Dublin Opinion

Here’ an excerpt interview Sarah Palin had with Hugh Hewitt which was broadcast on the Townhall radio show in the States yesterday:

HH: Do you think the mainstream media and the left understands your religious faith, Governor Palin?

SP: I think that there’s a lot of mocking of my personal faith, and my personal faith is very, very simple. I don’t belong to any church. I do have a strong belief in God, and I believe that I’m a heck of a lot better off putting my life in God’s hands, and saying hey, you know, guide me. What else do we have but guidance that we would seek from a Creator? That’s about as simple as it gets with my faith, and I think that there is a lot of mocking of that. And you know, so bet it, though I do have respect for those who have differing views than I do on faith, on religion. I’m not going to mock them, and I would hope that they would kind of I guess give me the same courtesy through this of not mocking a person’s faith, but maybe perhaps even trying to understand a little bit of it.

HH: Governor, let’s close with some foreign affairs. It is reported that you had an Israeli flag in your governor’s office. You wore an Israeli flag pin occasionally. One, is that true? And two, why your support for Israel?

SP: Well, it is true, and I ran into Shimon Peres recently at a meeting, and he even pointed that out. He said I saw a picture of you on the internet, and you had an Israeli flag in your state government office, and I said I sure do. You know, my heart is with you. And all of those trials and tribulations throughout history that Israel has gone through, not only does that allow me to want to support that country, but Israel is our strongest and most important ally in the Middle East. And they are a democratic country who I believe deserves our support, and I know that John McCain believes as I do that Israel is our friend, and we need to be there to support them. They are there for us, and I do love that country.

Here’s a news report, more of an audio visual essay actually, of what some of those mockers are saying about the significance of Sarah Palin’s religion and her feelings about Israel.

Notice the boom sound at the point where the Pentecostal preacher talks about how the Rapture, as described in the bible is exactly the same as the effects of a nuclear blast. The implication is: do we want someone who could possibly hold similar views getting within a heart beat of the Presidency, and who would have the authority to launch a nuclear attack? You can imagine the headlines: President Sarah Palin Strips Naked Live on TV in Anticipation of the Rapture.

It’s clear that Palin sees politics in terms of religion (see the pipeline quote, and what she says about Iraq) and no doubt it would be a very bad turn of events if she was elected VP. Yet I had a twinge of doubt, not that this could not come true - anything is possible except it seems bankers getting their comeuppance - but that this ‘boom’ sound was exploiting the fear of nuclear war.

In the novel Generation X, Douglas Copeland focuses on characters who seem to obsesses about the devastating effects of a nuclear holocaust – the fear hangs about them like emotional white noise. One character imagines the full effects of a blast on a supermarket where he is doing his shopping, another freaks a neighbour out by giving them a rock they’d picked up in the dessert with the A-Bomb was tested. It was a symptom, Copeland was suggesting, of people of a certain age who grew up with a lot of Cold War propaganda buzzing about the place. It was something I identified with, being, I guess, of that age. None of it was particularly conscious, yet I vividly remember the sense of serious trepidation that remained after watching TV films like the Day After.

The Day After – known popularly as the ‘controversial The Day After’ - was first shown on ABC in November 1983, 21 years after the world came within a hair’s breath of a real nuclear Armageddon, although this was not known until 2002.

Since the collapse of Communism and the triumph of free-market capitalism (hehe) the nuclear threat has changed and more recently it is the treat from potential proliferation of nuclear material on the free-market (harhar), the ‘axis of evil’, including Iran and North Korea and those dirty bombs that can be carried in suitcases etc.

In a perhaps more muted way the fear is also there of an accident at a nuclear power plant. It was interesting to read in Flat Earth News about the level of exaggeration and hype in the media surrounding the effects of the contamination from the explosion at Chernobyl, with reports of hundreds of deaths and sensationalist reports on the long term damage.

According to the Chernobyl Forum report Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-economic Impacts, however, the real situation was considerably less alarming:

The highest radiation doses were received by emergency workers and on-site personnel, some of the workers. In time more than 600 000 people were registered as emergency and recovery workers (‘liquidators’). Although some received high doses of radiation during their work, many of them and the majority of the residents of areas designated as ‘contaminated’ in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (over 5 million people) received relatively low whole-body doses of radiation, not much higher than doses due to natural background radiation. The mitigation measures taken by the authorities, including evacuation of people from the most contaminated areas, substantially reduced radiation exposures and the radiation-related health impacts of the accident. Nevertheless, socio-conomic impacts.

There were TV dramas surrounding this event too, and I remember watching one documentary which dramatized what happened up to, and immediately after the explosion. In one scene a woman in Minsk is minding a small child in an apartment. She notices that the quality of the air in the room had changed. She goes to the window to see if the air outside is any different. To find this out she sticks out her tongue and the women who provided the account describes how her tongue tingled.

These are the things that stick in your head.

In 2006, I got a phone call from my mother at around 11.00 O’Clock at night. This was very disturbing as my mother is in her 80s and never phones me. But she had some terrible news. She told me that there had been an accident in Sellafield and that everyone is being told to stay indoors. O’Connell Street is in mayhem, people are running around in a panic.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Where are the kids, are they indoors? Close the windows. They’re telling everyone to stay indoors and close the windows.’

‘What?’ I asked again.

And then, after a moment, I recovered. My mother is in her dotage. Although she still has her faculties she is not at her sharpest, especially at 11 at night. She also has a tendency to fall asleep watching television and then to wake and not know what time it is or how long she’s been asleep.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘It’s on the television. I’m watching the news now.’

I turned on the television and sure enough the reality TV drama Fall Out was on. I remember vaguely hearing about it, but I never had any intention of watching it.

‘Mam’, I said, ‘it’s a TV program, its not real. It’s not really happening’.

‘What?’

{heavy sigh}’It’s only a dramatization of what might happen if there was a nuclear accident in Sellafield – IT’S NOT REAL’.

‘What?’

‘Mam, never mind. Go to bed. I’ll lock the windows. Talk to you tomorrow.’

I needed to go to bed myself, although I was sure I wouldn’t go to sleep. Not immediately anyway. Before I did though I opened the back door….and stuck out my tongue. No, no tingling. It’s safe to go to bed.