Cracking The Code
Posted on November 12th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Peter Suderman says that he doesn’t understand this Palin statement:
Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.
I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:
Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.
See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely. By comparison, the second sentence is a piece of cake. Pretty much every word in the second sentence serves a function. Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.
Filed under: politics
What is needed is some kind of computer translation/editing program that could turn Palinspeak into plain English. Alternatively, and more entertainingly, someone could write a program that turns ordinary speach into Palinspeak. Someone did that with Snoop Dog’s vernacular, and it was wildly successful. Just as Newt taught Republicans how to speak in disciplined, coded phrases, Palin might teach a whole new generation of GOP politicians how to imitate her style of speech, and thus bring about a radical transformation of the political landscape. I can hardly wait.
Well, some people might sneer at Palin for including “confusing chatter” in her statements. But what these psuedo-intellectuals don’t understand is that Palin’s just operating on a more sophisticated level than they are. Including extraneous words and phrases in important communications has a proud history in the American military as a means of reducing the effectiveness of enemy code-breaking operations. Is the US military “unsophisticated” as well? Clearly Palin, having had previous statements taken out of context by the liberal media and her political enemies, has decided that she must veil the true meaning of her statements so that only her supporters will know what she’s really saying. If Mr. Larison is unable to understand Gov. Palin then it follows that he is not in possession of the code book one must use to break the Palin Cipher, is therefore clearly not a real conservative, and thus should be ignored when it comes to matters of Palinology.
Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin.
I thought Jonah Goldberg was the bottom of the barrel of an exhausted political movement. But then Sarah came along.
(Daniel, I don’t agree about the “same God” but I know what you are talking about, down there, and you’re right that it is not okay to throw a lot of theological concepts together and hope for the best. But there is something to be said for people that claim to worship the same God (godhead? father figure?) trying to work out some kind of accommodation together around that concept. As a semi-believer I hope that we as a culture can see our way toward meeting Muslims part way around concepts such as justice and peace and the rules of war. But I have to acknowledge you’re a more serious Christian than I am, and that may just be impossible.)
Something like this?
http://www.fisheaters.com/jpiispeech.html
But what these psuedo-intellectuals don’t understand is that Palin’s just operating on a more sophisticated level than they are.
Camille Paglia says Palin ‘uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.’
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/print.html
Clearly, it’s my lack of appreciation for experimental jazz that has soured me on Palin.
Whenever she speaks to the public she sounds like she is preaching.
Now lets rework that first sentence to normal speak.
Yes I deleted the Obama slam… It is too bad she seems to be writing her own material. But in normal speak she could make sense, in her preacher speak, that will be impossible. She doesn’t seem to understand the election is over. Continuing her attacks on Obama seem to damage her and yet she continues her attacks. She really needs to study. She needs to familiarize herself with policies. Bone up on actual issues, propose some actual solutions. Those solutions could be energy related. Verbally presents herself poorly. All we really know about Sarah Palin is conservative men seem turned on by her. Well that is weird.
Camille Paglia says Palin ‘uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.’
So Sarah Palin has a Charlie Parker-esque gift for improvisation? That wasn’t the impression I got from listening to her in interviews. I’d say that Palin’s use of language more closely resembles the tin-eared screeching of a junior high school saxophonist. Paglia also says that the Democrats deployed a “shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage.” What, is she annoyed that they stole her shtick?
Comparing Palin to an improvisational musician is an insult to musicians who must work for years to learn to listen and hone their skills on their instruments. To suggest Parker’s in her voice is beyond insult.
Palin’s got the cadence of church and the King James Bible and shakespear — where the order of the sentence isn’t as importance as the words — in her speech; she’d be more comfortable reading Shakespeare then anything on the NYT bestseller list.
Even more important, she has little understanding of what the modern meanings of most of the words she uses are. She may still believe that American exceptionalism means we make great stuff, grow great people. etc., and has nothing to do with invading other countries alone.
I think you succeeded in almost, but not quite excavating to a verb. I still expect the guys in the chairs to be doing something; your sentence is an introductory close to something that is never revealed–probably because it is unformed. Words are just floating out there to baffle people.
She’s so full of hot air. She has no real ideas. She’s just posturing like it’s yet another pageant. That’s all we’ve had, pageant-speak.
Thanks, Daniel, for the edits. I’ve been meaning to do that too. It is possible, as you’ve shown, to track her meaning. But one needs to locate the speech fragments–the ones that track logically. And this is best done by working with transcripts. Listening to her in real time–for example, watch Lauer or any of her flummoxed interviewers listening to her–is quite another matter.
A few things strike me about Sarah Palin’s speech patterns and personal style. First, cognitively, Palin appears to be exquisitely wired for speech simply as a psychomotor matter.
Palin also strikes me as an aural learner, not a visual learner. This learning preference arms her with the ability to adopt any number of phrases that she has heard here and there. Phrases that are essentially without content (like “it’s our privileged obligation”) and which she tosses into her word salads like cherry tomatoes. Her physical presence and her fluency provide the vinaigrette that, to some, like Paglia, makes the salad palatable.
Recall too that her social milieu, fringe Assembly of God meetings and charismatic prayer groups, have influenced her speech with the impressionistic, fuzzy patterns of group supplications that range willy-nilly from the spirit of witchcraft at the library, to churchgoers’ druggy teenagers, to Angela’s lost schnauzer, to Ted and Donna’s struggle with infertility.
In supplication (prayer) mode, Palin has become accustomed to careening from topic to topic–none of them logically related. Again, in her AoG milieu, where well-educated listeners are not present to ask “WTF?”, Palin creates the appearance of coherent speech with resort to linking words and phrases like: also, over there, again, there again, just, and so on. And political speeches, for Palin, are perhaps another form of prayer: it’s a supplication addressed not to God but to potential believers in her.
