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Palin the Impaler |
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Editorial Features
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Written by Lionel Rolfe
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Thursday, 09 October 2008 |
America’s latest manufactured celebrity, Sarah Palin, is intriguing for at least two reasons to those who are easily swayed by the mass hysteria the mainstream media stirs up from time to time over whatever nonentity it chooses to coronate at the moment.
In one way, she is like Vlad The Impaler, also known as Dracula, a
Romanian ruler in the 1500s who dealt with his enemies in extremely
cruel ways.
Her vengeance against those who disagree with her is known to be
terribly swift and intense. Then there’s a tawdry quality that emerges
from her narrative. While Vlad the Impaler has lasted as a legend over
the centuries because of the scope of his legendary madness. Sarah’s
battles seem more like those that occur mainly in the squabbles of
white trash trailer parks.
Her voice, for one, sounds a false note, with a barely suppressed
hysteria just beneath the surface. Sarah’s voice is too grating for her
to become, say, another Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in the
Great Depression. When she began her meteoric political career as mayor
of Wasilla, Alaska, with the support of the most fundamentalist of its
8,000-strong denizens, she tried to get the city librarian to ban some
books. Rumor has it that the books she objected to included the Hobbit
tomes, Shakespeare, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. But the librarian
would not be moved and despite several threats to fire her for
disloyalty, Sarah moved on to bigger and better things.
McCain’s Republican operatives downplayed the incident, saying Palin
was only asking hypothetically if certain books could be banned.
Be that as it may, the pattern continued. When she next became governor
of Alaska, a state with fewer than 700,000 souls, many of them poor,
ignorant and fanatically religious who are also disturbingly gun-prone,
she fired one of the state’s top officials.
He had committed a terrible offense against the people of Alaska, it
seems. He hadn’t fired Palin’s ex brother-in-law who was involved in a
messy divorce with the governor’s sister. It was such a messy divorce
an Alaskan judge felt forced to issue an injunction against Sarah
Palin, telling her to stop trying to tormenting the poor man.
Apparently when she became governor, she felt that the judge’s
injunction was overruled by assumption of an exalted new position.
The second way she intrigues—her looks. It probably is appropriate that
Sarah has a certain commonplace beauty queen look—she was a runner up
in an Alaska beauty contest—combined with a kind of tawdry dominatrix
demeanor.
An acquaintance of mine, an attorney who has a finely tuned
appreciation of female sexuality, said after she gave her acceptance
speech at the Republican convention, he began to think of not voting
for Obama after all because it would be more fun to have a president he
could fantasize about and masturbate to. He figured if he voted for
McCain, Palin would end up being president soon enough, for obvious
reasons.
A tall, shapely woman with a pronounced Amazon physique, my friend said
as he listened to her, he found himself wishing she would pop out of
her shirt. “Those magnificent boobs need to be liberated,” he said.
But he admitted that if he actually found himself in bed with her, he
might grab for his manhood as much to protect himself as to unsheathe
his prowess.
Now probably if Palin hadn’t had such a curious disregard for the
problems of female rape victims, I wouldn’t dare venture into all this.
But I figure by insisting that female rape victims pay the costs of
solving their own rapes—which she did as the new Mayor of Wasilla—that
makes her fair game. Perhaps she believes boys will be boys and girls
gotta to understand the superior sex. Maybe, even maybe, Sarah Palin is
secretly an Elizabeth the Great.
The National Enquirer is no doubt as scummy a tab rag as there ever
was. But the truth is it investigates gossip with an aggressive vigor
that often hits paydirt—just ask former presidential candidate John
Edwards. And besides, where do journalists get off denying that their
trade is gossip.
Some time back, a female friend of mine abandoned her job as a writer
and editor at the Los Angeles Times and went to work for the Enquirer.
“Not only do they pay a lot better, they investigated stories far more
thoroughly than we ever did at the Times,” she said.
So it was with considerable interest I opened my latest edition of The
Enquirer and read how Palin had had an affair with a business partner
of her husband’s, which ended only when her husband broke off his
business relationship in order to save his marriage.
And you thought the Clintons had some of their own white trash problems!
The newspaper also confirmed what was rather obvious by appearances—her
daughter Bristol’s pregnancy was embarrassing the governor. At first
she wanted to marry off her teenage daughter to her barely legal stud,
a local hockey star, before her selection as vice presidential nominee
was announced. But the daughter refused to go through with her mother’s
feeble efforts to lie. Mother and daughter had harsh words, resulting
in the sulky, angry girl appearing in public with her mom, but giving
the whole thing away by her demeanor.
Her mom, meanwhile, covered her magnificent posterior, by telling
everyone Bristol was going to marry her paramour soon, a young man who
described himself online as a dude who didn’t want to be fucked around
with or become a dad.
Poor kid never had a chance.
It seems that Bristol is pissed off by her mom always putting career in
front of her children, and then being a hypocrite about it.
When Sarah finally did his first actual interview—a soft interview by
ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who definitely has a tendency to go easier on
Republicans than Democrats—it was clear she knew nothing about anything
on the world stage, except to repeat like an automaton how pro-Israel
she was. If Israel decided it needed to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities,
she said, America would have no choice but to play a supporting role.
She also seemed to be advocating that the United States must be willing
to go to war with Russia over Georgia if that former Soviet republic
became a member of NATO, and asked for military help.
The Europeans have a bit more reticent about going to war against
Russia. If she knew a bit about history, she would know that no one has
ever successfully marched an army land against the Russians—not
Napoleon, not Hitler, and nor would we more likely find success in
doing this.
