MINT-AND-CORN COUNTRY, INDIANA — Below, H.C. Johns excerpts a deliciously bad example of prefabricon rhetoric from Governor Palin’s resignation announcement. I watched part of the address on the day she gave it, but had not read (or heard) the speech in its entirety until this afternoon, when a friend passed the hyperlink to me, commenting, “she. writes. so. badly.” (We were on Gchat, no stranger to imperfect punctuation and capitalization — unless I’m the one typing!) With apologies to those interested in harder-hitting political commentary, I should like to attend to one of my other interests, the written word, by offering a few remarks about this impossibly obtusely written proclamation. Though no grammarian, and hardly an expert in the subject, I have enough of a grasp of the rules of the English language (no thanks to any English course I ever took) to note some of the more outlandish mistakes made by Sarah Barracuda. Even considering his countless verbal gaffes, I quite truthfully doubt that Joe Biden ever could compose something so indefensibly dreckish (but shall be amusedly happy to be proven wrong).

Alaska’s mission – to contribute to America. We’re strategic in the world as the air crossroads of the world, as a gatekeeper of the continent. Bold visionaries knew this - Alaska would be part of America’s great destiny.

I cannot conceive of a more insipid way of describing “Alaska’s mission”; with this sentence, Mrs. Palin says nothing whatsoever. One may give her the benefit of the doubt, expecting that the immediately following lines will elucidate. Nope. Whatever truth may lie in dubbing Alaska “the air crossroads of the world” is lost in Mrs. Palin’s failure to explicate how, in practice, this has ever proven to be relevant. Moreover, the inability of Mrs. Palin, seemingly incapable of properly employing dashes, to express herself literately inundates the figurative wound with copious quantities of verbal salt. (Furthermore, localist that I am, I wonder if, more accurately depicted, Alaska’s mission is “to contribute to” her communities and citizens.)

Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas. It’s energy! God gave us energy.

As Mr. Johns notes, neither “Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources” nor “This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas” is even a sentence. One could argue that “It’s energy!” constitutes a queerly disconnected predicate to the second phrase (but still would remain perplexed by the introductory attempt at coherency), but I cannot comprehend how wildlife constitutes a form of energy, unless moose corpses make for good fuel. (Maybe so! I strongly support the use of alternative forms of energy, so more power to them if they can make this work.) Perhaps I simply am too much of a pinko-commie enviro-nut-job crypto-liberal, but I generally deem drilling in ecologically sensitive areas to be irresponsible. (I reckon even some of my peers will dissent here; disagreement is healthy, and debate warranted.)

So to serve the state is a humbling responsibility, because I know in my soul that Alaska is of such import, for America’s security, in our very volatile world. And you know me by now, I promised even four years ago to show my independence… no more conventional “politics as usual”.

Let us file this one under “Speaks for Itself” and continue.

Here’s some of the things we’ve done:

We created a petroleum integrity office to oversee safe development. We held the line for Alaskans on Point Thomson – and finally for the first time in decades – they’re drilling for oil and gas.

“Some” describes an unknown amount, generally (if not always, as I believe: I am trying, for just a brief moment, to give her the benefit of the doubt!) more than one. That is, it’s a plural adjective. “Is”, on the other hand, is singular. Remedial English, anyone?

Again with the inability properly to use em-dashes! I frequently use — probably overuse — this form of punctuation, but I am quite certain that commas would better set off the prepositional phrase than these misplaced dashes. Even within the phrase, an additional comma or two would be of great service.

We have AGIA, the gasline project – a massive bi-partisan victory (the vote was 58 to 1!) – also succeeding as intended - protecting Alaskans as our clean natural gas will flow to energize us, and America, through a competitive, pro-private sector project. This is the largest private sector energy project, ever. This is energy independence.

“Succeeding as intended” strikes me as being redundant, but I may be judging a little too pedantically here. The dash forthwith thereafter puzzles me, though. Again, the comma seems to be the best option. I should suggest a semi-colon or period, but asking Mrs. Palin to find another predicate verb may be a little too unkind to a woman so sensitive to personal attacks that, post-Letterman (Ha, that’s humorously seemingly redundant!), she had to drag her poor daughter through the media circuit in a quest to prove her maternal affections. Technically speaking, “energize” may be appropriate, but, knowing that we generally employ that verb to describe the act of increasing one’s vitality, rather than the act of, say, extending or improving the grid or our ability to utilize oil, I shall permit myself to apply red ink to this, too. Also, is it really “succeeding as intended” yet if natural gas is not flowing, but will flow? (Nitpicking is a lot of fun for someone with nothing better to do with his time, or, at least, with no motivation to be less of a waste.)

And ACES – another bipartisan effort – is working as intended and industry is publicly acknowledging its success. Our new oil and gas “clear and equitable formula” is so Alaskans will no longer be taken advantage of. ACES incentivizes new exploration and development and jobs that were previously not going to happen with a monopolized North Slope oil basin.

Most of this is, I suppose, is almost grammatically acceptable; brutally semi-literate, too. Rather than picking it apart, I’m going to say just one thing, something that needs to be said not only to Mrs. Palin, but also to plenty of much better writers: “Please, for the love of God, stop using ‘incentivize’!” Surely, even a mongrel language like English deserves better than to be polluted with third-rate byproducts of our unhealthy obsession with concision. Is writing “provides incentives” that difficult?

We cleaned up previously accepted unethical actions; we ushered in bi-partisan Ethics Reform.

How one cleans up an action is beyond my understand. Surely, she meant to claim that they halted these unethical actions, demanding that others act ethically and doing so herself. Then again, maybe, after they tended to the mess left by the Exxon Valdez, Alaska’s leaders opted to bathe the unethical actions sufficiently to make them appear to be ethical.

We also slowed the rate of government growth, we worked with the Legislature to save billions of dollars for the future, and I made no lobbyist friends with my hundreds of millions of dollars in budget vetoes… but living beyond our means today is irresponsible for tomorrow.

This is not intolerable, notwithstanding Governor Palin’s peculiar obsession with misusing ellipses.

We took government out of the dairy business and put it back into private-sector hands – where it should be.

I know what Governor Palin means to say here, to wit, that her administration put the dairy business back into private-sector hands, and I appreciate the incredibly libertarian image that she accidentally paints, but, contrary to what she has written, the Palin Administration did not put government “back into private-sector hands”.

We provided unprecedented support for education initiatives, and with the right leadership, finally filled long-vacant public safety positions. We built a sub-Cabinet on Climate Change and took heat from Outside special interests for our biologically-sound wildlife management for abundance.

Her capitalizing the “o” in “outside” is inexplicable, as incomprehensible as the use of capitalization, rather than italicization, to emphasize words in the version of the speech that H.C. read. Also, “biologically sound”, rather than “biologically-sound”, is correct: One is not to connect the adverb to the adjective with a hyphen, at least when the former ends in “-ly”. (I admit that I’m unsure if exceptions exist for non-”-ly” words.)

I seem barely to have reached the halfway point of this rambling, incoherent eulogy for Sarah Palin’s prematurely halted first, and only, term in Juneau, but lack the wherewithal to subject myself and Post Right’s readers to anymore of this Northern nescience. Continue to endure it at your own peril.

Am I so wrong for wishing, and believing, that the political career of someone so indefensibly unable to express herself as well as even a high school graduate ought to be able to has come to a puzzling, screeching halt? Though hardly a loyal or good Republican, I continue to put the slightest bit of hope in the stupid party, if only because no other viable option presently exists; the retreat (or “advance in another direction”) from feigned relevance that Mrs. Palin seems to be making is a very welcome one.

Filed under: ideas, politics