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Sarah Palin resigns, a casualty of celebrity-internet-media snark
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Sarah Palin, who casts herself as a victim of the media, has become a casualty of the careless and thoughtless commentary, snap judgments and faster-than-light media coverage of the internet age. The internet media helped make her - it was a snap judgment that prized style over substance that set her on the global stage. Now, it has become her undoing.
Palin was schooled in the language of snark that finally badgered her out of office. Her most famous utterances on the 2008 presidential campaign trail were snark. Her knowing winks and saucy attacks on Barack Obama lacked real substance - he "palled around with terrorists" - but betrayed a contempt for inconvenient facts. She was the hockey mom/pit bull, who parodied herself with lines about her bridge to nowhere - the one she supposedly said "thanks, but no thanks" to when, in reality, she supported the project.
Yes, Palin is a media victim. Her awkward speech and garbled syntax were ripe for snark attacks. Her interview with Katie Couric - where she said Putin "rears his head" in Alaska's airspace - was an instant classic, viewed hundreds of thousands of times in internet video clips. When Tina Fey mocked Palin's flat accent and "y'know," "you betcha" style of speech, it was pure snark.
Film critic and writer David Denby, in his book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal and It's Ruining Our Conversation, says snark is "a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true."
What better way to describe our national conversation about Sarah Palin? We derided her background and her wilderness state. We hated those glasses and her updo hair-style. We speculated about the provenance of her infant child, and salivated over the news of her pregnant teen daughter. We pilloried her beliefs and her church, the names of her kids, and all the personal details of her life.
David Letterman's cracks about Palin's daughter getting "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez went over the line of fair play and decency into the realm of snark. The bloggers and anonymous internet commenters that hounded Palin from the start inhabit snark constantly.
Maybe she had it coming. The winking attacks, delivered with a mocking and snide tone, a tilt of the head to show disbelief and a puckering of the lips to show a sourness in those words. That was Palin's charm and strength on the campaign trail, where she lit into community organizer Barack Obama, where her preferred energy policy was summed up by "drill, baby, drill."
Live by the snark, die by the snark.
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