Here’s a little news flash for your Department of Media: Superman’s parents chose life and he was adopted in small-town USA by real Americans who run our factories, harvest our meat-bearing animals, and wave Old Glory down at the courthouse and the churches, not in Washington, D.C. by cynical power-brokers and liberal scientists.
Steve Aydt, second-place entry in Slate.com’s “Write Like Sarah Palin” contest
synecdoche, the generalizing trope. From the Greek, meaning “swap.”
Yeah, Figaro said he wouldn’t write about Palin anymore, but how could we resist this? Slate’s contest beautifully illustrates the political art of the synecdoche, the trope that makes an individual stand for a whole group, or a species for a genus, or vice versa. Agribusiness becomes the hard-working farmer watching over his amber waves of grain. The military shrinks down to one brave soldier. Wealthy heirs in Ivy League clubs miraculously morph into small businessmen struggling in the face of the capital gains tax.
Steve Aydt nailed it. What the Liberal Media don’t understand is how REAL these fake people are. The synecdoche gains great power in an unrhetorical society, because people fail to see it or what it is: a trope. So Sarah Palin is no cynical rhetorician. She’s telling it like it is. And what’s “It”? Whatever stereotype that warms your red-blooded American heart and doesn’t trouble your hard-working, beer-drinking mind.
Snappy Answer: Put that in your snowmobile and smoke it.