The Massacre of the Innocents

Ntodd puts me onto this, in which Sarah Palin out-Herods Herod:

Page 5: Here I learn something I didn't know and, if I were Sarah Palin, something I wouldn't want anyone to know. But Sarah hustles this fact to the front of the book because she sure as hell wants us to know it: Sarah surprised Todd with a "nice, needed, powerful gun" for Christmas in 2012. It was a "small act of civil disobedience," Palin writes, prompted by "the anti-gun chatter coming from Washington."

What was inspiring that anti-gun chatter in Washington in December of 2012? Oh, right: Twenty children and six teachers were shot dead in their classrooms by a deranged asshole with a "powerful gun." And before the grieving mothers and fathers of Newtown, Connecticut, could put their dead children in the ground, Sarah Palin ran out gun shopping. Buying Todd a gun in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was "fun," Palin writes—and, again, an act of "civil disobedience." Because gun nuts are a persecuted minority.

This paragraph about gun shopping in December of 2012—one first grader at Sandy Hook was shot 11 times—ends with Palin bragging about her tits. I'm not kidding.

Thus is our national discourse on guns carried out:  a ittle act of civil disobedience which involved purchasing a consumer product whose primary function is to be lethal.  Civil disobedience, rather than be a moral act by violating an unjust law, becomes a petty act of buying a gun because somebody shot up a school full of children, and that means the black helicopters with their special gun-only magnets are coming.  It doesn't mean children's bodies shredded by bullets; it means a danger for you!  Which is pretty much how Herod took the news of the Magi.

As for the rest of what he says there, Mr. Savage speaks for me.  But the anecdote, be it about this December or last, puts me in mind of Thomas Hardy:

  Christmas: 1924

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.

I doubt the latter portion of the Matthean nativity, the story that continues after the Magi leave, is much emphasized in Sarah Palin's church.  As I've said before, most Christians overlook it in the rush to pack up Christmas and put it away again before January 6, to move on to taxes and maybe Mardi Gras, and certainly Easter.  But her callousness especially makes me think of her spiritual ancestor:

When Herod realized he had been duped by the astrologers, he was outraged. He then issued a death warrant for all the male children in Bethlehem and surrounding region two years old and younger. this corresponded to the time [of the star] that he had learned from the astrologers. With this event the prediction made by Jeremiah the prophet came true:
'In Ramah the sound of mourning
and bitter grieving was heard:
Rachel weeping for her children.
She refused to be consoled:
They were no more.' " (Matthew 2: 16-18, SV)

Maybe that's more appropriate than Hardy.  I certainly think Sarah's response to Rachel weeping would be to applaud Herod for his "law 'n' order" stance.  I just know anything is more appropriate than her sickening anecdote, and her complete lack of awareness of what her reaction to the Newtown massacre really means.