Paglia on Palin (not literally)

Camilla Paglia has an article out, as always shes very much worth reading.  I particularly liked her comments on Sarah.

 

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin’s rehabilitation has been well launched. Step by step over the past five weeks since the election, headlines about Palin in the mainstream media and some Web news sites have become more neutral and even laudatory, signifying that a shift toward reality is already at hand(emphasis mine). My confidence about Palin’s political future continues, as does my disgust at the provincial snobbery and amoral trashing of her reputation by the media and liberal elite, along with some conservative insiders.

I love how Paglia put that.  Indeed it is a return to reality.  How an effective, reformist governor with an 80% approval rating, a history of moderation and bipartisanship was turned into a caricature of religious fanaticism, polarization and stagnation should serve as a case study for media malpractice.  I believed at the time and continue to believe that what drove the MSM’s hatred of Sarah was not only that she threatened their chosen candidate but also a cultural snobbery that allows our elites to dismiss anyone who didn’t go to the “right school” or hasn’t been a part of their clique (I still recall one MSNBCers response the day she was nominated “She hasn’t even been on meet the press!”) as a buffoon unworthy of consideration or respect.

Which is why I think Paglia put it very well here:

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!