Working-class people at college

This was a good letter to Camille Paglia in her current Salon column:

The purpose of this message is to express my outrage at the frequent criticism of Sarah Palin for having gone to five schools before she graduated from the University of Idaho. What many of her critics fail to understand, or smugly disdain, is the reason she attended several schools. Sarah's parents told their four children that they could not afford to pay their way through college, and if any of them wanted to go on to college, they must figure a way to pay for it on their own.

It is a towering credit to Sarah Palin's ambition, courage and will to persevere that she acquired college credit hours when and where she had the opportunity and could pay for them and had the drive and guts to earn her B.A. Although a degree from the University of Idaho may not impress someone who attended an Ivy League school, having the title the University of Idaho on her sheepskin is certainly more elegant than, say, Southwest Wyoming State Teachers College.

Those whose parents paid their way through school evidently don't appreciate what extra effort it took Sarah to acquire her B.A. But I do, because hailing from Galena, Kansas, the only Kansas town mentioned in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," I know what it's like to grow up poor, at least poor in relative terms.

It's common for working-class youngsters who manage to go on to college to go to one school, as did I, for their first couple of years. In many cases, a kid will live at home while going to a nearby college. It irks me that smug, spoiled brats have the gall to criticize Sarah Palin for going to several colleges, because she didn't flunk out of those schools -- she was scratching and clawing to grab credit hours when she could.

Although I graduated from the University of Kansas very near, if not at the very bottom, of my class, I remain proud of the degree I earned, because it enabled me to wiggle my way out of the lower working-class. I busted my fanny to make it through school, working as a busboy at a tavern and as a waiter in a sorority house. But first I went to school at a small state college, Kansas State Teachers College at Pittsburg, near my hometown, before transferring to the University of Kansas to earn my B.A. from a school with a better reputation than KSTC's.

My father was the youngest of ten children born to a farm family and probably never had a penny which he hadn't earned by his hard labor. He chose to lease and operate a gas station in Galena, Kansas, until he'd earned enough to purchase the station from the oil company. Operating a gas station was his vocation for more than 40 years. In all those years, I knew him to take only one weekend vacation, when he and my mother drove to St. Louis to watch a Cardinals game.

Dave Livingston

Colorado Springs, CO

You'll want to read Paglia's response, which ends with the line: "We're in a horrendous cultural vacuum because our status-besotted education industry is geared toward producing not original thinkers but docile creatures of the system."

This reminds me of something two childhood friends who went to the Ivies, but who spent a semester at LSU with me to qualify for a cheaper year-abroad program, said about going to the state school versus their Ivy (from which both graduated): that they got a lot more out of class at LSU because you actually got to interact with professors, and because the students didn't seem to have a sense of entitlement about being there.

Anyway, I liked this letter because what the letter-writer says is true, and because it also explains why so many people identify with Sarah Palin, despite everything. Understand me clearly: I think Sarah Palin is a fatally flawed vessel, and would be a terrible national leader. But please separate your thoughts and feelings about Palin long enough to understand why someone like Dave Livingston would identify with her, and come to loathe at least some of her critics. The Palin populist discerns, probably correctly, that much of the Palin hate is not only spite towards Palin herself, but spite towards a certain kind of American, and his tastes, his dreams, and his experiences. It is too bad, and maybe even a kind of tragedy, that Palin is personally not capable of sustaining the hope ordinary people put in her. Anyway, I know people can't talk about Palin anymore without going crazy, but Dave Livingston is worth listening to. I know a lot of people like him. He's why I wanted Sarah Palin so badly to be good, and was so disappointed when she wasn't.