Palin’s Wake
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Is Sarah Palin a master of the language comparable to James Joyce? That seems to be the suggestion of Roger Cohen of the Times. He’s no fan of the former governor of Alaska. Her fetching up in support of Donald Trump he finds the scariest development in the presidential primaries. Yet he has some sport with her use of language, likening it to the great Irish author, whose masterwork, “Finnegans Wake,” was written in jabberwacky.
“Trump’s candidacy, it has exposed not just that tragic ramifications of that betrayal of the transformation of our country, but too, he has exposed the complicity on both sides of the aisle that has enabled it, O.K.?” Mr. Cohen quotes Mrs. Palin as saying. “Well, Trump, what he’s been able to do, which is really ticking people off, which I’m glad about, he’s going rogue left and right, man, that’s why he’s doing so well.”
Mr. Cohen likens this to the part of “Finnegans Wake” where Joyce writes: “Did you aye, did you eye, did you everysee suchaway, suchawhy, eeriewhigg airywhugger?” Then again, too, we can think of other Joyce-isms that might apply. After all, as the Irish bard put it elsewhere in “Finnegans Wake,” “a baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint.”
You betcha, we’d say. The New York Sun took the trouble to put the entire text of “Finnegans” through its electrically operated “Queen’s English” brand Literary Disambiguator only to discover that the name of Palin herself shows up, as in right here: “In preplays to Anonymay’s left hinted palinode obviously inspiterebbed by a sibspecious connexion.”
Adds Joyce, with an almost clairvoyant accuracy: “Note the notes of admiration! See the signs of suspicion! Count the hemi-semidemicolons! Screamer caps and invented gommas, quoites puntlost, forced to farce! The pipette will say anything at all for a change. And you know what aglove means in the Murdrus due-luct! Fewer to feud and rompant culotticism . .”
Decades after Joyce wrote those lines (he died in 1941, a generation before Palin was born), people are still quarreling with the Nobel Prize committee for failing to give the be-speckled Irishman the laurel they reckon he so manifestly deserved. Sarah Palin’s not in that league, of course, but we wonder how America is going to look back on its mockery of Mrs. Palin.
The Times has just issued a piece by Nicolle Wallace, the erstwhile aide to Senator McCain who was supposed to help Mrs. Palin in the 2008 campaign. Instead, Ms. Wallace betrayed Mrs. Palin at the first whiff of buckshot and fetched up as the villain in the movie “Game Change.” She lauds Mr. McCain for defending the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, against the voter who had insisted he was an Arab.
We have no hesitation in agreeing that the exchange was one of Mr. McCain’s finest hours (the qualifier is only that he’s had so many). The Sun, too, marked early in the 2008 campaign that our disagreements with Mr. Obama are not over his background or character or patriotism but over his policy. We don’t doubt that such is the view of Mrs. Palin herself.
What, though, do the Democrats have to say about the President’s own failures — that is, what Mrs. Palin calls the “betrayal of the transformation of our country.” He came to office on a vow of hope and change, withdrew prematurely from Iraq, pulled back in the very Afghanistan he’d claimed was the right war, abandoned the Libya he destabilized, and defaulted in Syria on the responsibility to protect.
The catastrophe that has met these defaults is historic. He’s signed with Iran articles of appeasement that are opposed by majorities of both houses of Congress. The economic downturn that greeted his presidency has been extended to what will go down in history as the Great Recession largely because of policy errors by the President and the Fed chair he appointed. Millions of under- or un-employed Americans are suffering.
Mr. Obama has emerged as one of the few presidents to place a priority on narrowing the scope of the Bill of Rights (we speak of the Second Amendment). Religious Americans are in court to dodge the ObamaCare mandates. The President has turned out to be not a uniter but a divider. How can he escape his own share of responsibility for the fact that many of the voters are angry? For, as Joyce put it in “Finnegans Wake,” “one must recken with the sudden and gigant-esquesque appearance unwithstandable as a general election.”