67. English Composition vs. Sarah Palin

 

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I think "Vague" was probably the word most often found in the margins of English Composition themes. You had to be on top of freshmen all the time to get them to be specific.

In yesterday's Athens Messenger Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg News revealed that he must have been an English teacher. He was all over Republican candidates for being so vague about President Obama's decision-making. "What, specifically, has he done wrong on policy? What, specifically, would you have done to create jobs?"

He went on to scold them, and a few politicians on the left, for their dim charges on the stimulus, and bailouts, and jobs, and health care, and the debt limit. If it had been in red his final imperative could have come right from the schoolmarm pencil I used: "Be specific and rational, not vague and visceral."

I can't help thinking about that pencil when I listen to Sarah Palin's speeches. She's a great example. Real Americans, real Americans, real Americans. My wife counted at least four "real Americans" in one short clip.

I think she needs a good scolding. I see it coming from my seventh-grade, Middle-West, middle-class English teacher. "Now Sarah, you know that's a lazy way to write. You've got to think about what you say. God gave you a mind. Use it."

And you know who else you could put in that class, right next to Palin?  Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, those radicals of the German student protest movement of the sixties, the ones with so much Gramsci and Marcuse in their mouths —claims for "authenticity" and "anti-"fascistization," cries against "repressive tolerance" and "cultural hegemonism," enunciation of one Marxist abstraction after another, further and further removed from "the specific and rational."

Isn't that a happy picture, Sarah Palin and Ulrike Meinhof, squirming in their seats, forced to take a scolding from Mrs. Davison or the visiting Bloomberg journalist?