Camille Paglia on Classism, Language, and Sarah Palin

Camille Paglia puts her finger on something that has vaguely troubled me.  For years I’ve enjoyed reading Language Log’s posts on Bushisms — which as often as not included the reminder that we all garble our syntax from time to time, and even daringly suggests that Obama makes his own share of gaffes. Remember the gratuitous Nancy Reagan joke? (Of course, that’s not nearly as bad as Reagan’s “We begin bombing in five minutes.” But I digress.)

Paglia targets Dick Cavett’s Nov 14 NYT blog on Sara Palin,“The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,” 
calling it

…insufferably
supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her “frayed syntax,
bungled grammar and run-on sentences.” He called her “the serial
syntax-killer from Wasilla High,” “one who seems to have no first
language.” I will pass over Cavett’s sniggering dismissal of “soccer
moms” as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

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?

Paglia then recounts an anecdote about a talented and popular Yale professor who used class time to make a sneering, classist, sexist statement about a marriage between a well-heeled socialite and an italian-American mechanic.

Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett’s linguistic
and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the
contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in “The Wild
Wordsmith of Wasilla.” I am very sorry that he, and so many other
members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the
quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks —
which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences
of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the
world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois
syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest
problem with understanding Sarah Palin’s meaning at any time. Since
when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy,
veddy proper English? We don’t live in a stultified class system. In
the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point
about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals
claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing
mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and
wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom! — Camille Paglia, Salon

If I were still teaching Seminar in Thinking and Writing (which has units on topics such as education, race, class, and gender), I’d definitly assign Paglia, since she works so very hard [edited to insert the following word] not to fall into the kind of intellectual rut that leads students to try to turn a bumper sticker slogan into a five-paragraph essay.

8 thoughts on “Camille Paglia on Classism, Language, and Sarah Palin

  1. Somewhere in my memory I have an image of Desi Arnaz reading “Jabberwocky” on SNL. Why, when I can’t find my car keys half the time, is there still room in my brain for *that* memory?

  2. I’ve known a hot librarian. In fact, I’m about to marry a hot librarian. And Sarah Palin… you’re no hot librarian.
    Jackson’s delivery of GE&H was hilarious because his sermonic cadences did’t match the children’s lit genre, but since the book consists of a series of semi-solemn declarations, it sort of did at the same time. It’s his self-awareness of this that makes it even funnier.

  3. I remember noticing Palin had to work a bit to get into that particular groove.
    You can see the seams when she goes off-book, but her line about selling the plane on e-bay was well-delivered, which suggests she can be coached. Maybe that’s because her early training was in TV journalism, where the teleprompter is your best friend?
    I listened to Obama on the radio yesterday, answering reporter’s questions about the Illinois gubernatorial crisis, and I heard plenty of doubling-back and bailing out of overly-complex sentence syntax, but the key difference was that, throughout, he sounded like he was giving a lecture. Because I’m part of academia, I liked that quality of his speech, but I think the folksiness of Bush and Palin resonates with people who don’t have positive cultural associations with academia (or, for that matter, rap music). And the folks at Language Log often discuss just how much of this is scripted and how much is genuine, after Jeffrey Nunberg posited that it’s a “faux-bubba” pronunciation, which Bush deliberately adopted at Yale in order to self-identify with Texas yokels instead of silver-spoon debutantes. But any suggestion that Bush somehow knows what he’s doing generally raises big objections from whatever group is upset by his choices — it seems somehow more comforting to think that the man doesn’t know any better, rather than that he’s operating from a value system and a consistent world view that resonated with enough voters to result in two heart-poundingly close elections.
    Incidentally, Bush doesn’t seem to refer to the “nuke-you-lar family.” President Clinton said “nuke-you-lar” sometimes, but, like Carter (who said something like “new-kee-uh”) he probably got a pass because of his Southern accent. (Clinton also gave grammarians quite a lot of other stuff to do, like debate the meaning of the word “is,” or the exact scope of term “sexual relations”.)
    I had a friend in college who used to love making fun of Jesse Jackson’s speeches — “From the outhouse, to the state house, to the court house, to the White House, don’t surrender.” Around that time, Jackson appeared on Saturday Night Live reading “Green Eggs and Ham” like he was delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon. My very conservative friend pointed at Jackson’s virtuoso (and hilarious) delivery and crowed that there was proof positive that Jackson was all style and no content.
    I’m such a textual thinker that quite frankly I sometimes feel the best way to run a government would be to put all its laws on a Wiki, letting any organization that wants to fork off a branch of the laws, and then every couple years all the people vote for which set of laws they want to follow. (Of course, everyone would have to follow the current set of laws, so I can’t commit a crime and then change the law to make what I did legal.) That would make return good writing to the central place it deserves (as we see in the Declaration of Independence). So all this quibbling about presentation style reminds me of “grammar flaming” on Usenet — I’d like to think of it as a distraction. But it’s not — the ability to persuade is a core skill in getting people to trust you.
    I think his attitude fits with the “Obama = celebrity” meme that was gaining some traction for McCain up until Palin became a “hot librarian” stereotype.
    Nothing that Palin or Jackson says is likely to change the minds of someone who’s already formed an opinion, and their communication style is designed to excite the base, not placate the other side or offer rational musings for the center.

  4. I agree with Mike; it’s possible to communicate substantively using any kind of regional dialect, be it “bourgeois syntax” or backwoods small-town slang; Sarah Palin did neither, in my opinion. I actually take issue with Paglia’s comparison of her speech patterns to those of street rapping–very often, rapping is about being concise, achieving the maximum amount of impact with a few words carefully chosen to fit a meter. Every time I’ve heard Sarah Palin speak, she seems to do the exact opposite–using long, drawn-out phrases to explain something, doubling back and re-explaining something she just talked about using even longer and more drawn-out phrases, killing time with uncertain pauses or unnecessary words. It’s kind of wearying to listen to her labored off-beat rhythms, very unlike listening to the tightly constructed rhythms of a rap song.
    Just look at the tenative way she bobbed her head along to Amy Poehler’s rap song on SNL–http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/update-palin-rap/773781/
    If that’s not proof she’s got an awkward sense of rhythm, I don’t know what is.

  5. Demosthenes said the three most important aspects of rhetoric are delivery, delivery, and delivery. That said, and speaking as a Southerner who is quite willing to subtract consideration of accents from my judgment and is largely fine with the pro-gun, small-town lifestyle that she seemed to want to champion, Palin’s debate performance and her many media appearances were devoid of the minimum level of content that I would expect from an informed politician interesting in demonstrating his or her command of the important issues of the day. Coupled with the observation that she rarely, if ever, acknowledged that Obama or Biden were reasonable human beings and that it might be reasonable to disagree with her (a problem McCain also had), her speech patterns were not the problem for me. It was her manner, attitude, and lack of preparation.

  6. Hmmm, I thought Dick Cavett Nailed it RE: The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla!
    Everytime I read her statements full of ¨um´s¨, and ¨ya know¨´s. Always a problem with form AND content

  7. “…since she works so very hard to fall into the kind of intellectual rut that leads students to try to turn a bumper sticker slogan into a five-paragraph essay.”
    Do you really mean this or do you drop a “not” or “avoid” somewhere?

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