Friday, August 7, 2009

Sarah Palin's popularity sign of our stupid times

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Perhaps it's tacitly understood in corporate circles that there are too many people distracted by Britney, Paris, Octomom and company to care about antiquated concepts like "truth."

Reality is whatever you can get away with, and sanctimonious gibberish is now just the background hum of modern culture.

Exhibit B: Sarah Palin. In her recent resignation speech as governor of Alaska, Bullwinkle Barbie collapsed sense and sensibility into a sinkhole of non-sequiturs.

Here's a taste of her deathless prose, which reads like a daisy-chain of tweets from a teen hopped up on Red Bull:

"And getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America soaring through nature's finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it's the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn't it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future."

The only thing missing from the text was the tag line, "Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device while driving."

Shortly after Palin's resignation, William Shatner appeared on Conan O'Brien's show with a jazz combo, performing the ex-governor's speech as stream-of-consciousness free verse. Funny stuff. But even though she's out of office and her tiny little mind, Palin's continuing high profile doesn't bode well for democracy in the North American security perimetre.

Perhaps George W. Bush wasn't so much the nadir of U.S. leadership as its template, and Barack Obama merely some literate, late-empire tokenism.




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