Hans Baldung Grien - Eve, Serpent and Death (Oil on wood, 1512)
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Republican Gomorrah, Max Blumenthal has posted at The Daily Beast a clear look into the warped world of Sarah Palin and her Pentecostal church in Wasila, AK.
Max Blumenthal is one of very few investigators-too few, in my opinion--who put events in their proper mythological context. Trying to understand Sarah Palin, absent the warped mythology she has learned from her church, makes as much sense as comprehending the above painting without its mythic context.
Tell me, o reader my dear Reader: by what myth are you living your life? Cosmos as a construct, an artifact, a machine mastered by its maker, a cosmic male tyrant, maybe? Society as the holy war machine of an absentee landlord? Our leaders as god's own agents here on Earth?
If you want to pretend the cosmos is a machine, that's fine; but then, so must you be. So scientists and Sarah Palin have that much in common: both think of the cosmos as a machine; Palin's crowd think themselves the favorites of the political master of that mechanism; scientists inhabit the same mechanism, only now godless, substituting themselves and their laws for the those of the cosmic tyrant.
Global warming, in this view, is the direct result of our attempt to machine the source of machines and ourselves into submission. The mythos of "life as holy war machine commanded by tyrants" is killing us ever faster all the time, perhaps at the rate of increase of our mechanical advantage.
So will the ultimate extreme makeover ever be attempted: will someone, likely a male, ever try to put the whole world under his boot or thumb all at once with a preemptive nuclear strike? If that person is anything like Sarah Palin, it's all but certain.
Warring their way to Armageddon is just what they do.