Palin, with her meat loaf and rifles, reminds us that there are two hopelessly incompatible Americas
By Linda Grant

A Photoshopped picture of Sarah Palin has been doing the rounds for the past few days; it shows her in a stars and stripes bikini toting a rifle - patriotism, hunting and cheesecake all combined in one image. Two minutes of Googling reveals that the rifle has been identified by gun nuts in Republican chatrooms as a Crossman pump pellet gun. Soft porn for rednecks. Expect to see it pinned to the wall in every gas station in Texas and tacked to the dashboard of every long-haul truck. But this cartoon-like depiction of her smothers what we need to understand about why Palin appeals to American voters and why American elections have been so deadlocked for the past decade, as if there were two Americas, doomed to lived on the same landmass under the same government, like hopelessly incompatible spouses.

A new novel, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, published in the US this week, tells a fictionalised and thinly veiled story of Laura Bush, from small-town girl in the 1950s midwest to school librarian to Republican bride to President's wife. What you learn from the novel is that, like it or not, the American heartland is not so much a political ideology but an actual place with people living in it. Small-town Americans have values and a lot of those values are good ones: neighbourliness, family life, a knowledge of the land and what grows in it. The other America they see on TV seems without ethics - crime, violence, drug addiction, pornography and prostitution - and they don't want any part of it.

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