It was a strange sight, this woman who comes out of a background so
steeped in anti-Semitism she probably doesn’t even understood it
herself.
Perhaps this Stepford Wives enunciation of her pro-Israel stance might
make more sense if you consider she was never heard to utter a word
about Israel or even Jews before she was picked to be McCain’s vice
presidential pick.
Indeed, her background suggested quite the opposite.
In the days leading up to her pick, a gentleman named David Brickner,
the head of Jews for Jesus, held forth in the Wasilla Bible Church
which the governor has attended for the last seven years, and carried
on about how Israelis were on the receiving end of terrorism because
God has had made some harsh judgments on Jews because they had failed
to embrace Jesus.
Although Palin’s pastor there, one Larry Kroom, said Palin wasn’t in
the audience at the time Brickner was carrying on against the Jews like
a crazed Imam, he liked what Brickner had said and would be inviting
him back.
There was a glimpse of Palin’s own unfamiliarity at least with
ecumenicalism during her acceptance speech at the Republican National
Convention. Quoting from an anonymous “writer,” she proclaimed, “We
grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and
dignity.”
The line came from Westbrook Pegler, a notorious anti-Semite from the
Great Depression, a luminary among the lights of others such as Father
Coughlin and Gerald Smith, who had mentored at the feet of Huey Long,
and H.L. Mencken, a brilliant writer but still a virulent anti-Semite.
Pegler believed that Eastern European Jews could not be trusted,
because they were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however
outwardly respectable they appeared.”
Palin has so little knowledge of Israel and Jews you can almost excuse
her for employing Pegler, and the like, in her descriptions of things
as they are. While her husband was involved with the Alaska
Independence Party, apparently a part of the larger American
Independence Party movement, where all kinds of nativist, fascist folks
found their true home, Palin herself avoided registering as one. She
kept her Republican party membership card intact.
But recently as governor, she told members of the group to “keep up the
good work” and wished the party luck on its “inspiring convention.”
There’s also been an argument about whether or not she was a supporter
of Pat Buchanan when he ran for president on the Republican ticket in
2000. It’s apparently true at the time she was in bed with her main
man in the Republican Party, Steve Forbes, but still wore a Buchanan
button when she officially greeted the then presidential candidate. Was
it just a flirtation, or something more?
Buchanan himself remembered their meeting with fondness, and proclaimed her as one of his best warriors.
My concern about Buchanan is that he is a hitler-praising fascist sympathizer very much in the Westbrook Pegler mold.
That she would use a quote from Pegler, but consciously decide not to
credit the writer because that might have proved embarrassing, suggests
something sinister to me.
I say this as one of Pegler’s “East European Jews,” so I could be dismissed as a paranoid old leftist.
Perhaps this is the case, but Palin genuinely scares the shit out of
me. And apparently she scares the shit out of Ed Koch, the former New
York Mayor, a Democrat who endorsed George Bush in the last election
because of his fear of Islamic fundamentalism, but this time is going
full hog for Obama. Of course Pegler, if he were still around, would no
doubt make much of the fact that Koch was a Jew.
Before Palin joined the more mainstream Wasilla Bible Church, where
they were apparently happy to teach that Jews were getting killed
because God too wanted Jews punished for not accepting Jesus, she spent
20 years as a Pentecostal.
Palin and her large extended family joined the Wasilla Bible Church
about the same time she decided to pursue a political career. Before
that, for twenty years, she had been reared in a far more eccentric
Christian fundamentalist church—the Pentecostals. Like the Mormons, the
Pentecostals make most Christian fundamentalists nervous. They look
with disdain on Pentecostals, whose most sacred rites make them easy
targets for satire. There’s certainly a strong sexual component to
their carryings-on that wouldn’t wash well with more respectable
believers.
Pentecostals were the people who talked in tongues and solved their
health problems with a laying on of hands, Weird shit like that.
When it came time to be interviewed by chosen members of the Mass
Media, Palin was trying not to be not such a religious wingnut. She
tried to modify past statements in which she had credited God for Iraq,
an oil pipeline in Alaska, and making Alaska a safe haven where
Christians could flock in the End Days.
Still, there it was on You Tube. Speaking at a meeting of the
Pentecostals, she said “that our leaders, our national leaders, are
sending (U.S. soldiers) out on a task that is from God. That's what we
have to make sure that we're praying for -- that there is a plan and
that that plan is God's plan.”
At the time she said this, she admitted she wasn’t up to speed on minor
matters like conducting wars and the like. “I’ve been so focused on
state government, I haven’t really focused much on the in Iraq.”
In another You Tube video, Palin is seen nodding her ascent as a
minister on the stage with her talked about tapping into Alaska's
natural resource wealth to fulfill the state's destiny of serving as a
shelter for Christians at the End of Times.
And last but not least, it should be mentioned that Sarah Palin carves
up and cooks moose, hunts down wolves with rifles while flying in a
helicopter, believes women should be forced to carry children even if
they were placed in that position by rape, and that the world is only
6,000 years old, and creationism should be taught alongside evolution
courses in science classes.
Palin can believe whatever nonsense she wants to—apparently Alaska
likes its crazy governor. But this is a woman who believes that the
Apocalypse is a good thing, not something to avoid. The Apocalypse
might even be a good thing because it will reward the true believers
and punish the rest of us sinners. Such a person should not have her
fingers, no matter how lovely, on the nuclear button.
Lionel Rolfe is the author of Literary L.A., Fat Man on the Left, and
The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather.
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