That’s not stopping Bachmann from comparing herself to Thatcher in a new ad (embedded above), one that capitalizes on the buzz surrounding Meryl Streep’s Oscar-worthy performance as Thatcher in the new biopic The Iron Lady. Now, it’s often problematic when conservatives try to tap into pop culture and align themselves with current hit movies.* (Remember over the summer when Republicans in Congress psyched themselves up for the debt ceiling fight by watching a clip of thuggish behavior from The Town? Was that really the image these fiscally responsible Republicans wanted to convey, that of violent bank robbers from a movie made by prominent Democratic supporter Ben Affleck?) How tone-deaf is it for Bachmann to associate herself not with the real Thatcher but with the movie Thatcher, played by one of Hollywood’s prominent liberals, in a film that British conservative politicians have criticized as an unflattering smear of Thatcher?

Oh, well, it could have been worse. Bachmann could have chosen instead the new movie Young Adult, about an attractive Minnesota woman who’s a bitter, mean, has-been. Or, if the Iowa caucuses were being held a year ago, she might have had to use Black Swan.

*For all its buzz, The Iron Lady is not exactly a hit yet. It’s done well in its first week of limited release, but it’s far from a blockbuster, since it’s only playing on four screens throughout the U.S. so far. So no one in Iowa (or most of the rest of the country) has had a chance to see it, which means the comparison will be lost on most voters anyway.

Fine, so he changed the lyric, “And no religion, too” to “And all religion’s true.” (The offending alteration comes in at around the five-minute mark in the video embedded above.) But if you think about it, that line is just as provocative as the line it replaces. If all religion is true, then neither Muslims nor Christians nor Jews nor Buddhists can claim a monopoly on religious truth. (And then, I guess, we should all become Unitarian Universalists.) It’s a provocative change, provocative in a good way, like the rest of the song, and I suspect that that venerable provocateur, John Lennon, might have approved of the tweak, since he considered so little to be sacred, including his own musical canon (“I don’t believe in Beatles,” as he put it).

Besides, isn’t this a song about nothing being sacred? Has anyone really listened to the lyrics, beyond the chorus, that is? Lennon imagines a world of peace and unity, created by eliminating theism, nationalism, militarism, and capitalism. Maybe the song’s millions of fans are in agreement with that radical proposal, but I suspect most of them wouldn’t be willing to go that far and discard all the isms that make their lives comfortable in exchange for a vague utopian dream. It’s fun and fascinating to imagine, probably because it’ll never happen. We can work toward the world of brotherhood and non-violence that Lennon imagined, but we’re probably not going to get there his way. Or Cee-Lo’s way.

In my field, it’s that time of year when best-movie lists are announced, and while sequels like Transformers 3 and Twilight 4.1 have dominated the box office this year, they’re not showing up on critics’ lists. Instead, critics are touting little-seen movies like The Artist or Beginners (both of which happen to feature scene-stealing Jack Russell terriers, as seen in the video above). That is, there’s a vast disparity between what’s popular and what’s actually good. This will cause a lot of handwringing, as usual, at the Academy, since they would love the popular and the good to be in sync so that more people watch the Oscar show. It will also cause grumbling among contrarians who would dismiss critics as out-of-touch elitists. But the idea that the most popular movie must also be the best is nonsense. If that were true, the People’s Choice Awards would be taken more seriously than the Oscars. In fact, why have awards at all? Why not just look at the box office chart and give the best movie prize to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II?

The notion that validity should be determined simply by popularity has infected our politics as well. There was a good example of this last week in the kerfuffle over Politifact rating the Democrats’ assertion that Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan would end Medicare as “the Lie of the Year.” It was a curious choice, since the finalists included other, more brazen lies, such as Sen. Jon Kyl’s assertion that abortion accounts for more than 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activity, a claim Kyl’s own office said “was not intended to be a factual statement”) or presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s evidence-free assertion that the human papillomavirus vaccine can cause mental retardation. In contrast, the Medicare line comes down to, at best, a difference of interpretation. It’s a lie only if you buy the Republican argument that changing Medicare from a single-payer, guaranteed, cost-saving, government-provided health insurance program for seniors and future seniors into a single-payer, guaranteed, cost-saving, government-provided health insurance voucher program for seniors and future seniors doesn’t actually end Medicare.

