Palin and passports for the working class

It's a minor thing, really, but I was put off by Sarah Palin's answer to Katie Couric about why she (Palin) didn't get a passport until last year. To be sure, it's not a serious question, but Palin didn't acquit herself well with her answer, at least not in my book. She said something to the effect that she was a working girl, not one of those wealthy people who can afford to backpack across Europe in the summertime between semesters. In other words: only elites go abroad, not good common folk like me.

I suppose that's an answer that might be politically effective, but it's cheap. Palin is only three years older than I am. We come from the same class, and both grew up in small rural towns. We also grew into adulthood in an era of cheap international airfares. When I was a young adult, I worked summer jobs, and saved enough to go travel in Europe when the fares were super-cheap. I did it because I was intensely curious about the world, and how other people lived. That curiosity was planted in me by my elderly great-great-aunts, farm girls who volunteered as Red Cross nurses in World War I, and who served near the front lines. They grew up in relative poverty, Lois and Hilda did, but they revered learning. They lived in cities for most of their lives, but spent their last years in a little cabin in the country, a short walk through a pecan orchard from my house. I think back on them in wonder, so grateful I had those few years with them when I was small. They represented, and showed to me, a sophisticated worldliness embedded within a love for their own little patch of ground. I learned to read early, and I can recall -- literally, the picture comes to mind as I write this -- sitting on Aunt Lois's lap (she smelled like medicine and Keri lotion) by the fire reading the words "Kissinger" and "Moscow" in the newspaper with her, and asking her what Moscow was, and who Kissinger was. And she told me. Lois believed quite naturally that it was important for an intelligent person to care about the affairs of the world, but I also recall her speaking with disdain about a couple in our extended family who loved to discourse on politics and international goings-on, but whose pseudo-sophistication led them to see country people -- their neighbors -- as mere rubes.

Lois and Hilda, in short, were at home in the world wherever they were. In truth, Hilda was something of an intellectual snob, but not Loisie. She was a commoner, but in no way common. In listening to my father tell stories about her, it's clear to me that one thing Loisie despised as much as people who thought themselves superior by virtue of their intellectual gifts was people who were proud of their ignorance and parochialism.

I can't know for sure what Sarah Palin's economic circumstances were when she was young and free to travel, but it must be remembered that never before in history was it so easy for people of our class to see the world, if we so desired (the end of cheap oil also closes this marvelous window of opportunity, I fear, for our children). I suspect the truth is that Palin simply didn't have the intellectual curiosity to travel abroad and learn from other cultures. That's not a sin, but it is to be regretted in someone who puts herself forward as a leader of the world's pre-eminent power. What is a sin, or at least a mark against her character, is to frame one's disinterest in the world beyond the border of one's experience as a sign of populist virtue.