Categorical Aperitif

Patricia J. Williams has my favorite comparison yet for Sarah Palin: she's like one of those banal yet calculated, unapologetically repetitive yet attention-getting Warhol paintings.

As someone who was trained in advertising, Warhol had mastered many of the tools of expert propagandists. One such device is prosopopeia, a rather literary term for what happens when the Pillsbury Doughboy persuades you to buy a bread product by giggling so charmingly after that poke to his puffy little tummy. Prosopopeia is the personification of an abstraction. As theorist Barbara Johnson says in her book Persons and Things, "A speaking thing can sell itself; if the purchaser responds to the speech of the object, he or she feels uninfluenced by human manipulation and therefore somehow not duped. We are supposed not to notice how absurd it is to be addressed by the Maalox Max bottle, or Mr. Clean, or Mrs. Butterworth."

It is in precisely this sense that Warhol's portraits are calculated disguises, masks that artfully undermine the specificity of his subjects and render them theatrically populist images. There is, for example, a wonderful Warhol self-portrait, now on exhibit at Ohio State's Wexner Center for the Arts, in which he wears white face makeup, a woman's wig, eyeliner and bright red lipstick. He is to Kabuki femininity what Sarah Palin is to Kabuki Republican masculinity: iconic, self-proclaiming, yet concealed. That this is literally the case is underscored by the invisible and advance authorship of "her" acceptance speech. Imagine that speech as it lay waiting for just the right someone to deliver it. Imagine the accents and intonations of the tryouts they must have had: what gun-toting, warmongering, polar-bear extinguishing, creationist, antiabortionist man could have gotten away with it?

"How do you sell a box of poison?" they must have wondered. Dress it up in drag, they obviously concluded.

Beware: the last sentence of Williams's piece will haunt your nightmares.