{"id":22435,"date":"2010-02-16T14:36:31","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T19:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=22435"},"modified":"2010-02-16T20:25:28","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T01:25:28","slug":"sarah-palin-and-americas-potential-for-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/sarah-palin-and-americas-potential-for-fascism\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbie and Ken"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning my carpool friend was\u00a0a bit groggy\u00a0from a night of restless sleep.\u00a0 “Fe,” she said,\u00a0 “Sarah Palin was in my dream last night. She was on a podium, saying\u00a0terrible things to rile up her fans,\u00a0and for every horrible thing she said directly to me, I was unable to talk back. It was as if\u00a0I was gagged”.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

It was interesting that a woman of my friend’s intelligence would have such a\u00a0strong subconscious reaction to a media\u00a0figure, a manufactured character. Sarah Palin burrowed herself deep into my friend’s id <\/em>like a tick. The id, for those unfamilar with Freudian theory, is the wild and untamed part of the psyche, which must be controlled by the ego. Unable to shake Palin from her thoughts, my friend’s frustration could find no further voice. She could not dig deep enough or verbalize clearly enough what it was about the Sarah Palin in her head that bothered her so deeply. Mrs. Palin became the boogeyman under her bed. An itch she could not scratch.<\/p>\n

What is it about\u00a0Sarah that stirs up such passionate,\u00a0even subconscious reaction?\u00a0How does\u00a0she\u00a0get under our skin even as\u00a0our rational minds adore or dismiss her? Her spunk and folksy demeanor makes you like her. Her sexual attractiveness reminds you of the cute PTA lady you’d like to fuck. Our lizard brains are thrilled and horrified: a hot MILF in four-inch Prada stilettos on Fox News encouraging President Obama to bomb Iran to assure re-election, a concept even neocon Dick Cheney refutes as unwise. Stanley Kubrick, director of the apocalyptic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove” could not come up with a better film character.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Former Cosmopolitan<\/em> centerfold Scott Brown, now senator from Massachusetts and Sarah Palin,\u00a0are the Ken and Barbie of politics. Not a lot there, but iconic and loaded with potential for our projections, political and otherwise.\u00a0Here at Planet Waves we’ve been talking about the Mystical Longing<\/a> born from a frustrated-repressed society yearning for a hero or a heroine to rise, who sublimates our sexual desires into a stick figure of leadership whose usefulness is valued, as long as the message resonates.<\/p>\n

Palin’s current attractiveness is\u00a0a combination of\u00a0sexual allure\u00a0and a force of personality\u00a0giving you a\u00a0wordless\u00a0comfort that she could command. She is not presidential yet, but she gives people a secure feeling by her supposed certainty.\u00a0Sarah 2010\u00a0has acclimated well under the well-constructed framework of planned speeches, sympathetic interviews and public events from which she can launch her political career. This is her first year on\u00a0a new campaign trail, and though she’s made mistakes, she’s a quick study. She’s set her sights on running against Obama in 2012, and Fox News is as logical a home for her to do this as cowshit is for mushrooms.<\/p>\n

We know Palin is a pawn in the middle of a dangerous game by the same players — the corporate interests, military and Far Right Christians — that Rove and the Bush machine used to engineer Clinton out of office and Bush-Cheney into it. She herself is not dangerous, yet. Even nitroglycerin can be handled safely given the right storage temperature and containment stability.<\/p>\n

But it’s the times we live in that are volatile, and America is at a critical point. We have a struggling economy and congressional stasis. The chasm dividing the haves and have-nots is getting deeper. Longstanding problems seem to have no solution, yet neither side is willing to move together in a rational fashion to resolve them, let alone acknowledge these problems exist. The nation is under pressure of the extremes of the right and left, each side demanding that we go no further or we’re not going far enough. You might even want to compare our current state to that of the Weimar Republic<\/a> – the era that preceeded the rise of Nazi Germany. Therefore, the unveiling of the new model Sarah 2010 under this setting raises some alarm.<\/p>\n

