Sarah Palin: Flarfist(?)


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Originally uploaded by emilymcmc

The VP debate is done and my initial prediction (cue the scene from your childhood playground where you witness an older sibling grabbing a younger sibling’s hands and makes them hit themselves in the face, all the while taunting “Stop smacking yourself!”) doesn’t seem to have come to pass. Palin seems to have held her own and showed up as prepared as can be (cue a very Matrix-like scene where Palin gets strapped to a chair, a socket injected into her skull, and all Vice-Presidential knowledge is uploaded directly to her brain).

As for the “nucular” pronunciation, I’ma side with Tony Brown on this one and just call that a pass.

Bringin’ it back to poetics for a sec, looking back at Palin’s conversation with Charles Gibson and asking “Woman, what were you thinkin’?!” I will offer the possibility that Palin was filtering her response with the aesthetics of flarf and her answer was an exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises and that she tried to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing (inter)nationally syndicated public displays of political k(no)w-how. As an example, here is a retextualized Palin response.

A Matter of Doctrine

I know that John McCain
will do that and
                    I
, as his vice president,
families              we are blessed
with that vote
of the American       people
and are                 elected
          to serve
and are sworn      in
on January 20
, that will be
                    our top priority
is to defend
the (American) people.

Then again, she could just be a bad grammarian who has no idea what sentence structure is, at least according to this hysterical word nerd breakdown from Slate: The sentences of Sarah Palin, diagrammed.

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2 Comments

  1. I’m not sure about her being poetic. To my British ear her voice is piercing and her language cowboyesque. Still, I do find her rather fascinating as a character.

    Good article and interesting site.

    I write poetry too. if interested you can read some of mine here: http://www.penmeapoem.com/category/poetry/

  2. Her voice is very piercing to my American ear, as well. I would call her language cowboyesque but I wouldn’t want to insult a fine tradition of Cowboy poetry.

    I think America will continue to be fascinated by her after the election and she will have quite the career as a platformist. I would call her a speaker but I wouldn’t want to insult a fine tradition of people who can speak in a coherent sentence.

    Thanks for the props and I’ll be checkin out your site as well.

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