Two weeks ago, Slate challenged its viewers to write like Sarah Palin.
As it turns out, Going Rogue is like a 208-page homage to Bulwer-Lytton... only this time, with ALL the sentences applying, not just the opening sentence:
What is the single worst sentence in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue?
According to Slate's Going Rogue index, it comes on Page 102: "As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on."
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times didn't have to read past the first paragraph for her nomination: "I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."
Just as with Tina Fey, no embellishments or dramatizations are necessary for the comedy gold. The words, verbatim, are sufficient.
Does it even matter that it was ghost-written? The style so fits Palin, I wish she had written it herself. It makes me want to know if this ghost writer wrote any romance novels. I'd like to see the full extent of her talent for purple prose.
Well... I now the results have come in, and the contestants did not disappoint! Three winners, nine runners-up, all giving us object lessons in overwrought imagery, strained metaphors, over-the-top descriptions, and variety of ways one can sneak the patriotic motif in appropriate (and not-so-appropriate) places.
The winner, Ann Sensenbrenner of Madison, WI:
"One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd's eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn't seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic."
Oooooh! Todd is such a hunk!
"Todd's phosphorescent smile, his manly physique like Alaska's majestic mountains resplendent in white birch and gentian in the springtime, reassured me as I swiped the McCain campaign credit card through the reader at Macy's—I winked at my very own Joe Sixpack, anticipating that on my watch, his new silk boxer shorts would soon be more endangered than the leatherback sea turtle." —Lisa Patterson
Notice the way that the picture the words paint comes to a resounding CRASH, at the moment of the McCain credit card.
This is a classic Bulwer-Lytton technique: a well-written start, a pretty, almost pastoral scene painted with words... before the tone and the flow abruptly change, CRASH, and suddenly you find yourself in a new and inappropriate direction, scratching your head, wondering what the hell just happened:
As always, that morning he awoke to the melodious sound of a stream of water cascading into a still pool, punctuated by several ominous silences-- and he could judge, by the length of the silences and the volume of the cascade, just how much of his three-year-old son's urine he would have to wade through to get to the sink. --David Pellicane, Highland Park, NJ
Get the rest of the entries here, with a pretty Palin picture to match each one!