As a dad, I am torn between wanting to introduce my children to the world as it is, on the one hand, and providing for them a vision of the world as I want it to be, on the other.
The expressions of this conflict are trivial, but they are unending. Should my wife and I expose our little ones to violent and overblown movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean series, even though we didn't like them, just because their friends are talking about Jack Sparrow on the playground? Should we let them play with water machine-guns like the other kids in the pool, or watch old cowboy-and-Indian movies with damaging stereotypes in them, or use language like "That sucks!" at home?
I mean, what's our problem? Don't we want our kids to have a comfort-level with the world they actually live in? Sure, it's crass. It's violent. It's loud. It's rude. It's constantly trying to sell them something. So what?
Or do we protect them from all that, and instead keep their focus on Suzuki piano lessons, children-friendly poetry (here's a good one for kids!), nature walks, puzzles, with the hope of instilling in them a love for the kind of activities we think are preferable? Would that make them out of touch with their own culture?
The truth is that we don't live by our own standards. After they go to bed you might find us indulging in some terrible, brain-numbing action movie which makes us feel happy. So where do we draw the line for our kids? At the ideal, or not at all, or somewhere in between?
It's a big question, and I find it gets bigger the more I think about it. I look to people like Jon Stewart as possible models: now there's a guy who seems to immerse himself in our crass, consumerist, contemporary culture but is able to stand apart from it too. I wonder how that translates into his parenting?
Okay, what does this have to do with Sarah Palin?
Well, the appearance of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP jolted me back to this question about our relationship to our culture, and my responsiblities as a dad.
Palin represents much of what I detest when I watch TV: that unearned, unreflective, confrontational style with no tolerance of ambiguity or nuance.
If you watch a "reality" show on TV these days, even the snob-sanctioned ones like Project Runway, you see little proto-Palins everywhere: supremely confident, competitive, basically mean people, sometimes laughing at themselves but mostly at others.
She's ignorant of the world and doesn't even care.
As our national politics devolves into a reality TV show I guess this is what we get: the beautiful African-American man with the serious way and the winning smile vs. the former beauty queen who describes herself as a "pitbull with lipstick." Cue the music and the graphics: Project White House. Season 44.
The McCain campaign is attempting to diminish Obama by pitting these two cultural phenomena against each other (while suggesting subliminally that the gray-haired, crotchety war hero is the real choice among grown-ups).
Obama is aware of this attempt to reduce him to a mere "personality" in a ratings-getting contest with Palin; that's why he and Biden are staying clear of her as best they can and keeping up the attacks on McCain's plan for the economy in the last few days. But even if Obama's aware of it, he can't stop it.
So does my resistence to Sarah Palin show that I am "out-of-touch"?
That's why her emergence is clarifying for me. It answers the dilemma I have as a dad about how to raise my kids in the midst of a trash culture. It makes it obvious to me that the problem isn't the stuff all around us. The problem comes if we don't call it for what it is.
What Palin makes me see is that it's not the exposure to our crass culture that is the problem... it is the passive acceptance of it. As long as we're talking freely and critically in our house we can watch whatever warped TV we like (well, okay, with some limits!). It's all grist for the mill, as long as the children know it for that and only that and are still thinking for themselves. Some would call this critical distance from the culture being "out of touch." I would call it being alive.
Critical distance is what I want for my little ones. And it's what I want for my elected officials.
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