Another Palin Speech!
As Sarah Palin’s arguably OxyContin-fueled performance at the Iowa Freedom Summit (Oh dear God!) shows, conservatism is complex, if not intellectually, then at least syntactically, much like the National Anthem sung by Aaron Lewis. There’s no point in throwing another dropped jawbone into the twitterverse about her eldritch speech. Sure, she digressed more than Prufrock on a blind date, but it wasn’t half as weird as her winsome
2014 CPAC speech, where she wove Duck Dynasty, Vladimir Putin and Dr. Seuss into a narrative that even today perplexes Enlightenment mankind.
What’s truly amazing is not Palin’s incoherent smirky dyslexicon, but that her speech in fact floated all the mainstream conservative memes you are going to hear from now until the money-drenched paroxysm of voting in 2016. Among them, the “playing the playing the race card card.”
I told you conservatism is syntactically complex.
Here it is in Palin’s own inimitable words:
“Really, it's kind of Orwellian, observing how that works, that rule of Saul Alinsky's, no doubt, that the left employs. Disgusting charges, from the left. Reverse them – for it is they who point a finger not realizing that they have triple that amount of fingers pointing right back at them, revealing that they are the ones who really discriminate and divide on color and class and sex. We call them out. We don’t let them get away with it.”
Triple that amount of fingers? Whatever. The point is this is the rightwing noise machine’s race reverso meme, a little storyline about how an effete liberal who points out racial discrimination or unfair treatment is actually a racist for playing the despicable “race card.” In short, it’s racist to expose racism. You would think the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in this country was a game of Crazy Eights.
We must stand in awe of this. It probably came out of Frank Luntz’ basement lab (the GOP memographer who created the “death tax” campaign and helped draft the notorious 1996 GOPAC Memo, which is the basis of all conservative Parseltongue today). George Lakoff, the UC Berkeley professor, calls this framing the issue (no progressive should run for office without memorizing Lakoff's books and the Memo) but colloquially it’s known as going down the rabbit hole with Morpheus, where much of American political discourse is, alas, directed.
The best response: a reverso reverso meme. Taking Palin’s counsel to heart, call them out for playing the play the race card card. Maybe their heads will explode like Scanners.