(As an aside, Daniel, since theology is your forte. Take a look at AoE doctrine and tell us what you think. I’d appreciate it.)
Furthermore, and this is utter speculation, Palin may have found that the combination of her physical beauty, personal charm, and curious force of will (what people describe variously as magnetism, the “it” factor,” her “sparkling” personality) utterly disarm most of her listeners.
Here’s the thing: her charmed experience with disarmed listeners has made her linguistically lazy–and she was never linguistically fit to begin with. So, on a national stage, dealing perhaps for the first time with incredulous listeners unaccustomed to the cadences of Wasilla AoG prayer meetings, Palin blames aghast listeners. It’s their partisanship, not her incoherence.
So I agree with Larison, who has owned this subject from the beginning, along with Sully, and Kevin, quoted below:
outthere has a great point.
html goof: blockquote should have ended after “in these chairs . . . . ”
The rest is mine.
What Palin is guilty of here is something I recognize very well: It’s the type of thing I used to do in high school when I was bluffing my way through an essay test where I didn’t know the material. Say as many words as possible, throw in substantive-sounding terms whenever you can, but don’t actually say anything. It’s like the old saying: If you can’t dazzle them with intellect, baffle them with BS.
Tgirsch, this apparently works with roughly 1/3 of the American electorate, judging from the election-time polling questions about Palin’s preparedness. I’m giving credit to several million McCain voters for going for him IN SPITE of Palin, presumably in hopes that McCain wouldn’t die in office. The rest were either dazzled, as you say, or else are accomplished in the art of doublethink.
Those who describe Palin’s speech in Church terms are closing in on whe she speaks this way. She comes from a religious world that is opposed to reason, and has invented an alternative method for talking to God. Traditional Churches adhere to the notion that God is logos, that our own rational minds are reflections of God, are gifts by which we may come to understand God, whereas Palin’s religious world sees the mind as an obstacle to God. In their view, pure emotion is the only true path to God, and reason just gets in the way. So when Palin speaks, she isn’t paying attention to the words, she’s paying attention to her own emotional state, and the emotional state of her audience. This is why she is such a mesmerizing public speaker, even when she doesn’t make sense, because not making sense is part of the message, part of what allows her to convey a pure emotional feeling to her audience. This is how preachers of a certain type operate. They often stop making sense, and just shout out emotional declarations and aspirations. They assume God isn’t listening to the words, but to the emotional meaning behind the words, so he can sort it out himself directly, without any messy grammar and vocabulary. So Palin doesn’t care if she obeys the rules of grammar, she only cares that she obeys the emotional connection she feels to her God, her audience, her own sense of herself. This is what these people call “authenticity”. And yes, she’s not alone in approaching life this way. A large portion of the evangelical community out there instantly recognizes what she’d doing, and enthusiastically supports her for it. Those who don’t “get it” are thus instantly recognized as not being part of the “word of God”, and she knows that “they don’t see the world the way you and I do”.
Traditional Churches adhere to the notion that God is logos, that our own rational minds are reflections of God, are gifts by which we may come to understand God, whereas Palin’s religious world sees the mind as an obstacle to God.
It’s my understanding that Calvin taught that human reason was corrupted by the Fall, along with every other aspect of humanity. Thus he rejected the Thomist doctrine that proper use of human reason would support faith in revealed truth. For Calvin and his followers, human reason might contradict revelation, and in such case reason must be rejected.
Most American Protestant denominations are Calvinist, the principal exceptions being Methodists and Episcopalians, both of which are offshoots of the Anglican Church.
David, yes, I think you’re right to some degree. I was raised by a Catholic/scientific-agnostic father, Episcopalian mother, in a largely Jewish community, so reason was never considered an enemy to faith. But I guess in some large parts of the Protestant world reason and faith don’t seem to co-exist happily. I’m not as familiar with the Calvinist world, but my impression was that they are not the majority of Protestant demonations. I may be wrong however. Do you know what the stats are on that? I haven’t really thought much about that line of distinction in the American Christian world. Is Baptist a calvanist form of protestantism?
Did a little research on Calvinist doctrine, and I guess the principle of “depravity” applies here - the notion that the Fall left mankind in such a depraved condition, that none of his faculties are capable to grasping or appreciating God sufficiently to turn towards him, and thus we are utterly dependent on Grace. This would kind of explain Palin’s total lack of interest in the world of rational thought and learning. What difference does it make to know all these “facts”, if in the end they do nothing, and only God’s Grace can help us?
So, one requires not a psycholinguist to analyze Palin-speak, but a historian of American religions.
As I understand it, only the Presbyterians and the Reformed churches are rigorously Calvinist (Protestant Reformed) in the sense that John Calvin and John Knox would recognize this distinguished denomination today. Huguenots were French Reformed. Together with the Lutheran, Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, and Episcopal churches, Presbyterian and Reformed denominations comprise Mainline Protestantism.
Then you have the16th-century religious socialists of the Radical Reformation: Pietists and pacifists like the Quakers, Mennonites, and Amish.
Palin is a Fundamentalist, however. I think Jeff Sharlet (The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power) has the best recent treatment of Fundamentalism, which IIRC he says owes a lot to American phenomenon Jonathan Edwards. I’ve gotten up only to page 163.
But it’s easy to observe that combustible conditions exist on the American frontier (or in the hinterlands of Alaska) when you mix personality, disdain for schooling, and opportunities for leadership in fringe Christian churches. And sometimes Bill Kristol, on a Weekly Standard Alaska cruise, is lovestruck with one of these rare creatures and thinks she’s the future of what was once a Grand Old Party.