Parsing Sarah Palin

While I’ll be the first to admit that she wasn’t the train wreck I expected, I sat through the Vice-Presidential debate wondering if it is simply genetically impossible for Sarah Palin to answer a question with a straight answer.

I also became extremely irate when she kept repeating NU-CU-LAR, a la George Bush (whom, you will note, she quite happily threw under a bus). “It’s NU-CLEE-AR, dammit!” I shouted at TV.

“Chill out, Mom” my 12 year-old said.

“I can’t, honey,” I told her. “I can’t take another four years of having our nation’s leaders massacre the English language.”

Call me old fashioned, but if you cannot even pronounce the word correctly I don’t think you should be qualified to be in charge of our nuclear arsenal, or be charged with pursuing policies which might - in the worst case scenario - lead to its deployment.

But back to Ms. Palin and her non-answers. Slate has a great piece in which Kitty Burns Florey diagrams some of Palin’s sentences from recent interviews.

There are plenty of people out there—not only English teachers but also amateur language buffs like me—who believe that diagramming a sentence provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator. The more the diagram is forced to wander around the page, loop back on itself, and generally stretch its capabilities, the more it reveals that the mind that created the sentence is either a richly educated one—with a Proustian grasp of language that pushes the limits of expression—or such an impoverished one that it can produce only hot air, baloney, and twaddle.

Hmmm. Let’s take a guess on what the diagrams of Sarah Palin’s sentences show us?

from Slate

This is from her interview with ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson:

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.

Florey says:

I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there’s anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I’d be delighted to hear from you. To me, it’s not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (”with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.

Last night, I felt like I was watching a Stepford Wife who’d been programmed with folksy winks and “John McCain and I” phrases to parrot in response to each and every question. When Gwen Ifill asked what programs she and McCain would have to give up from their election agenda because of the economic crisis and she said none and went off about lowering taxes again I was thinking that despite her claims to be Mrs. I Live On Main Street, she must be living on a completely different planet than the rest of us. Either that or she has absolutely no understanding of macroeconomics. Either way, it’s a scary prospect to imagine her a heartbeat away from the Presidency with a 72 year old in office.

Or, as Florey sums up:

In a few short weeks, Sarah Palin has produced enough poppycock to keep parsers and diagrammers busy for a long time. In the end, though, out of her mass of verbiage in the Sean Hannity interview, Palin did manage to emit a perfectly lucid diagram-ready statement that sums up, albeit modestly, not the state of the economy that she was (more or less) talking about but the quality of her thinking:

from Slate

Fortunately, the polls show that American people seem to be seeing through her empty words.