Memorial Day again. You know we’re going to find some weapons-grade idiocy on the intertubes about soldiers and freedom and eagles et. al., don’t you? Let’s see what we…oh, that didn’t take long. And gracious, you’ll never guess who this year’s bullshit is brought to you by:
Yesterday the Palin tweeted the following: “VETERANS,not reporters,give freedom of the press.VETS,not politicians,give freedom to vote.VETS,not campus radicals,give freedom to assemble.” She did not mention that she’d stolen it from a 1970 poem.
Sure, she could have just Twitter-twatted the author’s name and title of the poem and hoped her followers could figure out how to find it on their own, but honestly, who fucking cares? The real problem is that the sentiment is skullcrushingly stupid and flat-out wrong; anyone with basic honesty and even a modicum of historical knowledge should be ashamed to have their name associated with it. And what are her legions of imbecilic followers going to do anyway, go to a bookstore and see if the guy’s collected works are available?
Personally, I think there’s something incredibly apt about seeing this classic updated for the social networking age. A synopsis of a poem that was utterly banal to begin with, for those who couldn’t handle the complexity of the unabridged text, complete with Twitter punctuation, though most users probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway. It reminds me of Oscar Wilde saying that America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.