values moron that conservatives are at a loss to recover. But the liberals did not. Palin's radiantly evil face – if evil is, truly, bland – is impressed on us more than anyone who rose to fame or fell to tragedy in 2008, because of Tina Fey's lightweight impersonations and because of our slight and common way of expressing distaste for actual political evil.

It is no coincidence that in pop, Palin was most vivid through Saturday Night Live, a show that has always reviled politicians by drawing attention to their facial deformities or curious ways of speaking; that has never, as Chevy Chase begged of Fey, “really let [them] have it.”

Indeed, the show most recently was criticized for laughing at New York Governor David Paterson's blindness. It is one thing to mock someone's voice, clothes and vacuity; quite another to deploy genuine satire, in the manner of, say, Jonathan Swift, against their monstrous and dangerous views.

And, by making an amusing puppet of Palin – a friend of mine sardonically cherishes the Palin Cabbage Patch doll that is squishy-cute, and harmless, of course – we have effectively defanged her and turned her into just another freak of pop, like a drunk-driving-but-still-hot Mischa Barton, or still-kickin'! Cloris Leachman.

It is no news to anyone that Palin's values were degenerate enough to make dead feminists shudder in their graves; that she was, in truth, the only interesting (as in vile-lively) aspect of the Republicans' pathetic run.

Yet, leaving aside how seemingly rigged-for-failure the GOP's ticket was, why did McCain and Palin not, at least, draw attention to the relatively better, eerily quiet end of the Bush administration? One would think that these poor performers may make us reconsider George W. Bush and his cabinet. And, on one level, they did, as witnessed through the slant-tributes that are the Nixon-o-mania occurring onstage and in film.

A Thanksgiving film that is still viral shows Palin delivering a numbingly idiotic speech as she prepared to pardon a turkey.

In the background, while she talks about her son Mach 10 (or whatever his name is) and his safety in Iraq, we see a gory little man dropping a screaming turkey head-first into a funnel that appears to grind its head into pulp, judging by the trough full of blood around the apparatus. As Palin, looking for all the world like a natural-born killer, is saying what “fun” she is having being back in Alaska to prepare for Thanksgiving, the grinding goes on. This film short says everything about Palin's campaign; everything barbarous that has lurked behind our own playful, “fun” sense of her candidacy.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, my favourite rebel army, have, of course, attacked her since, already in the throes of hatred for her professed love of hunting and disgusted by her shocking obliviousness and sense of what “fun” really is.

There was a so much tragedy this year, in the celebrity realm as well: Eartha Kitt dying on Christmas was a terrible blow, as was Heath Ledger's lonely death, and countless others, those we will see in the sham tributes held during the Academy Awards to the accompaniment of polite death-clapping.

While it is heartening that Palin is all over but the mockery, her continued presence is a painful reminder of how carelessly we ingest information about venality, how eager we are to make a Muppet Show of what we fear, or, possibly, do not want to fear.

And, while we are willing to accept 10th-generation photocopies of stars of any kind, because we wish simply to be happy, why do we never round up or consider what stellar beauty occurred in the years we leave behind? Or is the change and hope that Barack Obama promised in his leaden victory speech enough to satisfy any such desire?

I hope that we will wake up and refuse to trivialize evil. I hope that change will include something sweet, an affection for all the things that happen that make us smile, even if it is a YouTube dog that eats spaghetti or a northern star that asks us, now and then, to look directly at where we are and what we love.