Sarah Palin's Parlor
One can only imagine the entrance to Sarah Palin's Parlor. Likely it is homey, filled with the smell of freshly cook jam, and the stuffed and mounted relics of her gamesmanship - perhaps like the picture featured below.
The photograph was taken in the parlor of the Chateau Tivoli in San Francisco while shooting film trailer for scene in “The House on Black Lake”. In novel protagonist Alexandra Brighton is ushered into the stately summer home of Ruth and Ramey Sandeley and is aghast to see the lineup of exotic animal head trophies and artifacts decorating the elegant room. Ruth tells Alexandra that her husband believes when you look into a powerful animal’s eyes and take its life you are bound forever. Of course, this is not a good omen for Alexandra.
Most hunters keep a souvenir of victims when they kill for sport, and not for survival. Yet, rarely do women lust for blood. “A woman gives life, and God, the father, takes it”, Ramey informs Alexandra. In the course of her journey she is betrayed by women with a thirst for second hand power and ultimately led into a patriarchal trap. Sarah Palin's hunting partner is not her mother, sister, or girl friend - it is her father. In her videotaped journey she finds a pioneer soul sister squatting in the depths of the Antarctic, who sews her own flesh wounds and professes to love blood and guts in the manner in which other woman covet jewels. She is not a not bold feminist in a frontier land, but rather a conservative leader in a modern world. She does not shoot for sustenance, but rather for the glory of the kill, and the camera that records the killings seeps a taste of the barbaric into mainstream experience. A female who gives and takes life for sport is clearly an anomaly, in all of nature. Dominance cannot succeed without its hand maidens, and there are rewards for those who are willing to play the game. What the protagonist in the story does not realize is that she is the trophy. In the course mankind's recorded history the display of a sacrificed victim has always been a symbol of power and domination.
Perhaps it is time for Sarah to clean her parlor of the relics of domination and fill it with trophies of empowerment. When she puts down the rifle and embraces mother earth, all creatures will feel more secure. A female role model that embodies the unique powers of the feminine, while igniting the loftier attributes of the male, carries the hope of a remarkable new world order.
