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I invited myself to D.E. Rasso’s place to watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska. It was every bit as vacuous and grating as Nancy Franklin says, and also filled with fundamentalist dog-whistle moments.

We wrote about it (after three bottles of wine) for The Awl.

The Awl has published my examination of Sarah Palin’s fundamentalist background — a background not entirely dissimilar to my own. I have a hunch about what she’s up to with her new reality show, and it scares the hell of out me.

When Sarah Palin began shopping around a “Planet Earth-type” reality series based in Alaska earlier this month, the media responded with its usual gleeful incredulity: Caribou Barbie on a fishing boat! The former governor is reportedly seeking upwards of $1 million per episode, and, with Discovery and A&E interested in the project, she just might get it. Not only are her antics the best thing for Internet page views since Paris Hilton invented the no-panties dismount, they’re TV ratings gold. Jimmy Fallon said it best, “Any reality show about Sarah Palin will have to compete with that other reality show about Sarah Palin: the news.”

If you’re among those speculating about Palin’s intentions, I’m here to help. As a casualty of a tongues-speaking, faith-healing, demon-battling storefront church childhood, I keep track of Pentecostals and Charismatics the way some people stalk abusive exes, and I have a sick feeling that I can decode this new iteration of her mission for you.

It’s long. If you’re going to read the whole thing, you’ll want to get yourself a cup of coffee or crack open a beer first.

Every time I pass this Carnegie Hall ad campaign, I think these happy people are praising God at an Oral Roberts revival.

On Rachel Maddow’s show, the Haitian Ambassador responds (above) to Pat Robertson’s revolting and infuriating, but not especially surprising, claim that the earthquake is a result of slaves’ “pact with the devil.” As Alex Balk says, this rebuttal is “direct, intelligent,” and “filled with more history in one minute than pretty much anything you see on most news programs all evening.”

As you’ve no doubt heard, aid agencies are really struggling. Writer Edwidge Danticat spoke with CNN yesterday about the implications of the disaster.

It is a catastrophe beyond measure, because even when we’ve had mudslides or floods, it has overwhelmed the capacity of the country to handle it: to absorb the wounded, to help people find medical care. But this situation is something far beyond anything the country has ever experienced before.

In Haiti, most people cannot afford basic medical care, so imagine now, the primary hospital in Port-au-Prince is said to have been severely damaged. It’s truly an extraordinary catastrophe for a country that’s already suffered so very, very much.

The sad thing is that the country seemed to have been on an upswing. There was the beginning of some tranquility.

Earlier Danticat said she could see “parts of my old neighborhood through this very large veil of fire.” (Via A.N. Devers and Joy Press.)

Give what you can. Doctors Without Borders is on the ground and working already, but lacking shelter and basic supplies like anesthesia, so that organization is a good place to start.

Ayn Rand’s selfishness-meets-the-free-market doctrines may be odious, but she must be taken seriously, argues Scott McLemee, if only for her influence.

[T]he Rand market has never been anything but robust in the years since her death in 1982. Every year, her melodramatic novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1958) have sold at least 100,000 copies each. Rand’s other fiction remains in print; so do her ventures into philosophical speculation and political commentary. From time to time, an opinion poll in the United States will show that she is among the most influential writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Intellectual historians do not recognise this, but then her influence is on the lower levels of the culture, where they seldom venture.

All of this might be construed as an American peculiarity, like miniature golf or the bacon cheeseburger. But that is too narrow a view: Rand’s perspective is not nationalistic, and her philosophy has a properly cosmic dimension. To put her in perspective it is helpful to consult, of all things, The Communist Manifesto. When Marx and Engels describe the world-churning dynamism of unfettered capitalism – its capacity to unmake and remake the world in its own image – they write with a verve and vividness that make recent paeans to globalisation seem timid. It is fitting that they might have some prophetic insight into the author of The Virtue of Selfishness…

But … Marx and Engels overestimate just how much reality the human psyche can bear – and they certainly underestimate Ayn Rand. Her fiction is a sustained effort to create for capitalism a grand mythology that is too solid ever to melt into air. Her approach to doing so was sui generis and even, in its way, avant garde – most conspicuously in Atlas Shrugged, her final novel, in which didacticism and tempestuousness combine in a truly epic work of propaganda.

Indeed. My friend Allison took the billboard shot above while heading south on I-95 through Georgia yesterday. Then she dug up some background.
 

See also: a Brooklynite’s insane Randian diatribe; what Howard Roark might have brought to Williamsburg; Atlas Shrugged, updated for the current financial crisis; and Americans’ efforts to weather the recession by seeking financial advice from the Bible.