I just watched Sarah Palin’s speech from April 1st in Wisconsin. It was uncomfortable to watch, because it appears she knew from the outset that these people wouldn’t get her rhetoric, and they didn’t. Bless her heart, she went ahead and wrote her own speech, though, and stumbled her way through to the end.
When I watch Sarah Palin’s speeches on youtube, I enjoy reading the comments:
“I understand each word she says but when she strings them together they become nonsense.”
“Is this bad slam poetry?”
“This isn't the plain language of the citizens unless those citizens are passing a bong.”
“Word vomit.”
Understanding Palin-ese is easier when you know that half of what she says are little insulting digs at other politicians. When I watch her, I keep another window open so I can google phrases.
In the April 1st speech, I googled “teddy bears and soccer balls” and found out that Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck gave a truckload of teddy bears and soccer balls along with hot meals and some medical supplies to a detainment center on the US-Mexican border in 2014. While they used it as a gesture against President Obama at the time, now that the GOP candidates are trying to out-hate each other on immigrants, Palin is using that brief moment of faux compassion as a reason to shame them. God forbid that illegals would be treated the same as humans!
The other half of her speeches are loaded words and phrases that come from her extremist religious views.
Because I was raised in an extremist Christian home, and mostly only associated with other Christian extremist peers and adults until I went to college, I’m often able to understand these parts of her speeches without Google.
What most non-Fundamentalist/Pentecostal/Evangelical Christian people don’t realize is that fundamentalist Christians speak in sort of a code. There are words that they use that don’t have the same meanings to them as they do to everyone else, and Sarah’s speeches are littered with them.
The Guardian did a great job translating her endorsement speech for Donald Trump, but they missed a few of the Fundamentalist codes she used. In that speech, she referred to ‘rock and rollers and holy rollers!’ A rock and roller, to her, probably means almost any young person, and of course a holy roller is an evangelical Christian who speaks in tongues and dances in the Spirit or gets slain in the Spirit during religious meetings.
More recently, in this speech, within minutes she’s used the word ‘prospering’ as a verb. “Trump is the one to... be prospering the middle class.” To a fundamentalist Christian, ‘prospering’ is a powerful word. God prospers those whom He loves, and since many fundamentalist church have Prosperity Teaching leanings, chances are that anyone who has grown up in a those churches knows these sermons almost by heart. Linking Trump with ‘prospering’ is saying that Trump will make God make you rich.
Her speeches are also phrased like a Pentecostal sermon. No need for complete sentences when you can just string a series of alliterative coded phrases together to stir the desired feelings.
Sadly for Sarah, though, her audiences are no longer just bunches of far right Christian Fundamentalists. It was amusing to watch Trump’s face during her endorsement speech. I don’t think was imagining the confusion and revulsion on his face while she talked.
And her April Fool’s Day speech was received even more poorly. The audience reactions were deliciously painful to watch.
I guess they just don’t understand her.
Bless her heart.