What has Sourdough Newt Wrought?
A female blogger from Wasilla goes into some detail in a spreading post about Sarah Palin, which I herein also spread.
The account seems verified, and knowing Alaska politics, and knowing that the high school pal of many of us, "Sourdough Newt", mentored her originally into politics in Wasilla, the manipulation, religious baiting and political hardball against a mellow community rings true.
One picture that emerges is of obsession with loyalty. A particularly damning episode is her reducing progressive property taxes and raising a sales tax for a hockey rink, including on food, in order to attract "big box" retail, read "Wal-Mart." And then the author, Anne Kilkenny, uses this astonishing phrase:
(She) Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots.That's what I thought it used to be. My god! What is it now?
Interesting set of articles here from the Progressive Alaska blog, out of Palmer, which is near Wasilla. This blog claims, with documentation, that taxes went up and expenditures expanded 63% under Mayor Palin. It's also worth noting that while Wasilla has very high rates of rape, domestic violence, and teenage pregnancy, Palin as governor fought funding for pregnant teens. I also am curious as to what books she wanted to ban so much she was willing to fire the librarian AND put people who opposed her on this on an "enemies list."
Know-nothingism, obession with political loyalty, religious baiting. W in a dress?
Speaking of Sourdough Newt, what seems to have happened is that there was a major fallout between him and Sarah related to family issues, legislative jobs, and former Republican State Senator Lyda Green, now famous for her hatred of Sarah Palin. Lyda Green of course was an oil tool. Somehow Sourdough Newt got on his creation's enemies list.
It's also worth remembering that it's not that Palin took on Big Oil so much as she took on the Big Oil that her husband doesn't work for.
posted by JAB at 9:11 AM
4 Comments:
I was thinking about Sourdough Newt just the other day. He seems an unlikely memoirist, but I hope he will overcome his natural shyness and produce a tell-all autobiography at some point.
Smart and engaging, I have always found his world view utterly alien (as he certainly has found mine). Nagel's bat has nothing on Sourdough Newt.
Since our different-ness is so great, and has been from Day 1, I conclude that it must be rooted in early childhood experiences. And this is the area of Sourdough Newt's character that I think we are least likely to gain much perspective on.
Certainly there was an Alex Keaton dynamic in the family. Many young men delight in adopting views at variance with their fathers', however, so this can't fully explain what Howell Heflin would call his 'strange-ness'.
What does explain it, in my view, is the same aspect of his childhood that makes his world view so familiar to conservative elites everywhere.
He grew up abroad, in a country riven by furious political violence between a secular left and a religious right. Civil wars, death squads, they had it all.
The real losers in that struggle were those duped by ideology (on either side). The winners were the cynical manipulators who gained money or power by playing the two sides against one another.
In the imaginary worlds of his teenage years, the one seat of unquestioned authority was The Cardinal (just as it had been in that far-away place) - except that, in those dark dreams, The Cardinal was dead.
In that Alice-in-Wonderland world, all lived by their wits. Moral leadership was not just ineffective, but invariably brought some kind of divine retribution upon those who attempted it.
The political dynamic in rural Alaska (and rural America) has a lot in common with that imaginary world, and a great deal in common with the political struggles in Latin America during the 20th Century.
That's not an accident. If Bill Clinton wanted the U.S. to become a European country, Bush and his crowd would be thrilled to see its social structure look more like Mexico's or Brazil's. And for all their apparent incompetence, they took many concrete steps to help us all move closer to their vision of what Norte America could be.
Sourdough Newt gets it. He's seen it work. He understands that when this logic takes over it can last for generations, and you don't want to be on the wrong side of power as it plays out.
Perhaps he knew, or perhaps he forgot, that sometimes it gets out of hand. The wrong people win, and the monsters come out to play.
When my ballot comes in the mail I'm going to see a GOP ticket featuring the oldest presidential candidate in history, backed by a VP candidate objectively less fit to govern than even Dan Quayle. All with a nice side order of conservative religious nuttiness. I don't see how a rational person - even an ideological conservative - can find that option attractive.
And yet the polls don't show a landslide. Say what you want about the convention, but they got Obama's negatives up a little. They planted that seed.
The GOP ticket has no right to win. They have earned nothing, and yet they are still in the game. It's not in the bag. As Mr. Patton was fond of saying in 1944 - "we could still lose this war."
And Sourdough Newt can get to work on his next creation.
A fascinating essay- like unwritten antagonist in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.
Sourdough Newt had come up in several conversations last night, because of the sudden, curious permutations of high school onto the national stage.
The professional poets agreed: Sourdough Newt has a touch of dark literature about him.
It probably is true that the child is the father of man, but in adolescence we also abandon some of the strategies we are trying out. So it's deeply unfair to extrapolate identity from that period of anyone's life.
But when I first saw this, I felt a shock of recognition. I felt very strongly that I had met that man before.
These things can go different ways, and people grow and change. Sourdough Newt is not Harry Lime. There is a goodness in him, too.
The Third Man may be my favorite movie-
But I'll take that 500 years of peace and democracy.
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