The Godzilla from Wasilla

I am currently writing a book about American ignorance.

To be more precise it is about the 200-year-old perception that Americans know less about the geography, history, and current affairs of the world than people in other developed nations.

Before you think that is so old hat, so 2008, so BC (before Obama), I have one name of my own to justify this backward looking study: Sarah Palin.

But now, alas, my poster girl, the Governor from the America's frozen north, has resigned. Next thing the Governator of California will return to the movie business and America will look like a regular country.

In fact plenty of people are suggesting that America has already come back into the Western fold: that it is once again just another nation. Sure Obama's administration may lack the array of lay-preachers and recreational hunters that made up the Bush administration and his views on health-care, nuclear weapons and the need for a Palestinian state all seem, well, positively European.

But behind the front man, American politics still dances to its own tune (is that "Achy Breaky Heart" I can hear on CNN in the background?).

Last month it was the Governor of South Carolina going AWOL on the Appalachian trial (that's the Argentinean section of the long trail); earlier this year it was the Governor-cum-Mafia-Don Blagojevich asking for bribes from people hoping to be Obama's replacement in the US Senate. Blagojevich's denials and pleas of innocence were worthy of a starring role in the soap opera Days of Our Lives.

But my favourite was the 2008 revelation that the New York disciplinarian Elliot Spitzer had been caught breaking banking laws he was particularly keen on using to catch white collar criminals. Spitzer's crime was illegally ferreting away cash in accounts to pay for very expensive prostitutes, the kind you can take across state-lines (which is also illegal in the US).

I am tempted to try to argue that we sensationalise the indiscretions of Americans and that these recent spates of resignations (and sexual revelations) are all just the result of America's open and inquisitorial democratic culture. I could go further to say that all it reveals is that age old human tendency to first deny and plead innocence and then as a last resort ask for forgiveness in the face of categorical evidence of malfeasance.

The more Baptist a politician the quicker they seem to reach the “begging for forgiveness” part. The more old school Protestant or Catholic they claim to be the less likely they will admit anything - witness the similar approaches taken to truth telling by Richard Nixon and the three Kennedy Senators.

However, faced with all of these examples (and America's “made for movies” political history) it is hard to claim our American cousins are just like us but with more money, more power and more naked ambition. The reality is that their political culture is simply different to that of Australia or any other Western nation.

All this brings me back to Sarah Palin, another great American story. My guess is we have not heard the last of the already overexposed northern governor. A run for the presidency or at least her own TV show is surely to come. And the film Couric-Palin could be, I tell you, the Frost-Nixon of the next decade.

Let's recap the tale so far. Former beauty-queen and graduate in Communications gets elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (a satellite city of Anchorage for those of you weak on geography). She takes on the good ole' boys with a folksy style, a great smile and a "I am not another Juneau politician" motto.

The Gov is extremely popular and gets chosen to help balance the Republican presidential ticket with an extremely experienced but very old guy. The Governor is youthful and plays well with the religious right for among other things not aborting her fifth child who was born in April 2008 with Down-syndrome.

Rumours from the local librarian and church are that she speaks in tongues on the weekends and believes that dinosaurs and man walked on the earth at the same time (those northwestern liberals can be so vicious). She gives a great speech at the Republican convention, which excites the party base and the midriff of more than a few men.

Then disaster strikes: she is interviewed by two major league US journalists for television: Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. The Couric interview is so good CBS TV released it in sections over a number of days. The governor sounds totally clueless about foreign affairs and cannot name one magazine that she reads to keep up with current affairs.

But here is the real campaign trail gold: one of the funniest women in America (Tina Fey) looks uncannily like Palin and does her accent (particularly Palin's growling "r") and her wink superbly well.

Americans start to doubt the newbie from a small town is up to the job of being a heart beat away from the president (before Cheney, the VP role was essentially to be the back-up president, but when the VP has the dicky heart then you really need to watch out!).

This domestic drama however had an international dimension. Palin is a great hit with the international press. She plays to that old American stereotype the "ugly American" (gormless about world politics). I know, she is hardly unattractive, but ironies abound, in the 1958 novel The Ugly American, the ugly guy is the culturally sensitive hero.

During the 2008 campaign I tracked the coverage Palin received in the international print media compared to Joe Biden (remember anything about him?). Fake photos of Palin in a bikini holding a rifle and fake claims that she thought Africa was a country (it was President Bush who actually said that, not Governor Palin) were constantly printed in the global media - including in Australia.

The Age was particularly guilty of splashing falsehoods about Palin on the front page of its website. Reporting her actual words would have been a more effective and honest indictment of Governor Palin as presidential material.

Does this tell us anything new about the US? Not really. The plain speaking frontiersperson still has strong appeal to Americans. In America like most political cultures the fantasy that rural living cleanses the sins of urban life is potent and there is nowhere quite as pure in the American imagination as the Alaskan wilderness.

Palin's populist style and anti-cosmopolitan persona played poorly with urban and university educated Americans, and this negative so-called "northeast coast establishment" view of the frontiersmen and women has long been echoed in global opinion of the US.

It's an old story told as far back as the 1830s by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the British Frances Trollope. Palin fits the stereotypes neatly; however, as the Mississippi novels of Mark Twain remind us sometimes the so-called rubes from the frontier end up with the treasure and the joke is in fact on us foreigners.