I regret to say that recent reports of Sarah Palin have changed my mind about her.
Originally, I was inclined to like her. If moms don’t cut other moms slack, no one will. We mothers are the first ones blamed for everything, for every rotten decision a son or daughter makes, every wrong turn, every misery and failure and short-coming, every lousy card that fate deals a kid. This is part of the distortion of modern talk psychotherapy, of course, as it has osmosed into the zeitgeist. So when I first heard and read about Palin, I thought the best of her.
But subsequent reportage has changed my opinion. What changed my mind is the report that Sarah Palin espouses book banning and censorship. The New York Times printed that Palin brought up the idea of banning books at a town meeting. “The librarian (of Wasilla, Palin’s town), Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to ‘resist all efforts at censorship,’ Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after office.” The Times goes on to say that Emmons was reinstated when residents made a strong show of support.
But the damage was done. And there are few acts of greater civil sabotage than the attempted mind-control of citizens by banning books. People are defined by their actions, and Sarah Palin’s acts show her to be a repressive, vindictive politician, a fascist of the first order who is intent on curtailing free thought. Anyone who votes for her can expect to see jackboots, an empowered Gestapo, and concentration camps in short order: that’s the natural evolution from that first, powerfully evil act of banning books.
All tyrannies ban books and espouse censorship. Books release ideas into the collective consciousness, and ideas are the great liberators of the human spirit. Ideas cause change, freedom, and human dignity. To oppose those dreaded eventualities, all repressive regimes strive mightily to control ideas. Banning books to control ideas is an effective way to control constituents, to turn citizens into subjects and slaves. Fraulein Fuhrer Palin is rightly afraid of books and ideas… but in the US, she should not, must not, can not be allowed to, fear a free citizenry.
James Fallows of the Atlantic called Palin “George W in a skirt” after hearing her canned interview with Chalie Gibson. He said she lacks curiosity about anything and relies on her gut. Her book banning is a great example of this.