Unearthing the cultural and mythological basis for Middle America’s love affair with Sarah Palin.

Earlier this month (February 9, 2010) a man was arrested in Massachusetts and charged with stockpiling weapons because he feared an imminent “Armageddon.” Apparently active in the Tea Party movement, he considered Sarah Palin, who he said is on a “righteous Mission from God,” as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of (American) society.(1)

This irrational stockpiling of weapons seems to be happening more and more, along with a precipitous increase in the number of heavily armed, anti-government paramilitary groups. What's the reason for all this paranoid, apocalyptic angst? As the Joker would say, "Why so serious?" And what's with this fetish for Sarah Palin? Fresh off her Going Rogue book tour and Tea Party Convention speaking engagement, Sarah has solidified her position as the darling of the American ultra-conservative “populist” movement, and talk of her running for President has even ramped up. Befuddled progressives, appalled by her shallow rhetoric and political history that would seem to advance the interests of big corporations over the real needs of the middle class, can only shake their heads in wonder at this woman’s popularity among “Middle America.” So what gives? Why is Sarah Palin the darling of largely white, fundamentally religious, stubbornly anti-education and heavily armed "Real America"? A quick gander at cultural history just may give us a clue.

The Warrior Goddess

Such blind, obsessive idolatry is as old as history. Powerful warrior/hunting goddesses were worshipped in primitive tribal societies dating all the way back to the earliest known cultures of Sumeria and Egypt. Very often, as in the cases of the Egyptian Neith and the Sumerian Inanna, their warrior attribute also became combined with the role of creator or great mother goddess. Remember, these were simple folks. Farmers, herders, hunter-shoppers, construction workers, letter carriers, accountants, senators. To primitive people constantly fearful of enemies both real and supernatural, these goddesses were protective benefactors providing comfort, security and feelings of personal power – both political and sexual.

Sound like Middle America today? Crushed under the thumb of an all-powerful and emotionless corporatocracy and guided more by religion than education, they are frightened, helpless and intellectually unprepared for the complexities of international terrorism, global warming, a soul-consuming economy and gays wanting to get married. Their fear is so powerful it makes ordinarily inoffensive people advocate and even insist on torture, acquiesce to the denial of human rights and due process usually considered inviolable, sacrifice the lives of their children and their national treasury to war against what is only the swarthy semblance of an enemy, and obsessively make the right to own a gun the single most important issue of their lifetime. Blindly groping in the darkness of an unsophisticated mind, they instinctively reach for a form of succor that is as primal as their fear itself.

Sarah as Artemoose

Enter Sarah Palin – with her seductive combination of motherhood, sexuality and aggressiveness. Sensual and sassy, yet an in-your-face MOM, she is the mother-creator, the huntress and warrior, simultaneously virgin and harlot (hey, she’s a goddess), that every man deep down in his primitive self seeks in a woman. A nurturing angel while raising the kids, she’s also a hard-riding, bronco-busting wild woman in the bedroom. (Dismissing rumors of divorce, she gushes, “Have you seen Todd? He’s a hunk!”) Such women have been idealized and worshipped by primitive people since the dawn of time. Sarah is Diana the Huntress merged with Venus the Goddess of Love. The Greeks called her Artemis, the Alaskan version is Artemoose.

The Huntress instructs her cub

The Sumerian Inanna (also called Ninni, go figure) was the goddess of sexual love, procreation and war and also worshipped as the queen of heaven and earth. As “Mother of All” she was the goddess of fertility, birth and nature, but she also combined male aggressiveness with a superabundance of female sexuality. Her role as aggressive warrior allowed her to roam beyond the female domestic domain and within the public arena of men who quest for power and fame.

As Goddess of War, she had the wild instinct of Artemis. Battle was called the “dance of Inanna,” and she was always at the heart of it. She was “the star of the battle-cry, who can make brothers who have lived together in harmony fight each other.”

As Goddess of Sexual Love, she was equally passionate, singing ecstatic songs of desire, self-adornment (think expensive wardrobe), and the delights of lovemaking. She referred to her chosen consort as her “honey-man” who “sweetens me ever.” More extroverted than Aphrodite, she craved and took, desired and destroyed, grieved and composed songs of grief. She claimed her needs assertively, celebrating her body. Ultimately, she was the embodied, playful, passionately erotic feminine; the powerful, independent, self-willed feminine; the ambitious, regal, many-sided feminine.(2,3)

This is Sarah Palin, avatar.

Sarah as Inanna, Mother Goddess of fertility and war

Sarah is a woman who apparently can effortlessly pop out kids like a pez dispenser, run the country’s largest domestic oil extraction operation disguised as a state, single-handedly hold back Vladimir Putin and the Red Menace, and drag the occasional moose home for dinner – all the while staying perky, sassy and hot as a pistol for the “First Dude.” A hot mama with a powerful rifle cocked on her hip, winking at you and saying, “Drill, baby, drill” is not just articulating energy policy. To her followers, it’s a sexual power message that resonates to their core.

