DON'T CRY FOR SARAH PALIN

First, of course, they are all men. A disproportionate number of them came from Latin societies, and all are famous or infamous charismatic leaders for whose people they become the populist, emotional embodiment of the state. With this charismatic authority, the leader and the people become one, and he seems to express uncannily what his followers are feeling.

While there are many interesting things about charismatic leaders, one of the most striking is that there are virtually never any women in their ranks. Even while holding high positions in many societies in the last 50 years, particularly in Asia, Europe and the U.S., women almost never are charismatics. Their uses of power have been different.

And that is precisely what has made Sarah Palin -- and her intense, apparently ubiquitous book tour, which began this week -- so interesting.

She has much of the same persona and appeal as her political sister-under-the-skin, the magnetic Evita Peron, who mesmerized poor Argentineans as President Juan Peron's wife and minister of social affairs between 1946 and '51. Evita could stand up at the podium with the worst of the men and send her audiences into spasms of rapture as she cried out to her followers, the "descamisados," or "shirtless ones," over the injustices of life.

Although Sarah' words come nowhere near the sheer emotional decibel of Evita's, whose devoted followers even petitioned the Vatican to canonize her, on an American scale, Sarah surely rates with all the historic charismatics. She evokes the same intense personal excitement, she calls forth the same identification with her followers and their suffering through her humiliations and hurts, and she evokes the same sense that someone up there understands their anger and feels their despair.

When she revels in her hurts -- during the campaign with John McCain, his staff was unrelievedly nasty to her, no one checked the press release on her daughter Bristol's unwed pregnancy with her, and staffers lied about the tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes that the campaign bought her -- she is not unlike the male charismatics.

Just imagine what Sarah would sound like over a truly humiliating Treaty of Versailles or a broken promise at Yalta! It terrifies one to think of the degree to which that would bring out the moose-skinner in her.

It is no accident that charismatic leaders feed on grievances. They awaken those grievances in their followers, playing over and over again on the injustices of life, creating victims where there are often only the natural inequalities of life, and, of course, benefitting royally when the hat is finally passed around. Think Hitler and World War I, or Castro and the American Platt Amendment.

Thus, it is equally no accident that Sarah's book, "Going Rogue," is filled with little-girl complaints."Why are they so mean to me, mama?" "Why didn't John let me speak when we lost the campaign?" "Why do they make fun of me when I'm so much more beautiful than they are and when I'm so much smarter than they are?"

It would be tempting to lead from this into a speculative analysis on why female charismatics should be similar to, but also much different than, male charismatics. But the truth is, we don't know enough about women in this role yet, or how working-class and religious women will respond to this approach in the long run. Historically, only a few American women have exhibited the charismatic DNA, in particular some of the female evangelists of the Great Awakening.

But from what we have seen and what we can sense, and if Sarah is any example beyond simply being sui generis -- beyond Alaska, moose, salmon, oilfields, muscle-bound husbands, attractive kids, and a genuine talent for local governing -- female charismatics will be more personalized than their male counterparts. Their causes will reach out more to the too-often lost women of America's working class, usually ignored by America's Big Boy elite players, even while they are, in their own way, taking part belatedly in the feminist movement.

These woman, and many working-class men, CARE about Sarah deeply. They are probably not even 10 percent of the electorate, but that's more than Evita had in the beginning. Like Evita with her forgotten Argentineans, Sarah expresses what her Americans are feeling and resenting. And again like the beauteous Evita, she brings glamour into their lives, telling them that they too can have excitement and beauty in their world.

Some years ago, when I was studying the phenomenon of a great charismatic (and truly awful man), Fidel Castro, and others of his ilk, I came across a revealing insight by psychoanalyst Carl Jung about Hitler. Hitler was, Jung said, "the mirror of every German's unconscious ... the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they can be heard by the German's unconscious ear." The core of the charismatic phenomenon could not be expressed better.

This is not, of course, a comparison of moose-skinner Sarah Palin to mass killer Adolf Hitler, but the relationship between leader and follower is not unalike in both cases.

Meanwhile, as this all works its way out, don't cry for her.

COPYRIGHT 2009 UNIVERSAL UCLICK