Friday, October 03, 2008

bankrupting Sarah



The cheery, well-oiled mooseshit streaming from Sarah Palin, e.g.. . .




He knows to learn from the mistakes and blunders we have seen in the war in Iraq, especially. He will know how to implement the strategies, working with our commanders and listening to what they have to say, taking the politics out of these war issues. He'll know how to win a war.

. . .smacks of the perky fraudulence of certain mortgage maestros who got us into the mess we're in. The next time she says "John McCain and I will fix this you betcha!" someone needs to invite her to offer a few details.

How come we never do? A hypothesis: it's because we have become so habituated to commercial advertising speech -- its intonation, its cheerful confidence, its sound bites innocent of logic, evidence, truth-claims -- that we've forgotten that arguments are supposed to cohere, gather force from reference and relation, connect with historical and scientific knowledge, carry within them their own auto-critique.

We've forgotten that. USians growing up in a TV dominated household have been exposed to Yottabytes of commercial bilge over the past 25 years, but not a single passage from Homer, or Aquinas, or Epictetus, or Spinoza. 

Media are as media do.



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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, sure. But that Sarah Palin knew she was going down as early as round one. She opens up with a folksy down-home main-streety kind of talk and she's showin' her sweet pearly whites, smilin' for the audience, smilin' for the camera, grateful she remembered to vaseline the corners of her mouth because tonight she knows she's gonna win and that big top model smile is gonna score her lotsa points, you betcha! So she's smilin' and charmin' and generally squeezin' as much out of that dental work as she can, when out of the corner of her eye she sees, like a great white shark emergin' from a coral reef, the first glimpse of the Biden investment in ivory. And Joe peels his lips back, and further back and widens his eyes and crinkles his cheeks and the corners of his mouth are turned up like he just walked out of a Colgate ad or sump'n, and he stretches his lips so tight you'd think you could play a banjo tune on 'em, and then he just beams, and the house lights catch the display and people watchin' at home get a little static on their screens 'cuz how d'ya even transmit sump'n so bright and cheerful? Then everyone watchin' gets it, and the applause practically brings down the house. He's the big winner in the smile category and all that's left is the talent competition and Sarah, well Sarah was never good at the deep stuff.

First thing Sarah did this morning was call the dental team, but it's too late for bigger, brighter teeth. She was already one-upped in the smile department, you betcha!

10/03/2008 12:36 PM  
Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

Yes, the orthodontal display on the left was extraordinary, calling out Sarah's practiced moves with something monumental, sort of like if James Brown had decided to take a little walk after watching McCain try to dance, so completely astonishing in its slow revelation, that it must have come to terms with her jolly efforts to have him blow his cool with the finality of of a guillotine.

10/03/2008 1:51 PM  

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