15 August, 2010

Palinisms and a Very Good Point

Lockwood takes note of the new book of Palinisms soon to be published, and makes a damned good point:
However, I think that simply listing all these strange quotes (and they are strange) for the LOLs misses the point. First, it gets old pretty quick. Second, it overlooks, even obscures, the strange phenomenon of Palin: here is a person who apparently cannot tack together an intelligible sentence in the English language without a prompt, and even then it's iffy. Yet people are paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, for her writing and speeches. What does that say about the media, and what does it say about us? That is the book I'd like to read.
Yeah, me too.  To tell the truth, I have utterly no interest in reading a book of Palin quotes, even to poke fun at her.  At least with Bush and his Bushisms, you could sorta see where he'd intended to go, and where he'd taken the wrong turn at Albuquerque, and that made his verbal blunders all the funnier.  With Palin, it's just painful.  It's like trying to make fun of a retarded person who's on drugs and is suffering from recent head trauma.  It's just sad.  The only thing funny is that she believes she's qualified to be POTUS, and even that hilarity is tempered by horror, because there are people dumb enough to vote for her.

I don't know what's worse: that, or the fact they find her babble comprehensible.  Maybe it's like scripture or Nostradamus: nonsensical enough that people can read into it whatever they want to hear.  And perhaps that explains why she gets paid so much money for her inane shit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In this age of electronic interconnectedness, where a texted letter suffices for a word and nearly 50% of social messages are useless babble, it makes perfect sense.

Reading Palin is like deciphering code. The key word phrases are there, in the incoherent muddle trotted out as political pablum.

The rest of the patter is shit-filler (dietary bulking agent), necessary to fill the time alloted for speeches and word-space for books.

Lockwood said...

Thanks for the links and frequent comments. I really do recommend The Bush Dyslexicon, and I'm sure you could find in a used bookstore for a few bucks- I think much of what Miller has to say about Shrub is applicable to Palin as well: it's a message about a message. It's circular, tautological, and empty. And in our culture, that is exactly what TV is designed for.