As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. . . Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English — beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Which seems to suggest to me that she is wriggling about all over the place in an effort to make an argument that runs counter to the liberal consensus. It ignores the point that Palins’ rural blag is a very effective tool for the Alaskan politician and suggests that a poor command of the language can lead (by accident or design? Lord knows) to lovely innovations. Also the citing of Shakespeare in the context of Palin’s use of the language is slightly mind melting.

It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city with a population of more than 500,000 voted for Kerry, and that the election was won for Bush in the outer suburbs, exurbia and the countryside – peasants with pitchforks territory. For an organisation so wedded to its big-city corporate clients, the Republican Party has been hugely successful in mopping up the votes of low-income, lightly educated rural and exurban residents.

Even that bullshit artist Camille Paglia is swooning over the rural inflections:

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse — which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies).

An empty vessel indeed. So God only knows, it can go either way.

Gavin,
are likely to win it
But Obama is 5.7% ahead in the polls.

Oh wait, white people say they’re going to vote for a black candidate, but get the jitters in the voting booth, it seems. It’s called ‘passing’, but in reverse.

Then I heard a quote. A quote you would expect to come from Rafsin Jarnz in Iran or one of his peers. “The worst thing Nuclear War could do is speed people on their way to paradise”.

Imagine the shock and horror of realising such a quote came not from Iran but from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jeffery Fisher).

And now the McCain/Palin duo makes me realise that I do not have to look east for Theocracies coming into power with Nuclear capabilities.

People who get their advise from the likes of the thankfully dead Jerry Falwell or the unfortunately alive Al Sharpton are currently running for the highest office of their land and are likely to win it.

What I also want to know is how much is ‘Northern Lights’ at fault for having had Palin inflicted on us..
Will never be surprised by how far back certain parts of the US will swallow such obscurantism…