Accompanying Politifact’s ruling was a readers’ poll, which Ryan tried to game by urging his supporters to vote for the Medicare claim. Politifact says it’s not influenced in its decision by the readers’ poll (indeed, the Medicare assertion finished only third there), but then, why have a poll at all? What difference does it make how many people say something is true or false? Reality ought to exist independent of what people perceive it to be. But in today’s politics, reality is simply the delusion that has the most votes.

That’s the sad thing about this fiasco. Not only can we no longer agree on policy (if, indeed, we ever could), but we can’t even agree on basic terms, on what is true and what is false. You get truth from your media sources, which tell you that the other side’s sources are hopelessly biased and dishonest, and I get my truth from my media sources, which say just the opposite. There is no independent source trusted by both sides to referee reality. Politifact and other fact-checking news operations were meant to fill that vacuum, but it was becoming clear, even before Politifact’s Medicare controversy, that no one was buying the notion of fact-checkers as unbiased. Recent criticisms of fact-checking have come from both the right (here, here, and here) and the left (here, here, and here).

A fact-checker might respond (as, indeed, Politifact’s Bill Adair did) that, if they’re being criticized by both sides, they must be doing something right. Of course, that would be true only if both sides’ criticism were equally valid. Instead, Adair and his cohorts are buying into the narrative that both sides are equally dishonest (a narrative that creates a cynicism about politics that ultimately supports the conservative myth that government can never solve problems, only create them or make them worse), as well as the narrative that, if you criticize both sides, both sides will learn to trust you. (Nah, they’ll still call you a liar when it’s their ox that’s gored.) A truly independent fact-checking apparatus wouldn’t worry about ideological balance in its results (only in its approach), and it wouldn’t care what readers thought, no matter how many of them agree or disagree.

One is reminded of the old riddle, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln*, asking how many legs a dog would have if you call a tail a leg. Answer: Still just four, since calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so. You’d think we could all agree on that, but sometimes the tail wags the dog, and sometimes the dog with the best tale has no legs to stand on.

*There’s no proof Lincoln ever said this, but it makes for a good story, which is all that matters.

Oh, right.

MTV, which marks its 30th birthday today, has changed a lot since I wrote this Boston Phoenix article marking the channel’s 10th birthday.But one thing remains the same: it’s still a channel that’s all about the search for identity. Well, maybe “search” isn’t the right word; “shopping trip” might be more apt.

The biggest change isn’t necessarily the fact that the “M” doesn’t stand for “Music” (or anything else) anymore. Rather, it’s that MTV, which was so influential in terms of visual and film style in the ’80s, changed the face of TV in the last two decades by introducing reality TV as we know it with The Real World in 1992. Reality has since taken over the tube, almost all of it modeled on The Real World’s mix of combustible groups of people in a confined area and confessional individual direct addresses to the viewer. (Even scripted TV has copied this, most notably in such shows as The Office and Modern Family.)

But the quest for identity remains central. Only now, instead of music being the primary vehicle for expression of identity, it’s only one of many (including fashion, sexual behavior, and other lifestyle choices), all of which are displayed as consumer choices. (That self-definition was to be expressed through consumption was always implicit during the first decade of MTV; now it’s blatant.)

What’s interesting is that (to old farts like me, at any rate) the possible identities on display at MTV all look like cautionary tales of people you wouldn’t want to risk becoming: teen moms, teen werewolves, the juiceheads of Jersey Shore. I suspect this depiction of identity-shopping-gone-horribly-wrong is why there’s such fascination with Jersey Shore among people my age and others who are far outside of MTV’s target demographic.

To me, Jersey Shore is a hilarious comedy of manners, the only one we really have now on TV (aside from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm). Snooki and the other seven Oompa Loompas in her tribe have a fine, detailed eye for the nuances of what constitutes proper social behavior in their world and what violates that code (even if the Shore cast are usually the ones violating it). Their observations are hilariously witty (if not intentionally so), and their rules of social interaction are as strict as Edith Wharton’s (if entirely different in substance). I’m looking forward to the fourth season (which starts this week, on August 4), which takes the gang to Italy to clash with their distant cousins. (It should play like Henry James to the first three seasons’ Edith Wharton.)

Are Jersey Shore and MTV forces for good or evil? Probably both. The message that you and your peers can make your own social rules but must abide by them is probably less dangerous than the message that the things in your life that you use to determine who you are are all reducible to marketable commodities. At least MTV has long been smart enough to make hits out of critiques of itself, like Beavis and Butt-head (which the network is reviving) and Daria.

