Table Talk
from the editor
During a visit to the Perth Library last week I checked out Joe McGinniss’ recently published book about Sarah Palin titled “The Rogue.”
I’m an ex-pat American who has watched with a kind of fascinated horror at the fascist police state of a train wreck the USA has become.
When Sarah Palin got tapped with John McCain’s magic VP nomination wand back in 2007, she quickly exploded upon the national consciousness like a force of nature, you remember, all that “Mama Grizzly” posturing.
McCain lost the election but Palin lingered around for a while, making a bizarre Reality Show. She was being groomed as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. Frankly, she scared the heck out of me, but of course it doesn’t much matter who the president is…the actual rulers are the planet are those shadowy ultra- wealthy elites at the top of the heap.
Heck, those folks in government are only just barely above us peons in the grand scheme of power. Governments are controlled by Corporations, who are ruled by Big Banks, who in turn answer to the National Central Banks who are controlled by the International Central Banks. And those are owned and controlled by the ultra Financial Elites.
My point is that it doesn’t really matter who wins the election….Money ultimately rules us all in the end.
However, having crazy politicians in power doesn’t make things any better!
Anyway. I sat down and read “The Rogue” with fascination. McGinnis went to Alaska to write a book about Sarah Palin and, by coincidence, was offered a vacant house right next to the Palin’s home.
This actually turned out to be a handicap. He was there to investigate and report, not spy on the family. The Palins raised a huge stink about his presence.
This was ironic, because apparently that house had at one time been used as a half-way house for recently paroled felons. These parolees were only made to move on when they made a meth lab in the basement.
Another previous tenant was a woman whose fiancée’s son tried to murder her with a machete!
The Palins didn’t have any problem with these model citizens living next door!
I’ve been very curious about Sarah Palin because of her amazing ability to connect with people and make them absolutely worship and adore her, in spite of the fact that she’s a control freak and a raging narcissist.
I wrote recently about psychopaths and the peculiar influence they seem to have over the rest of us. How normal, compassionate humans can hand over control of their lives and countries to narcissists and psychopaths never ceases to amaze me and in fact totally blows my mind.
But, I myself was once entangled in a psychopath’s twisted web, so I can report from the trenches of experience that they seem to have some mesmeric power to suck our brains right out of our heads!
Narcissists and psychopaths are so focused on their own needs and desires, and their wills are so powerful that most people believe their BS and get sucked in.
And it appears that this explains Sarah Palin’s attraction…it’s always all about her and people fall for it.
Anyway, “The Rogue” was an interesting look at Alaska as well as Sarah Palin. Alaska is still like a wild frontier….the state only just joined the Union back in 1959.
Packing a weapon is not only legal, it’s common. And according to McGinniss, when people found out he was actually living next door to the Palins while he took notes for his book well over half of them offered him his choice of firearms from their personal arsenals! To protect himself, they said.
Because the Palins are apparently well known to be ruthless hillbilly bullies.
Well now. If Palin hadn’t finally managed to self destruct, and had actually run for president she would have just been one more in a long line of self absorbed bullies.
Which brings me to the incredible Mitt Romney saga. Mitt is also a bully, although he was born a rich and entitled one. He was recently secretly taped at a fund raiser with a group of his fellow right wing rich buddies in which he opined, among other obnoxious statements, that 47% of Americans are crying welfare babies who need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
This kind of incredible obliviousness may finally sink him with the right wing poor people of the country. But then, those same right wing conservative poor people also tend to consistently and continually vote against their own best interests, as long as their candidate is against gay marriage and birth control. Go figure.
It comes down to voting to deny freedom to the people, rather than voting for freedom for all.
This is a very strange and inexplicable human tendency., where people would rather take away from others than have plenty for all.
I just read an interesting essay about community and how humans judge themselves and their lives relative to how well their neighbors are doing.
The less your neighbor has, the more you have by comparison. There’s a joke about this: A poor Russian peasant has lived a good and virtuous life. It’s been hard, but he’s squeaked by. His neighbor has a cow, and because of this his neighbor has prospered.
One day God tells the peasant that he has been such a good person that he’d like to do something for him. “Tell me, my son, what can I do to make your life better?”
The peasant replied, “Kill the cow.”
Back to politics and amazing stuff they don’t teach us in school: Back in 1872 a woman actually ran for president against Ulysses S. Grant and Horace Greeley.
Her name was Victoria Woodhull, and she had led quite an adventurous life. She had been a spiritualist and, bankrolled by Cornelius Vanderbilt, had also been a successful stockbroker.
Her presidential platform supported free love, short skirts, abolition of the death penalty, vegetarianism, excess-profit taxes, female orgasm (!), world government, better public housing, birth control, magnetic healing and easier divorce laws.
She spent election night in jail. What would the world be like if she’d been elected?
Stephanie Kelley
