Photo: Associated Press
It seems the media and bloggers cannot get enough of Sarah Palin. So much is being published so quickly that not even the fact checkers at the urban legends site can keep up with it. There is a lot of Palin BS on the net from both left and right. My belief is that a lot of this is intentional because the more misinformation out there, the more people just begin to blow off any information about Palin. People become so thoroughly confused that they finally have no idea what is the truth and so they give up trying to find it.
One Palin story resonated with me because it very closely resembles an incident I wrote about in the book The Strange Death of Liberal America. Littleton, Colorado provides an instructive example and unsettling parallel to Palin’s actions as mayor of Wasilla. In most minds, this Denver suburb still remains infamously associated with the shootings at Columbine High School. Littleton actually has two school districts: one, Jefferson County on the western boarder, contains Columbine, the other is the Littleton district, where before Columbine, another “massacre” took place whose consequences, while less bloody, should haunt us as we seek to understand the Era of Bad Feelings.
The Columbine shootings stemmed from the inexplicable acts of two teenagers, the strange turnings of their minds distorted by hormones and elemental rights of passage that lie in atavistic regions of the brain. The first Littleton massacre represents a major skirmish in a crucial battle that is still waging over the future of American education and the fate of Liberal America. The shots fired in that first battle aimed squarely at the heart of public schools and their sounds reverberate today in classrooms across the country.
What happened in Littleton in 1993-94 did not receive much media attention, but anyone in education has heard the story. It revolves around a school district take-over by right wing activists campaigning against Outcome-Based Education (OBE), a loose school reform effort aimed at teaching students how to think as well as to memorize facts.
Before the takeover, Superintendent Cile Chavez was named Colorado Superintendent of the Year and the district had been nationally known for its achievements. Visitors from more than 100 school districts in thirty states attended district-hosted monthly open forums to see the innovations and apply them to their own schools. Other districts brought Littleton faculty members to conduct workshops in their schools.
When the reactionaries succeeded in getting a majority on the school board, the turmoil began. In what became known as “the Sunday-afternoon massacre,” the new board fired the superintendent and people began digging trenches. More than a thousand residents turned out to support Chavez, but their protests, which landed them on the front pages of area papers, did not reverse the decision.
Chavez described the new Board’s style as “vigilante consumerism” in which people not only want to be involved in decision making, but insist that decisions go their way. She said:
I decided as superintendent I didn’t want to deliver what the new board wanted. I drew the line on the way they were treating people. They wanted a top-down management. I couldn’t operate that way.
Chavez moved on to become a much-in-demand speaker and consultant, working with education organizations across the country on leadership and change issues. Her story created a large buzz in education circles, yet the media’s ignorance, either deliberate or not – it really makes no difference–never brought the story to the general public.
Regie Routman, who has also written about the Littleton take-over, believes,
In retrospect, some parents said that they voted for ‘back to basics’ as ‘the answer’ to various perceived problems but they didn’t really know what they were voting for.
In an interview after the takeover, one reactionary leader made a statement that still gives me chills:
I don’t think we’re going to end up killing each other off.
In Strange Death I wrote:
The story bears repeating for it provides a possible blueprint for the fate of other public schools. There seems little doubt the takeover took place through what reactionary strategists refer to as stealth candidates, people who hide their true beliefs so they can get elected.
Once elected, stealth candidates, like an ideological suicide bomber, have several possible missions. First, convert the system to conform to the Counterrevolutionary agenda. If this doesn’t work, advocate a slanted policy like those school board members in Dover, Pennsylvania, who tried to inject religion into the curriculum in the guise of ideas like “intelligent design.” Finally, if you can’t subvert from within, undermine the system by attacking government officials whenever possible. A Holy War against the infidel liberals has been declared and nothing short of symbolically taking over Jerusalem will do.
At the time I wrote that I had never heard of Sarah Palin or Wasilla, Alaska and never did I suspect that someone who essentially had conducted the equivalent of Littleton’s “massacre” would be running for Vice President of the United States. Although a great deal of misinformation is circulating about Sarah Palin, when you examine her actions as mayor you can understand why her nickname is Sarah Barracuda–and it has nothing to do with basketball.
When Palin first ran for city council, she was such a novice an incumbent council member took her around town and introduced her to people. She then quickly moved from there to running for mayor, using the old GOP cutback government line. Guess who was one of Sarah Barracuda’s first targets after she was elected?
According to the New York Times, Palin’s mayor campaign was Wasilla’s first exposure to “wedge politics:”
Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf.
