Blowing up: The Palin-ization of everything

It had to happen sometime. Or maybe it didn’t. But yesterday a company announced it was releasing a Sarah Palin blow-up doll. The sales pitch? “Sarah Palin blow-up doll is full of more hot air than the real Republican vice presidential running mate!” Whether it’s love or hate or an obsession with ephemeral pop-culture phenoms that’s fueling it, everything is getting Palinized, from Halloween costumes to Facebook pages to adult films.

While The Sarah Palin might be the most popular and universally loathed Halloween costume this year, Gawker has come up with a few variations on the Palin, including our favorite, the Gay Pride Palin. But the Getting Palined trend doesn’t end there. There’s a Sarah Palin action figure, which comes with its own gun holster and Matrix costume. Whoa. There’s Palin’s fake Facebook page, which evidently hit a peak this morning since both my mom, friend, and cousin’s friend’s uncle sent it to me at nearly the same time. And the fake, albiet different, Sarah Palin extends into the Twitterverse, too, with her very own page. Sample tweet: “Oh no. There’s only one reason John laughs like that. He’s pooping.”

This isn’t the plain old Palinmania going on that we saw spike for maybe three days last month, when the McCain campaign first announced its unvetted running mate. This is post-Palinmania, or maybe post-post-Palinmania, fueled by web memes, pop culture, and of course, irony. But is it tragic irony?  According to my little pop-up dictionary, tragic irony is “a literary technique, often used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character’s words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.” In other words, Palin’s no victim here. Methinks the cunning Palin knows exactly what her words and actions mean. Now send us your Gay Pride Palin photos!