The video of William Shatner reciting parts of Sarah Palin’s farewell-as-governor-speech on the Conan O’Brien show has been all around the place — but if you haven’t seen it, you can watch below.

Now, I like Sarah Palin, but I do find this very funny — and it certainly beats the sorts of terribly vile personal attacks on her and her family that have come from other quarters.

Nevertheless, while Captain Kirk and crew are making fun of Sarah Palin by treating her speech as beat-poetry, it does occur to me that the joke is — to an extent at least — on them. When she was speaking of Alaska in this farewell speech, she was doing it poetically. She was trying to sum up something of the spirit of the place, the tough beauty of the land and the climate, and what it all says in turn about the spirit of the people of Alaska. You can do all that at very great length by spelling it out tiresomely, or you can do it as she did, poetically, hitting on touchstones that don’t mean much (if anything) to people in the lower 48, in Beverly Hills and in New York, but resonate with people who have lived there all their lives.

I like her version and William Shatner’s version pretty equally, shedding light from different angles on the work. It’s only a pity that we’ll never get to hear Bob Dylan recite it on “Theme Time Radio Hour.”

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