That’s the thing about MTV; it’s always been smarter than anyone, including the network’s own programmers, give it credit for, and in ways that disrupt its dominant narrative. It’s easier, maybe, to see that in retrospect. Remember when pundits scoffed at MTV for reducing political interviews to the question of “Boxers or briefs?” Little did we know then, with the rise of cable news and the obsession with Al Gore’s earth tones and Hillary Clinton’s hairdos among supposedly august media outlets, just how trivial political journalism could become. (From today’s vantage, Tabitha Soren looks like Edward R. Murrow.) Around the same time as that Bill Clinton forum (years before everyone else was fixated on what was going on under his pants), MTV launched a show aptly titled Short Attention Span Theater. It was the first big break on TV for a young comic named Jon Stewart. After having launched the career of the Daily Show host, I think we can forgive MTV for unleashing The Situation.

Elizabeth Taylor at 15 in 1947. Photo by Bob Landry for LIFE

Elizabeth Taylor‘s death last week made me sad, but not for the reasons I expected. I wasn’t sad for her; by all accounts, she lived a long and fulfilling life, brought joy to millions through her movies, and did enormous good through her philanthropy and activism. Rather the sadness came from the sense, as it did when her friend Michael Jackson died, that a more blissful era had passed.

The day Taylor died, I began working on a project for LIFE, captioning photos for an upcoming book commemorating the photojournalism magazine’s 75th anniversary. Poring through LIFE‘s archives, I was reminded again what a repository of our shared cultural memory it has been. So many familiar images — the sailor and nurse kissing in Times Square on V-J Day, Jackie Robinson stealing home, the Beatles frolicking in a swimming pool during their first visit to America, a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road, a student at Kent State screaming over the body of a classmate killed by National Guardsmen, the Zapruder film — all of them encoded in our DNA and burned into our retinas as if they had happened to us, even if we’re too young to have been there.

There were Hollywood pictures, too, of Marilyn Monroe in thoughtful repose, James Dean walking down a rainy street, and many pictures of Taylor, including the one at the top of this post, taken in 1947, when she was just 15 but already impossibly beautiful, already a star, yet with a lifetime of tumult and triumph and endless scrutiny still ahead, about to crash over her like an ocean wave. Who could have imagined it? And yet, she looks prepared and unafraid.

And then, in the same book, opened to the middle, was a wordless, two-page spread, a photo from Ground Zero of the towers exploding above, debris and bodies shooting out against a cloudless blue sky. Cracking the book open to that page was like finding a crack in history, a dividing line between a soft, smooth past and a jagged, doubt-ridden future. And I remembered what it felt like to be in New York that day, to see the smoke and smell the burning flesh and to slowly wrap your mind around the dazed realization that our city and our country had changed irrevocably, and those memories made me terribly sad all over again.

There’s something comforting about these retrospective projects. Yes, the ’60s (or the ’30s and ’40s, or the ’80s and ’90s, take your pick) were a terrible time, too, so full of violence and chaos and uncertainty, but we got through them, didn’t we? Now we can look at old photos from those eras as mementos of a time when we were young and foolish; we’ve made so much progress since then and are so much wiser now. But while 9/11 recedes into the past (can it have been almost 10 years already?), there’s no such reassurance. If anything, that image was a reminder of the opposite, that all our sense of our own progress and wisdom was an illusion, that the world is just as dangerous as ever, and that we are no smarter about it, except for the realization that has been forced upon us that we are no longer immune from whatever’s happening beyond our shores, or from the blowback from our own reckless, selfish actions.

What I seem to be helping to curate, then, is an elegy for the American Century (a term that, like the photos, also originated in the pages of LIFE). The images we remember all mark a time when America was the world’s most powerful nation, when not just our weapons or our ideology but also our movies and pop culture were inescapable. It was also a time of relative consensus at home; as bitter as the political or social clashes may have been, we all shared some common assumptions and a common popular culture — not really something you can say anymore, at least not often.

Taylor was a part of all of that, helping to reinforce Hollywood as the source of the nation’s dream life and spreading its gospel around the world. Whether on-screen or off — whether in her torrid movie romances, her stormy marriages, or her fierce advocacy for people scorned because of how they got sick — she got everyone in the world involved in a discussion of an elemental question: what does it mean to love?