Her opponent, incumbent John C. Stein described the onslaught in language that echoes Ceil Chavez:
Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’
As mayor her acts of retribution have become the stuff of legend. One was the firing of police chief Irl Stambaugh which eerily presages her recent firing of Alaska’s Commissioner of Public Safety amd also echoes the firing of Chavez. Like Chavez, Stambaugh was a widely-recognized figure in the state, being nominated for law enforcement official of the year.
The week after Palin was elected, Stambaugh asked her if he still had a job. According to notes Stambaugh kept of that meeting
She answered that she was elected to make change. She went on to state that the NRA didn’t like me and that they wanted change.
Not long after that The Seattle Times writes:
Palin wrote to all the department heads, including Stambaugh, asking for letters of resignation. She said she would then decide which to accept.
Palin kept Stambaugh for awhile, but one late January day, Palin wasn’t snowmobiling or hunting moose, she was hunting bigger game. An assistant of Palin’s walked up and gave Stambaugh an envelope. Inside was a letter from Palin, saying Stambaugh was fired.
I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the City of Wasilla.
Stambaugh’s wrongful-termination lawsuit was thrown out in 2000 by a federal judge who said Palin had the right to terminate him. He is now retired.
This was the infamous Wasilla Massacre. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Stambaugh wasn’t the only one to receive a termination letter:
Similar letters went to librarian Mary Ellen Emmons, public works director Jack Felton and finance director Duane Dvorak
But perhaps the most controversial story concerns Palin’s attempt to fire Emmons. The librarian had refused to consider removing from the library some books that Palin wanted off the shelves. Since this incident has received considerable national attention, the Anchorage Daily News has followed up on its earlier story of the matter.
In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her — starting before she was sworn in — about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose. Emmons told the Frontiersman she flatly refused to consider any kind of censorship.
Wasilla resident Anne Kilkenny, who has become almost as big a media phenomenon as Palin, told the Daily News that at a council meeting:
Sarah said to Mary Ellen, ‘What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?”
Subsequent investigations have failed to turn up any instances of books actually being removed from the library, and Emmons, now married and living in Fairbanks, has steered clear of the controversy.
Other Alaskans have weighed in on Palin’s character. Pollster Dave Dittman, who worked for her gubernatorial campaign, told the conservative Weekly Standard magazine in 2007:
The landscape is littered with the bodies of those who crossed Sarah.
Alaska state Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican who first helped Palin get started in her career, notes:
You go under the bus and find a crowd there.
Victoria Naegele, then the managing editor of The Frontiersman, recalled of Ms. Palin’s first year in office:
It was like we were warped into real politics instead of just ‘Do you like Joe or Mary for the job?’
Well, real politics, Sara Palin-style have now come to the rest of America. Former Littleton superintendent Ceil Chavez reflected on what happened in her community with a prescience that echoes today:
People’s tolerance level is low, and lots of people are just angry in general. And there’s a huge fear factor in society today . . . We’re living in a period of major isolation. Here in Denver, as in other communities, walls are going up around neighborhoods. What is the real message of that?
Now the questions that plagued both Littleton and Wasilla reverberate across America. Do we want an entire nation to face what happened in those communities? Palin’s “in-your-face” acceptance speech had to make you wonder.
While the two events took place in different contexts, they share some common themes that should all put us on guard as this election plays out. Both grew out of the religious right’s desire to not only enter politics but also to impose its values on the rest of us. The “massacres” at Littleton and Wasilla and the one in Dover, Pennsylvania are as close as this country has come to an American Taliban, religious extremists committed to turning democracy into theocracy.
As with the Taliban, both incidents show how far the religious right will go in imposing it ideology on the rest of us. What is notable is how in each incident the American Taliban went after key public institutions–in one education and in the other law enforcement and the library. Should there be any question the American Taliban are out to control our minds they need only look at Wasilla and Columbine.
Finally using tactics eerily reminiscent of the Afghan Taliban, the American Taliban eerily presented themselves as classic reformers. The Afghan Taliban promised to rid the country of the Russian invaders and restore Afghan society. The Littleton Taliban would take education “back to the basics.” The Wasilla Taliban would bring good government. Only when they had control was the extent of their agenda revealed. Sarah Palin did not, as some allege, purge the Wasilla library of books, but that she even thought about it is scary enough.
Wasilla, Littleton and the nomination of Sarah Palin ask what kind of America do we want? Do we want a country where religious ideology reigns unchecked? Do we want a country where dissenting voices are purged? Do we want a democracy or a theocracy?
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