How did I miss this one?

Do I believe any of (Going Rogue)? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that (Palin) does, and that her readers feel they are hearing an authentic voice. I find the voice undeniably authentic …. It is the voice of small-town America, with its folk wisdom, regional pride, common sense, distrust of rhetoric (itself a rhetorical trope), love of country and instinctive (not doctrinal) piety. It says, here are some of the great things that have happened to me, but they are not what makes my life great and American. (“An American life is an extraordinary life.”) It says, don’t you agree with me that family, freedom and the beauties of nature are what sustain us?

If your only goal in writing cultural criticism is to make tweedy people at faculty parties sputter in bewilderment at your latest steaming pile of disingenuousness, maybe you should quit academia and spend more time in “small-town America,” absorbing all their “common sense” and non-doctrinal piety (whatever the heck that is, it sounds like a foot condition).

Stanley Fish, I love you! Keep doing what you do, and maybe we’ll all learn to “think again!” (Or is that the Atlantic’s motto? Sometimes I get my counterintuitive oracles confused.)