What a woman! Could anyone doubt her goddess credentials? She is Ninni, Ishtar and Isis. In more human iterations, she is a modern-day Boadicea, warrior queen of Britain, defending the heartland against the cold, impersonal and tax-hungry centralized authority of Rome/Washington. She is Marianne, bare-breasted symbol of Liberty, populist leader of street battles against tyranny, and currently embossed on the euro. And, of course, she is Wonder Woman, her magical bracelets able to deflect inconvenient reality and rational criticism.

Sarah as Marianne, bare-breasted symbol of Liberty and heroine of the masses

Say you were someone like, oh, Glenn Beck, an arrested adolescent, pudgy and pasty, prone to xenophobic paranoid fantasies while also being girlishly emotional. Suddenly, along comes Wonder Woman – powerful, sexy yet curiously nurturing, and willing to legitimize your adolescent fantasies while stroking you in all the dark and secret places that really really hurt. Wouldn’t you embrace her? Adore her? Worship her? Sure you would.

Beck and his fellow neoprimitive Cro-Mericans have embraced Sarah to the point of worship. She is their warrior/hunter/mother goddess and they are her Sarahphim, flitting around singing her praises. (In the Hebrew, Seraphim literally means burning ones. “The name seraphim clearly indicates their ceaseless and eternal revolution about Divine Principles, their heat and keenness, the exuberance of their intense, perpetual, tireless activity ...destroying the shadows of darkness.”)(4) One can almost hear Sarah’s angelic choir torching the nighttime of their souls by chanting “Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, holy, holy, holy, the whole earth is full of Her Glory.” (Isaiah 6:3) They reach to her as a reassuring illumination in the primal darkness of their fears, and Sarah the nurturing mother is perfectly willing to succor them.

(Conspicuously absent from this pantheon is Athena, a warrior-goddess in her own right. Born fully-grown directly out of Zeus’ head, she is beautiful and powerful – but she’s also a symbol of intelligence. And it is important that the goddess-avatar of the Cro-Merican NOT be intelligent. Her combination of sexiness and aggressiveness is very attractive, but they are intimidated by, and suspicious of, intelligence in women. And no one has ever accused Sarah Palin of being intelligent.)

Middle America today is much like Middle Earth, the Hyborian Age, the Book of Revelations or other fantasy world: a land of people lacking in historical perspective, obsessively focused on getting by, and prone to understanding larger issues only in the biblical sense of absolute good versus implacable and malignant evil. Overwhelmed by powerful enemies real and imagined, they instinctively turn to an Olympian savior. Theirs is a tribal belief system based on self-preservation through personal weapons, demonization of “the other” and collective aggressiveness. When Hyborian Ager Conan the Barbarian was asked what is best in life, he answered (imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice) “To crush your enemies. To see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” Such a creed is common in the more tribalistic areas of Middle America and eloquently describes what is best to the Sarahphim: To crush your opponents. To see them driven back to the goal line, and to hear the lamentations of their fans. In all of it’s iterations – to crush the islamists, the liberals, the gays, the Jews, the Catholics, the Darwinists. Yada, yada, yada.

Sarah and the Barbarians – hey, this one's real.

The above-mentioned Manchester Tea Partier and self-professed moonstruck Sarahph had some 20 weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition stashed in his condo. There was also “a large collection of military camouflage clothing, knives, several pairs of handcuffs (!), bulletproof vests and helmets, night vision goggles, a large supply of medicine, and six months’ worth of food supplies throughout the home.”(1) We have an angry, frightened and vocal group of people who are emotionally and intellectually unprepared to face the challenges of the 21st century. Their response is to arm themselves to the teeth while reaching out to the kind of leader that the scared and poorly educated have always embraced.

Of course, these gun-toting Tea Baggers are intensely Christian; they might feel uncomfortable bowing to such pagan idols as Artemis or Innana. Not to worry. For those who prefer their iconography more Christian, Sarah can easily slide into the role of the Virgin Mary. Christianity has evolved (strike me down, Lord) away from Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the gospel of prosperity allows, no demands, giving the competitor (read: enemy) a good beat-down. The Holy Trinity is now Life+God+Guns, and the avatar is the goddess of fertility+creation+war. Where Jesus once came in peace as a shepherd, Revelations warns that he will return with the sword. How appropriate, then, that Mary also returns flaunting her right to bear arms. With Trig on one hip and a .50-caliber AR-15 assault rifle on the other, Sarah is the Madonna of Armageddon, Our Lady of the Apocalypse. And this bitch aint no virgin no more.

The NRA designed an AR-15 assult rifle just for Sarah

Can she save America?      You betcha!

Indiana Republican Senate candidate and "Real American" Richard Behney told Tea Party supporters what he would do if the 2010 elections did not produce results to his liking: “I’m cleaning my guns and getting ready for the big show. And I’m serious about that, and I bet you are, too.”(5)

Lead the way, Ninni.

 

 

 

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