There’s no one left, it seems, in movies or in politics, who can get us all talking to each other and asking questions like that. Even in death, Taylor still looms large, but it’s not, as Norma Desmond said, that the pictures got small. The pictures are still as big as ever; it’s the world that got small, it’s we ourselves who got small, and the little worlds each of us live in that shrank and grew farther apart. So it’s not for Taylor that I mourn, but for each of us, and for our ability to reach across those worlds and connect with one another.

Photo by Laurie Sparham/ The Weinstein Company

As I’ve written before, movies are not telegrams, neatly-packaged envelopes containing pithy messages. They’re more like Rorschach tests. So are the Oscars, and interpreting them as sending any kind of straightforward political message is a fool’s errand.

Los Angeles Times movie columnist Patrick Goldstein tried anyway, labeling the victory this year of The King’s Speech (pictured) over The Social Network as “the triumph of Hollywood conservative values.” He’s not the only pundit this Oscar season to suggest there’s something reactionary about the Academy’s favoritism for Tom Hooper’s comforting, traditional Anglophilic, pro-monarchist period piece over David Fincher’s prickly, timely, formally and structurally unconventional drama about the young, wired, and litigious. But Goldstein takes it a step further, using the King’s Speech sweep to assert that, while Hollywood may be full of liberals, they’re not ideological robots bent on cramming liberal propaganda into movies.

It’s overly simplistic to say that The King’s Speech is a politically conservative movie. After all, it’s about a colonial commoner who insists on having the king treat him as an equal. Then again, that commoner demands egalitarianism only from the man, not the institution, which his actions serve to support. While the movie’s storytelling and technique are old-fashioned, its message is mixed. Same with the movie it beat, The Social Network, which had a contemporary topic (Facebook) and an unorthodox narrative structure but which also told a fairly familiar story of friendship, greed, and betrayal.

Even the Academy’s documentary branch, arguably the most overtly political segment of the Oscars, offered a mixed message this year. Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop was the most formally daring and brazenly entertaining of this year’s nominees, but the prize went to Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, a more traditionally-made talking-heads doc with a much more politically urgent subject, the failure to hold anyone accountable for the 2008 financial crash.

What seems to throw Goldstein and other commentators is the distinction between movies that are aesthetically conservative and those that are politically conservative. As I wrote here a couple years ago, form really does not equal content. So we shouldn’t be surprised when an industry supposedly full of dogmatic liberals produces movies that aren’t easily pigeonholed as liberal or conservative, or that the movies those supposedly rigid ideologues choose to honor are a complex mix of left and right, classical and innovative. If anything, we should be thrilled that the Academy chose a slate of movies (including Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, and True Grit) that resonated with mass audiences precisely because they were unpredictable.

Mark Twain (Library of Congress No. LC-USZ62-5513)

Your elites don’t trust you. They don’t trust you to be able to read certain historical or literary documents, listen to TV and radio pundits, or even look at certain billboards and posters without getting the wrong ideas and letting them poison your mind to the extent that you turn to violence.

We’ve seen that a lot this month, with censorship efforts against a broad spectrum of source material, from Huckleberry Finn to the U.S. Constitution to Sarah Palin’s website, in the wake of the Tucson shootings.

The Huck Finn foolishness came with the news that a publisher is planning a version of Mark Twain’s novel for high school classrooms that would replace the 200-plus uses of the word “nigger” with the word “slave.” Never mind how much this alters the intent of the book (to reinforce the ugliness of the dehumanizing word by contrasting its constant repetition with Huck’s growing awareness of Jim’s humanity) or confuses Twain’s painstaking recreation of regional dialects with endorsement of his characters’ casual racism. What’s important, apparently, is to protect the sensitivities of students. (It’s not clear whether the publishers mean to protect the sensitivities of black students, who hear the word daily in rap songs but might wince at its frequent appearance in an assigned novel, or of white students, who hear the same word in the same rap songs but may not know its full, grotesque history.)

Either way, it’s incredibly patronizing. What the censors (and the schools that buy this censored version of the book) are saying is: “We read this book when we were your age, and while it failed to turn us into frothing haters, we don’t trust you to have the same intellectual and moral grounding to read this book without taking offense at historical truth or turning to hatred and violence yourselves.”

