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The Mighty Ted Nugent (be sure to watch the clip above) declaring Sarah Palin one of his three heroes of hands-on conservation helped me to crack what I find so appealing about TLC’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” My admiration for the former governor notwithstanding, for over a decade now my reality show viewing has never left the delightfully disturbing and fascinating world of true crime prison breaks, forensic detectives, deadly women and wicked attractions. But I’ve come to like and admire the Palin family because seeing who they are and what they stand for celebrated in the current era of popular culture is such a rare thing.
Because I’m simplistic I tend to break the world down into three simple categories:
Category one is made up of those who keep the world safe: our military, police, firefighters. Those men and women who risk their own lives to protect the rest of us from the bad guys. Without them we have nothing.Category two is made up of those who keep the world turning. These are our doctors and nurses and entrepreneurs and those who do the hard work of keeping us fed, our cars on the road, the toilets flushing and the air conditioner running. They don’t complain, they don’t whine, they have no sense of entitlement. And without them we have suffering.
Category three is the rest of us, those privileged to enjoy the luxury of being website editors, film critics, writers, journalists, professors and the like. Remove these people from the planet (and I include myself among them) and the world stays safe and keeps right on turning. We’d miss them, but do we really need them?
Like I said, simplistic. But if you think about it, our pop culture gatekeepers spend way too much time celebrating category three and just as much time ridiculing and/or marginalizing the everyday Americans who make up category two.
The thing that galls me most about the Palin family’s cruelest and most unfair critics is that almost all of them fall into category three. Sanctimonious, narcissistic underminers desperate to be liked by everyone else in category three. People such as Joe Scarborough and Kathleen Parker who contribute nothing to our society; oxygen thieves like Whoopi Goldberg, Keith Olbermann, David Letterman, Katie Couric, Chris Matthews, Joy Behar, and most of the leftist entertainment community who could all disappear tomorrow and the world would turn just fine; snarky, elitist, left-wing news outlets such as the Washington Post, Newsweek, Mediaite, and Politico who could blink offline tomorrow and somehow we’d manage to get by.
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Above video is a preview of this Sunday’s episode, which our own Lorie Byrd will bring you a sneak preview of tomorrow.
But what would we do without the Palin families of our world? Without the devoted married couple who separate for months so Todd can earn a paycheck bringing energy to our homes from the North Slope while Sarah stays home and raises the kind of son who goes to war on behalf of his country. What would we do without the millions of Palin families who do the incredibly hard and dangerous work of fishing the seas so we can eat and make the selfless choice to give the world the gift of a beautiful child who just happens to have Down syndrome?
By some standard that matters only to them, the Joe Scarboroughs and Kathleen Parkers of our world might be educated and refined, but they’re also insufferable and rather useless. My grandparents were farmers, my father an auto mechanic, my mother a school teacher. These are the people I grew up around, my friends and neighbors and relatives. When I see the Palins, I see them. And for the first time in a long time I see their vital contributions and native intelligence celebrated in an entertainment culture normally dominated by real housewives, superior journalists and smug celebrities.
Best of all, the ongoing and entertaining TLC adventures of the Palin family does the important work of reminding us of the modest and irreplaceable heroism of the everyday American family. This might be the most avante-garde series on television right now.
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