In a series of essays from 1995, author Umberto Eco wrote “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt”<\/a>.\u00a0In\u00a0it he noted historical beliefs under which Ur-Fascism (Eternal Fascism) can coagulate around and propagate. These are a few I found already circulating in today’s political discourse (excerpted here):<\/p>\n

There can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.<\/p>\n

Thinking is a form of emasculation.<\/p>\n

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference<\/em>. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.<\/p>\n

The appeal to a frustrated middle class<\/em>, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. <\/em><\/p>\n

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy<\/em>. It is bad because life is permanent warfare<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What was disturbing about Eco’s article was that it takes only one<\/em> of these fourteen conditions for a virulent fascist movement to coalesce around. In the most recent of Sarah Palin’s appearances and in the Teabagger movement, I found five.<\/p>\n

Palin speaks for the country’s welling frustration by conservatives represented in its extreme by teabaggers.\u00a0Their sense of purpose\u00a0is defined\u00a0by and\u00a0aligned closely to God, guns and please no gays, taxes, blacks, Muslims or women. All they need is someone charismatic and populist enough to lead them out of the political wilderness, giving them permission to make their platform\u00a0a nationally acceptable movement.<\/p>\n

Both Republicans and Teabaggers, not necessarily the same thing,\u00a0want her on their team – either as the Republican establishment candidate or third party — Tea Party choice. She’s a coalescing force that can drive their agenda with the literal wink of an eye. Sarah Palin 2010\u00a0has the\u00a0certainty\u00a0to believe in her own destiny. God sent her.\u00a0For now,\u00a0as long as she gets the limelight and the bucks, she’s playing her part.\u00a0Deriding liberals and President Obama before cheering crowds of the disaffected who want their straight, white, Christian, male world back, her potency increases dimensionally. The longer the stasis holding jobs and the economy back, as Eco and history suggest, the more a force she could become.<\/p>\n

We come from a sexually repressive culture that shames women for being their own persons while at the same time puts them on a pedestal for being “ideal” mothers, girlfriends, wives. <\/p>\n

Sarah Palin arrives somewhere in the middle, giving us the sexuality we crave but cannot admit to enjoying publicly. Under the guise of the good Christian wife and mother, she is telegenic, pro-life, virulent and charming. A perfect broadcast star. That does not make her dangerous in and of herself, but if wielded as a tool for another agenda, she could be overwhelming, particularly if elected\u00a0to a position of power. She is the perfect empty vessel like Barbie. A wife, playmate and toy, embodying the conservative ideal upon which our darkest dreams, modeled carefully by the interests who prefer Democracy the Trademark, can be projected upon and bear fruit.<\/p>\n

This is not to say she can prevail in these times, nor do I believe she will. But we need to remember the lessons of the past — that Sarah Palins and Scott Browns exist as part of our current events, and should be a lesson already learned from mid-twentieth century history. Our national dialogue needs to move forward and not be mired in the past or a delusion of a world that doesn’t exist. We are becoming something else that we’re not used to and therefore we fear it.<\/p>\n

We need to face the problems we’ve got and choose what we want to be, not hold on to what we were and deny these problems exist. By choosing to define what we want to become, continuing to create ourselves as we move past the ignorance, fear and victimization that ignites causes that need the Sarahs and the\u00a0Scotts, maybe we can find a way out\u00a0from\u00a0uncertainty and\u00a0inability to\u00a0name them for what they are. We need to start sleeping peacefully with our unknowable future, not with our dolls but with ourselves, unafraid of the nightmares of the past.<\/p>\n

Yours and truly,<\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan<\/strong>
\nSan Francisco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning my carpool friend was\u00a0a bit groggy\u00a0from a night of restless sleep.\u00a0 “Fe,” she said,\u00a0 “Sarah Palin was in my dream last night. She was on a podium, saying\u00a0terrible things to rile up her fans,\u00a0and for every horrible thing she said directly to me, I was unable to talk back. It was as if\u00a0I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,1788,52,1054,1651,143,1636,1652],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}