That same impulse was on display with the recent reading of the Constitution on the floor of Congress, a reading that was supposedly meant to educate both the public and its representatives in the House as to the timeless wisdom of the Founders. Except that the reading left out the parts discussing slavery, the blacks-are-3/5-of-a-person compromise, and anything else that had been amended. (Guess that timeless wisdom wasn’t so timeless.) Clearly, the stunt was more political than educational, unless the point was to teach us that certain parts of our history still make us too squeamish to discuss.

The Tucson shootings led to more discussion of censorship. The notion seemed to be that all political rhetoric should be as free from violent metaphors as possible, lest a crazy person hear it and be inspired to commit real violence. It’s the same patronizing impulse, the desire to lower all discourse to the level where even the most susceptible or easily stirred will find it bland and unthreatening. Aside from whether or not that’s even possible, it blurs the distinction between real death threats/incitements to violence (which do not merit First Amendment protection and should be easy to prosecute) and more abstractly vehement rhetoric, like Sarah Palin’s notorious gun-sight crosshairs poster that targeted Gabrielle Giffords’ district but not necessarily her personally.

For that sort of rhetoric, we have to rely on shame to do the policing. It worked for a while with Palin; if she weren’t ashamed of that graphic, she wouldn’t have pulled it from her website. Similarly, a few days after the shootings, Clear Channel (which owns billboards and radio stations that syndicate Rush Limbaugh’s show) voluntarily took down a billboard in Tucson for the Limbaugh show that was riddled with fake bullet holes and touted Limbaugh as a “straight shooter.”

Unfortunately, shame, discretion, and good taste only go so far. Within days, Palin was claiming her crosshairs were merely “surveyor’s symbols” (they are not) and accusing her detractors of “blood libel,” a phrase apparently calculated to offend liberals (mission accomplished) and to appropriate the historical language of Jewish victimhood for herself (even as the actual Jewish victim here, Rep. Giffords, lay struggling for her life in the hospital. You stay classy, Sarah). The first person to call for pundits (including himself) to tone down their violent rhetoric, Keith Olbermann, is so far the only person involved in this mess who is now out of a job.

Maybe the answer is to go in the other direction: more speech, and more sunshine on that speech. Let Palin and Limbaugh say what they please — and then make them defend it. Let Clear Channel and Fox serve as platforms for hateful rhetoric — and then ask their sponsors if they really want to bankroll such talk. Let teachers and Congressmen own up to America’s horrific racial past — and let them show us how far we’ve come since then, and how far we have yet to go. But don’t demonstrate how little regard you have for us by trying to shield us from uncomfortable truths.

There’s Fox Nation, where Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are distinguished sages, where Juan Williams is rewarded for the thoughtless bigotry for which NPR punished him, where Obama is an alien bent on destroying capitalism, where Andrew Breitbart is the wronged party after he’s condemned for making Shirley Sherrod notorious and costing her her job, where a proposed YMCMA a few blocks from Ground Zero is a shrine to a terrorist victory, where the midterm elections are a sign of genuine populist rejection of the Democrats’ big-government agenda, and where white Christian male privilege is a sign of embattled martyrdom and not still at the centers of power in most places.

And then there’s the place where the rest of us live, a place that doesn’t even have a name because we’re too disorganized, disputatious, and dispirited to give it one (per Yeats: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity); call it Colbert Nation — a place where jesters Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are taken seriously because they’re the only media/political watchdogs still actually doing their jobs, where Obama is a  Wall Street sellout who’s been too deferential to implacable obstructionists, where the midterm elections are a sign that a well-funded right-wing astroturf campaign beats an ineffectual Democratic party any time, and where the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the only sign that we’re not on the verge of a wholesale repeal of every positive social advance of the last century.

During my brief visit to Fox Nation, I found only a couple of signs of hope that an America riven into two seemingly irreconcilable camps can find something to agree upon. One was during a recent morning broadcast on Fox News, when I was challenging myself to find something positive to say about the channel. Via satellite, the Fox newscasters had briefly reunited three servicemen in Afghanistan with their wives back home, and their bittersweet, tearful exchange of holiday greetings and longings to be safely reunited in person was poignant and touching enough for me to ignore the politics of the war or of Fox’s effort to corner the market on patriotism. There was nothing here but loved ones separated by distance and danger given a brief moment of solace by the grace of television. Who could find fault with that?

