The Dirty Prism

MSNBC’s coverage of Sarah Palin’s swan song was on the televisions at the gym today, both in audio and closed-captioning. As I did my time on the stationary bikes, I was face-to-face with one of the monitors. I finally realized her non-ghostwritten speech patterns remind me exactly of crappy closed-captioning.

Have you ever been sitting at a bar or an airport, trying to get a news story from the scrolling white words at the top of a television screen? As each word dribbles out, sometimes one at a time but often in chunks, you struggle to anticipate where sentences end and begin. Words backspace and retype themselves over and over, resolving into nonsensical syllables. And at the end, you’re forced to admit that the info wasn’t really worth the effort.

Sarah Palin’s her own one-woman crummy news feed. One does not so much listen to her, as try to piece together from her speech what concepts her handlers were originally trying to deliver to the audience.

So much effort has been made to position and present this woman as the gem of the GOP, receiving a pure stream of patriotism and refracting it to a wide array of true-blue Real Americans™.

In reality she reflects only inward brokenness, and whatever message she was originally encouraged to deliver is always fractured into polarizing chaos. That she still has a small core of fanatical supporters speaks to our nation’s need for better mental healthcare.

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