Postcards from home? I think I'd rather stay then, please.

As I'm currently trapped not only in England (by a volcano) but inside (by a rampaging cold), I thought I'd reconnect with the American political discourse I miss so much by reading a transcript of Sarah Palin's speech in Hamilton, Ontario last week.  For a little under two hundred grand, some lucky Canadians were treated to some theater whose absurd circularity does Beckett proud.  More on that in a moment, though, as I first want to make something absolutely clear: Sarah Palin does not scare me.  No one whose speech twists into modernist thickets while ordering coffee counts as a worthy political opponent; but as she is a political force amongst people who think no sandbox is complete without a couple of blowtorches—the parenting equivalent of having her serve as Commander in Chief—I feel it my duty as an American to condense her Hamilton speech down to its Platonic essence: 

This is such a melting pot.  This is so beautiful.  I love this diversity.  There were a whole bunch of guys named "Tony" in the photo line.

It is so good to be here tonight.  We'll kind of shift gears tonight.  Having a conversation with so many of you is something that I look forward to.  And not being so political tonight, I will talk a lot about energy, because I want to talk about some of the things that both our countries can do to ramp up production so that we can ramp up our economy, because the better our economies do, the better we do in terms of having opportunity to help children and those who are less fortunate, the better the rest of us do.  We will talk a little bit about energy.

I'm wanting to kind of shift away from the political.  The shift from the political, so now that I have that shift from the political but still have that desire to talk about the political and the economy and talk about energy and resources and national security and all those things.  I was telling Todd, this is like on the the Vice Presidential campaign trail, where you never really knew what you were getting into when you get into that line before you get interviewed.  

Obviously, sometimes I never knew what I was getting into in an interview.  Obviously!  Whenever we do something big in life, like a Vice Presidential campaign, I like to say a prayer about it.  I need some divine inspiration and I need to remember what it really is all about, so that evening before the debate I remember being back stage and looking around for somebody to pray with, and looking around at the campaign staff and there's nobody to prayer with. Not that I would think that God would speak through me, but wanting to leave you with a little bit of inspiration and encouragement and maybe on a personal level have a conversation with you about some of the things that Todd and I have been through in the last year and a half, the last couple of years, that hopefully you can learn a couple of lessons from, because we've been through quite a few challenges, quite a few battles and you all too, everybody goes through battles, everybody has challenges.  Some are played out in the newspapers, some of ours have been.  Maybe yours have not been, but everybody has to make tough decisions and prioritize things in life and here we are tonight, given an opportunity to come together to reach out to help others, to help children, who are in need.  We don't want to squander this opportunity, we want to be inspired and encourage and remember that though we all do go through some tough challenging times, we talked at the head table tonight that we need to be able to count our blessings, not our problems.  We need to share our blessings, so we'll do a little bit about that tonight.

I pause to ask the pressing question: do any among you have any clue what this woman is talking about?  Does she?  My answer, as you might figure, is a vehement: "No, with thunder."  She is making me uncomfortable with her words and what she says not because of their content, as they're free of that burden, but because of their form; or, more accurately, their formlessness. Nine hundred poor Canadians purchased $200 tickets to listen to the segue-free ramblings of a woman who forgets the subject of her sentence by the time she reaches the verb, then the verb by the time she reaches the object but keeps talking anyway.  Such is, after all, the beauty of talking points: so long as you say them all, the coherence of the speech containing them is inconsequential.  "Sound bites" are called "bites" instead of "meals" for a reason now.

Comments

[The Modesto Kid]

The sentence that starts out "Not that I think..." is epic.

[John Emerson]

You probably haven't read Gertrude Stein. In all seriousness, look her up.

The Canadians who paid $200 for that were not poor, and they were probably a nasty lot.

[Ahistoricality]

Actually, it's about $180K, unless you're referring to her fee specifically. But I think Scott meant 'poor' in the sense of unwitting victims of a crime against civilization.

My favorite section was where she's trying to make connections with Canadians over accent and lower 48 ignorance anecdotes and wartime panic highway construction... "With wildlife and resources and again with that work ethic and that pioneering spirit that just flows through Canada, that’s my state too, that’s Alaska. ... I feel right at home here with you all, I think we share a lot with that accent."

