The passing strange resignation of Sarah Palin

I had forgotten how she speaks:



Oh, how she speaks. But I suppose it's all finally over. I can't believe how close she got to all that power.

Back in September, when it looked as though all of America--and not just the crazy, populist rump of the Republican party--might be in thrall to the Alaskan governor, I had written this:

Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak.

...

Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.