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Saturday Night Live, like many other comedy shows, has degenerated into lewd skits and sophomoric frat-boy style jokes. So, I didn't watch any of the Sarah Palin/Tina Fey SNL skits - not live anyway. But Youtube and other news channels have given us an array of venues to choose those specific skits from.
I'm not here to critique Tina Fey on her impersonation of Sarah, although she does an uncannily great job at it, both with her accent and her mannerism (especially where she has the set jaws in Sarah's trademark doggedness.)
Sarah's meteoric rise into pop and political culture is equally uncanny. It is almost as though a supernatural force had a hand in all of this. What are the chances that she has her perfect double in an SNL comedian, and that an old Senator running for president will use her to revive his failing and flailing campaign?
I remember many times finding such uncanny situations where everything seems to align perfectly, but then realizing that they were really the devil's propositions.
Friends have also told me of these "perfect situations" which they just have to accept, and I as an outsider can have enough foresight to warn them of their predicament. Some listen, others go on to their folly.
I think this is what Sarah Palin is facing. Sometimes our most difficult choices are our easiest, those moments when the only answer seems "yes". How easy it must have been for Palin, bar her initial surprise, to agree to go on with her dogged, strong-jawed determination to face challenges and work her talent at a national level? Being who she is, how can she refuse? Her answer is almost set in her personality.
Still, she has a husband, two parents, a household of sisters and brothers, and surely a sane friend here and there who can show her the flip side of the this janusian proposition.
But her other choices, such as bringing her pregnant daughter and her boyfriend to parade before the RNC and starting her possible role as the second most important person in the world with a small infant at home, should have told us that her mind might not have been as lucid as we (or she) would have liked to think.
Somehow, Sarah Palin managed to be right in the firing line for McCain's vice presidency and Tina Fey's SNL parodies. We can blame them for using her, but we should also wonder what it was in Sarah that put her in such a perfect spot as such a perfect target.