Listen To My Jazzy Blogspeak
Camille Paglia cannot let go of her vision of Palin as the experimental jazz saxophonist of language:
I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?
In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?
Yes, it’s a lack of historical consciousness that causes people to think that spoken English should be coherent and comprehensible. No one should be concerned about declining standards or setting an atrocious example for those learning how to use their own language. Poor grammar and disjointed sentences aren’t lamentable signs of cultural deterioration–they’re just “colloquial locutions”! In other words, Cavett’s criticisms of Palin’s use of language were entirely accurate, but are supposedly too fusty and outmoded for the hip blogspeaking kids…and Camille Paglia. Does she think that it is a tribute to Palin to say that her “exuberant” way of speaking is “closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class”? To hear Paglia tell it, Amy Poehler did not need to perform a Palin rap song on SNL–we need only listen to Palin’s interview excerpts to hear the sounds of the street…or are they the sounds of Wasilla’s Super Wal-Mart parking lot?
Reading Paglia’s descriptions of Palin’s language, I am reminded of newspaper articles that describe crime-ridden neighborhoods as “vibrant.” This is the hyper-condescension of the anti-bien pensant person, who in this case makes a grand show of her sympathy for a target of conventional ridicule to show how even more enlightened and thoughtful she is than the merely “provincial” bourgeoisie. Paglia is worldly-wise, and she appreciates the wonderful “exuberance” of Palin, in much the same way that outsiders might praise the “warmth” of “charming” and “colorful” ethnic neighborhoods as a way of subtly reasserting their superiority while pretending to praise the people who live there. Let us hope that Palin does not make a comeback, if only to spare us more of Paglia’s Palinophilia.
P.S. “Wolf control” (i.e., cruelly running–and gunning–down wolves from the air) is now a working-class more mos? Who knew?
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Does she think that it is a tribute to Palin to say that her “exuberant†way of speaking is “closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class�
More to the point, Palin is neither as comprehensible nor as pleasant to listen to as a good street rapper. If Paglia’s just saying that Palin speaks like the average working class person in exurban Alaska I’d doubt that, since in my experience working class people (unlike Palin) are more than capable of putting words together into understandable sentences, and using those sentences to convey meaning. Maybe that’s a low bar, but Palin often doesn’t clear it.
But Paglia seems to go beyond that, and is genuinely convinced that Palin’s language has some kind of artistry to it. So if Paglia thinks that Palin’s way with words qualifies her to be president, what’s the equivalent level of success for a rapper from working class or poor origins? Jay-Z? Eminem? Whatever you think of the profanity and the moral content of the lyrics, those guys are very good at making clear and concise points in compelling and memorable ways.
I guess that’s just a long way of saying that this is just as stupid as Paglia’s previous argument that Palin is the Charlie Parker of contemporary American politics.
Paglia’s Palinophilia strikes me as simply another manifestation of Camille’s desire to be contradictory or counter-intuitive. That someone with a graduate education, a lengthy teaching career and a solid grasp of the English language could celebrate Palin’s mangled diction and general verbal incoherence as evidence of improvisational genius is best explained by an innate need to tweak the elite establishment into which she is so firmly ensconced. Palin’s public speaking does not reflect a great intellect, but rather a person of modest intelligence operating from the Cliff’s Notes version (at most) of whatever is the topic of the moment. To see otherwise is ignorance or self-deception.
Time isn’t my friend here, so forgive me if I miss a detail. I was remembering an old Misanthrope essay from National Review, maybe 7 years ago. In it the misanthrope stated that she had asked why she was requested to do book reviews so often and was told she was one of the few people willing to call a bad book awful without qualification. Paglia’s pitch that outside grammar and rhetorical skill Palin is melodious is a great counter example of this. Whereas tribalism might seem like a good explanation of this in most cases, Paglia is not in Palin’s tribe. As Charlie points out, this leaves us with being contrarian for contrarianism’s sake as a possibility.
Someday people will figure out that people’s problem with Palin was not accidents but substance.
Paglia is trying to be trendier and more cutting-edge than the trendy. Mocking Palin is in fashion, so the way to show how *truly* with it you are is to come up with some reason why Palin is outstanding. It’s not just contrarianism for its own sake, but it is an effort to show how sensitive and thoughtful you are by breaking from the crowd. Even when the crowd is making sense, this thinking says, conformism should be avoided to show that you are not limited and bound by the prejudices of your class/profession/whatever. Palin happens to be the one she praises, however backhandedly, but it could just as easily be anyone or anything else if it set Paglia apart from the crowd.
One should also not rule out feminist solidarity as part of the explanation. Paglia has invested a fair amount of time into claiming that Palin represents a new expansion of feminism, so it will not do for her standard-bearer to be dismissed and ignored.
http://www.godofthemachine.com/?p=580
While we’re on the subject of historical consciousness, the singular of mores is mos, not more. Yes, I’m old school.
Thanks for hopping on this one. I usually enjoy Paglia, but this time she set my teeth to gritting. Beat poetry and Rock lyrics either succeed or fail based on the usual criteria, such as specificity, clarity and the originality of vivid expression. If Rap has any virtue at all it is that it avoids euphemism. None of this applies to Palin’s trite, cliche-ridden clouds of verbiage which usually seemed intended to obfuscate meaning rather than to convey it. The notion that English can go “50 years out of date” is just a bizarre criticism from a person who used to be charged with teaching her students to appreciate the poetry of the English Renaissance. And, besides, the rhetorical tools we tend to value in political speech are those of argument rather than those of poetic effect. Chief among those tools are the application of logical syntax and the marshaling of evidence, neither of which appear in Palin’s repertoire.
In fact, Paglia’s comment is so absurd and rests on so many sloppy, ill-founded assumptions that it requires more time than I can give it here. Of course, I realized immediately that Palin would fit right in with Paglia’s weird Earth-Mother/Valkyrie trip, so I was rather expecting her to be a bit unhinged on the topic.
Camille’s prose in praise of Sarah’s incoherence was coherent, even if her thinking wasn’t.
O.k.Camille,You think Palins hot.We get it!
I think we should quash the meme that the Palins are ‘working class’. According to one report their assets include ‘a half-million-dollar home on a lake with a float-plane at the dock’ and ‘two vacation retreats’.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5931551