The other came during my conversation with the couple who found my vote for Obama so exotic. They’d been to the movies the night before and had seen Little Fockers, and they had agreed with the snobby, elite, probably socialist movie-critic consensus that the movie was an unfunny waste of their ticket money. Now, 2010 was, despite some great television, as awful a year for pop culture as it was for politics, with the movies especially painful. It was often dispiriting for me to write about movies this year, with so little to recommend to readers. But hearing about my Republican friends’ similar disappointment over one particular movie reminded me of my naive hope, when I started this blog two years ago, that pop culture might be the one thing we could all talk about that would transcend the ideological chasm between us. We may not agree on Obama or the Tea Party, but we can all agree that Little Fockers stinks. And maybe we can all agree that we ought to demand something better — from our movies, from our culture, from our media, and from our leaders.

In my TV Squad post, I noted the many conspiracy theorists (including some closely affiliated with the show) who believe that Tea Partiers are stuffing ballots to vote for Palin simply because they’re political supporters of her mother. I note the evidence for fraud marshaled by Jezebel, only to reject it as inconclusive. Nowhere in the post do I discuss Bristol’s character, attitude, looks, or unwed-teen-mom status, only her dancing skills. Nonetheless, just for bringing up the possibility of vote fraud, I am apparently a liberal hack who has besmirched Bristol’s sterling reputation with my unfounded smears.

In the thousands of comments that follow my post, there’s a lot of gratuitous insult-trading going on, a lot of mean-spirited comments about Bristol and Sarah Palin, and inevitably, about Barack Obama and Harry Reid and other Democratic politicians who have nothing to do with Dancing With the Stars except that no derogatory remark about the Palins is allowed to go unanswered by the Mama Grizzly bloc. As for whether or not there’s a conspiracy here, no one can say — and I don’t think it even matters — but the support for Bristol does tell me a lot about the way Tea Partiers think politically.

For one thing, no one seems to defend Bristol on merit, but rather, on character, on her origins, on her learning curve, on her effort. I’m old enough to remember when it was conservatives who favored a meritocratic ideal and decried affirmative action as a means of rewarding the less qualified at the expense of merit, but Bristol fans have gone to the other side of the fence, insisting that she should get credit for having started out at a disadvantage, not having entered the contest with any of the talent, grace, athleticism, or dance training that the contestants who were entertainers and sports figures had. In this scenario, Bristol is the underdog, not because she hasn’t mustered the dance skills that the other contestants have, but because she’s a waifish outsider, a small-town girl far from home who happened to land in Hollywood and find herself competing against the jaded cool kids, the prom royalty, with no assets of her own to see her through the competition except her smile, her work ethic, and her middle-American values.

Of course, this echoes the story her mother tells about herself. Both Sarah and Bristol (or at least their fan bases) have made themselves into underdogs. In the family mythology, Sarah is not the beauty queen and local TV personality who became a political star and a well-compensated pundit on the lecture circuit and in appearances on Fox News and now with her own reality show; she’s just a regular, hard-working mom. And Bristol is not the daughter of a wealthy and famous politician, thrust into the spotlight by her own mother, who has gone on to make a name for herself with do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did speeches to kids. (After all, if you do as she did, you might have to, um, wear glamorous gowns on a popular TV dance show while your well-to-do family takes care of your infant. And who wants that?), Rather, she’s a victim, picked on by all those mean liberals who hate her mom and who think the Dancing vote should be about who’s the best dancer instead of who appeals the most to middle America. (Not that uppity Brandy, that’s for sure. She may be a better dancer, but she has the unfair advantage of years of training, and she’s conceited, too.)

I don’t care whether viewers think Dancing should be a contest based on merit or on personal narrative (no matter how false and self-serving), but it does seem plausible to me that the same people who think the latter also think that way about elections that have real consequences. They’re the ones who voted for Ronald Reagan because he made them feel good, who voted for George W. Bush because they thought he’d be more fun to hang out and have a (near) beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry, and who voted for Sarah Palin and that old dude because they liked the notion of a tough-talkin’ Washington outsider who was also a soccer mom better than an egghead elitist with a Mooslim name and a murky heritage. And who also voted for the Tea Party candidates earlier this month, millionaire businessmen and women who positioned themselves as put-upon outsiders and made a virtue of their lack of qualifications.

I don’t know if the Bristol bloc can command great numbers (fraudulently or not) in a real election, but it would be wise for the Brandys and Jennifer Greys of the political world to fight narrative with a better narrative, one that emphasizes the value of experience and ideas over an entitled elitism that masquerades as aw-shucks folksiness.