Why I Won't Watch Sarah Palin's Alaska

Image from source, The New Yorker

Since her debut on the national stage only a little over two years ago (if you can believe it), Sarah Palin has grated on my nerves.  Why that is, is difficult to articulate, a problem Palin herself often has. It isn't because she's a woman, a charge usually lobbed first. It isn't that she's conservative. It isn't even her specific policy ideas, particularly, though I disagree with her on virtually everything.

It's a combination of things. For one, Palin proved herself to have a rather shallow knowledge of virtually any topic she was asked about during the campaign. So, however insightful or clever her followers may believe she has become, her political knowledge is almost entirely new. Since she lost her bid to be Vice President, she briefly went back to Alaska as Governor, and then promptly quit. So, her actual political experience ended very shortly after McCain/Palin campaign closed up shop.  All of her new learnin' coincided with becoming a political celebrity rather than an actual politician.  Even so, her every utterance is treated as newsworthy. Her every action is viewed though the prism of "will she or won't she" run for President.  Her presumed relevance bugs me for much the same reason that Newt Gingrich's does. 

But if you want to get right down to it, even all of that doesn't top the list of things that irritate me about Palin. It's her voice. Her grating, screeching, you betcha, colloquial gooberish, long word salad spewing voice.  That and the fact that her tangled syntax is cut with a wink, and a heavy dose of meanness.  And even after all that, I still don't think I've encapsulated it very well. But somebody has. I found a piece in The New Yorker that so perfectly encapsulates my "Palin Derangement Syndrome" that it saddens me greatly that I'm not that good a writer.  I've excerpted my favorite part below, but the entire article merits reading. 

[Excerpt]

Mush! Sarah Palin takes us for a ride.


. . .When it comes to Palin specifically, there is the fundamental problem that some of us don’t want to see or hear any more of her than we have to. And there are those whose objections have a physiological basis as well as an ideological one: the pitch and timbre of her voice, the rhythms of her speech, her syntax, and the way she coats acid and incoherence with cheery musical inflections join together in a sickening synergy that distresses the listener, triggering a fight-or-flight reaction. When Palin talks, my whole being wails, like Nancy Kerrigan after Tonya Harding’s ex-husband kneecapped her: “Why? Why? Why?". . .

Read more at:  The New Yorker