I remember the first time I saw Sarah Palin's glowing face. I opened my homepage to Slate.com one morning, and there she was with that vacuous stare. It was the day McCain and company announced she would be the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Thank you, John McCain, for that. Thank you for leaving the American public in the wake of your bountiful cynicism. Long after you have departed for the next world or whatever you actually believe in, she will still be around to assault us with her neverending string of gerunds and unwelcomed winks. Even at that first moment, I was overcome with feelings of horror and foreboding, and nothing has changed.
The most incredible aspect of the Sarah Palin parade float is what has been painfully obvious since the beginning to anyone with a tinge of honesty and intelligence: her lack of knowledge and inability to speak coherently. This was apparent from her first national television interview. When she first opened her mouth, I couldn't help but picture a high schooler who had crammed the night before for a poster presentation. Clearly, somebody had filled her head with talking points to regurgitate on cue. But this tactic was an immense failure, something that people like Bill Kristol either choose to ignore or genuinely disbelieve. Both possibilities are equally shocking.
Palin is not a woman of substance. And because she cannot tell us what exactly she is for, she must define herself by what she is against, even if these things don't exist. I doubt this is a viable long-term strategy. I watched her Fox News debut on Bill O'Reilly the other night, and she followed her usual narrative: we must fight against the liberal media; the American people have had enough of these big-government policies; the simple solution that will solve all our problems is common-sense conservatism. I've always despised the phrase "common sense," and for good reason: it's usually the dim ones who declare their belief in it.
It must be comforting to believe we live in a world without shades of gray, however untruthful this worldview might be. Facts don't matter much to politicians on the left or the right or any other direction, so long as they appear to believe the lies they throw at us. But even if these lies make us feel good, it doesn't make them true.
When I go back and watch Palin discuss foreign policy with Charles Gibson, I cringe slightly and wonder if the film Idiocracy is even more prescient that I had thought. Palin is a symbol of a greater problem: our inability to think clearly and seriously about things that really matter. When I listen to Palin spew a garden variety of consonants and vowels, I tend to think it's a symptom of her inability to think coherently. I doubt there is much structure to her arguments, and so there is not much structure to her words. If she understood and knew more about the issues she talked about, her sentences wouldn't betray a self-satisfied and bottomless ignorance.
Anecdotally, and in no way scientifically, it often seems that those who trumpet the magnificence and righteousness of our species are the very ones who spoil this vision. The brilliant ones who have made our world a little more interesting are the ones who are comfortable with doubt. They are also willing to question the role of our species in the universe. This is how progress happens.
Most people encounter problems and then provide answers. Maybe they are good answers; maybe they are not. We can debate this. Palin, on the other hand, encounters answers and then provides problems. But by courting the same media she rails against and molesting us with her own brand of ignorance, she has given us a problem for which there is no simple answer, and for this we must all suffer. Thank you, John McCain, for that.
The most incredible aspect of the Sarah Palin parade float is what has been painfully obvious since the beginning to anyone with a tinge of honesty and intelligence: her lack of knowledge and inability to speak coherently. This was apparent from her first national television interview. When she first opened her mouth, I couldn't help but picture a high schooler who had crammed the night before for a poster presentation. Clearly, somebody had filled her head with talking points to regurgitate on cue. But this tactic was an immense failure, something that people like Bill Kristol either choose to ignore or genuinely disbelieve. Both possibilities are equally shocking.
Palin is not a woman of substance. And because she cannot tell us what exactly she is for, she must define herself by what she is against, even if these things don't exist. I doubt this is a viable long-term strategy. I watched her Fox News debut on Bill O'Reilly the other night, and she followed her usual narrative: we must fight against the liberal media; the American people have had enough of these big-government policies; the simple solution that will solve all our problems is common-sense conservatism. I've always despised the phrase "common sense," and for good reason: it's usually the dim ones who declare their belief in it.
It must be comforting to believe we live in a world without shades of gray, however untruthful this worldview might be. Facts don't matter much to politicians on the left or the right or any other direction, so long as they appear to believe the lies they throw at us. But even if these lies make us feel good, it doesn't make them true.
When I go back and watch Palin discuss foreign policy with Charles Gibson, I cringe slightly and wonder if the film Idiocracy is even more prescient that I had thought. Palin is a symbol of a greater problem: our inability to think clearly and seriously about things that really matter. When I listen to Palin spew a garden variety of consonants and vowels, I tend to think it's a symptom of her inability to think coherently. I doubt there is much structure to her arguments, and so there is not much structure to her words. If she understood and knew more about the issues she talked about, her sentences wouldn't betray a self-satisfied and bottomless ignorance.
Anecdotally, and in no way scientifically, it often seems that those who trumpet the magnificence and righteousness of our species are the very ones who spoil this vision. The brilliant ones who have made our world a little more interesting are the ones who are comfortable with doubt. They are also willing to question the role of our species in the universe. This is how progress happens.
Most people encounter problems and then provide answers. Maybe they are good answers; maybe they are not. We can debate this. Palin, on the other hand, encounters answers and then provides problems. But by courting the same media she rails against and molesting us with her own brand of ignorance, she has given us a problem for which there is no simple answer, and for this we must all suffer. Thank you, John McCain, for that.
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