By LIONEL ROLFE
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 torment 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 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 f**ked 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 her 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 are 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 a land army 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 understand 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 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 that 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 sh*t out of me. And apparently she scares the sh*t 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 20 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 sh*t like that.
When it came time to be interviewed by chosen members of the Mass Media, Palin was trying not to be 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 YouTube. 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 war in Iraq.”
In another YouTube 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.
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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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