But the whole performance really has to be taken in context to be understood. It's a collage of elements picked up in her rise to Governor, the pregnancies, the VP run, the post-election scandals and resignation, the palm-writing incident -- and that says everything to me, that she's still flogging that hand-note schtick as though it were actually funny, as though she'd scored points somehow instead of embarassed herself and her party (R or T, whatever). That speech is the sum total of her experience, politically and personally, without editing or organization (I defy anyone to outline that monstrosity!) except that she is at the center, that she has never been wrong, and that her place in the world is in service to a greater good. Which is why she's not going away.

[SEK]

I blame the volcano for my math.

[P.T. Smith]

Oh my. SEK, I thought that whole bit was your version of her speech. I was annoyed. I was thinking: Okay, SEK, we get it, she talks in incoherencies, yeah. This joke has been done, please write about something more interesting, I like you, but I'm growing weary.

But then because it is sllloowww at the office today, I clicked through the link to the actual transcript: Hey, Scott's being wicked lazy, he hardly reworked this at all. Wait. Waiiiiit. Aw jesus.

[SEK]

P.T., when you've built up my tolerance and go without for a day or two, you need the strong stuff to get you, er, high or something.

[Davis]

I was briefly in P.T.'s boat. But then I remembered that SEK's versions typically make some kind of sense.

[mb]

Stream of unconsciousness?

[JPRS]

She was just quoting from Ancient Greek, which, as we all know, lacks and then incomplete, sentencing: "And again, as Plato said, I just want to remind you to be nice to one another, and remembering that everyone fighting the battle, some played out publicly, some are not, everyone though going through some tough times once in a while, so be merciful and forgiving and generous and then you will be blessed in return."

[Adam Roberts]

You totally deserve to get your pants back for this.

[Stephen]

What blows me away is the moment when she tells the crowd that she looked out of her hotel window at the Hamilton city-scape and declared it "God's Country"? Have any of you seen Hamilton? It's one of Canada's most industrial cities.

[Ahistoricality]

"God's Country" doesn't mean 'pretty scenery'; it means "God Has Spoken And Your Land Will Be Part Of My Holy Empire Or Be Damned"

[P.T. Smith]

What's really, really odd about her abuse of language is that so much of it sounds not just like someone who has a poor grasp of English, but a poor grasp of English because it is their second language. I'm not even making fun, it's true and very, very odd. SEK, you've worked with students writing in English as their second language, right? In college I lived with kids studying abroad and saw a similar style, and now I edit things occasionally written by someone who doesn't have English as their first language, and I've seen these mistakes.

Am I making this up? It's really amusing as all hell.

[Fritz]

I don't share the myriad of prejudices (class, gender, educational, regional) that inform your understanding of this woman. So, qua persuasion, it might be interesting if we had something to compare this with.

[P.T. Smith]

Fritz, Do you mean whole, complete sentences? My only prejudice against Palin is intelligence, not educational.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"a poor grasp of English because it is their second language"

She's a Russian KGB sleeper agent. Well-known fact.

[Fritz]

She's a Russian KGB sleeper agent. Well-known fact.

It should be noted that Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell never had any trouble with his English.

[tomemos]

Fritz, pray, how does "class prejudice" inform our contempt for Palin? Palin grew up middle class and is currently rich as all hell.

[Ahistoricality]

Sure, Fritz, let's compare an off-the-cuff non-soundbite answer to a complex, nearly unanswerable question with a prepared (or at least, scheduled) speech on anything and everything consisting of ungrammatical catchphrases and content-free homiletics. The only thing Obama did wrong was actually try say something interesting on a question most politicians would wave off with a dismissive cliche. Palin's speech is nothing but dismissive cliches, some of which weren't even cliches before Palin started perpetrating them.

[Falconer]

@Tomemos -- as I recall, several people on the Web looked at Palin's speech mannerisms, accent, reproductive success, and dress sense and concluded that she was the worst of trailer trash.

I think that's what Fritz is basing his opinion of our opinion of Palin on, that if one person on the web holds opinion A and opinion B, then (contrary to all known experience) everyone else on the web who agrees with A must also agree with B.

Perhaps I am over thinking this. Sorry if I just laid down a lecture on you.