Sarah Palin’s nickname in high school was “Sarah Barracuda.”
Supposedly, this reflected “her competitive streak.”
Charming.
How did this happen? How does a child grow up with a grasping nature so extreme that she becomes nicknamed after a vicious carnivorous fish?
There aren’t many clues in Palin’s early biography, which reads like a carefully pruned and polished star cheerleader’s resume…which, of course, it is.
Sarah was born the third of four children. That’s our one clue. Perhaps she had to compete for attention with older and younger siblings.
At some point in Sarah’s life – I’d guess the first five minutes – she decided there wasn’t enough out there for her. At least, not enough out there for her if she was going to share any of it with anyone else.
Maybe it was a sense of poverty. Maybe the Palins were poorer than their neighbors. Or maybe competing with those siblings was enough. But somewhere during that childhood, profound feelings of deprivation developed in Sarah’s psyche, and a famine mentality set in.
After that, all we can do is sit back and watch a mighty appetite gobble everything in its path.
When people are subjected to a severe deprivation, like a famine, they hoard and deny others and generally act in ways they aren’t proud of. During the famine in China that occurred as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign in the late 1950’s, widespread starvation led to cannibalism among the rural peasantry. Hunger can drive people to do terrible things. They can turn vicious.
A bit like a barracuda, tearing off hunks of flesh to gulp down its maw.
A bit like Sarah Palin.
Here’s a charming quote from the Barracuda herself: “I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon-burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou.”
The mental image is of a gaping mouth, with sharp teeth.
How about her politics? Could they even be considered politics? Mostly, it boils down to Sarah, Sarah, Sarah – and making money for Sarah.
She quit her job as governor to give speeches to the highest bidder, write a book and work on tv – all for enormous sums of cash.
She was willing to speak (and no doubt thrill and inspire) the Tea Party wackos – for many, many thousands of dollars.
Even when she was working for John McCain, it was clearly all about Sarah – her expensive clothes, her big family (she has five children), her gigantic super-church, her enormous state – even the humongous “big box” stores she enticed to the little town of Wasilla to replace its now-moribund downtown.
Something in Sarah’s background left her feeling hungry – deeply hungry – and she is still grabbing up everything at the table. Her “politics” are a philosophy of greed. She can get married – but gay people can’t. She doesn’t want to pay taxes – even to help other Americans survive. She’s got her healthcare – if you don’t have yours, well, tough luck. She’ll drill for every drop of oil in a nature sanctuary until her giant SUV is purring like a kitten, slurping it all down, belching, and demanding more. Immigrants can stay out – this country is Sarah’s, securely stolen from indigenous peoples and guarded with guns guns guns and more guns, wonderful guns. Sarah doesn’t like government – she wants to go it alone, because she’s got hers, and you can worry about yourself, thank you very much.
Sarah wants to get a gun and go out in nature and kill something beautiful and devour it.
A couple more charming quotes:
“If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”
“I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.”
Sarah is a predator. She’s earning a lot of money chomping her way through a frightened minority of mostly older, white Americans who are terrified of the future and will buy all the double-cheeseburgers, super-size fries and giant cokes they need to maintain a secure perimeter of human fat cells. Hunkered down in their gated retirement communities, clinging to their beloved guns, they crouch by the glow of their wall-size flat-screen plasma tv’s and defend what’s rightfully theirs – which is to say, everything.
Sarah represents insecurity in love. Somewhere along the way, early on, she decided there wasn’t any love out there for her. So she had no love to spare for anyone else.
Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten.
There’s room for you next to the mashed potatoes.
That’s the barracuda’s creed.
When gay people come out of the closet, they usually run into some variation of the “but that’s unnatural” argument. This is the apparently sensible claim that it doesn’t make sense to be gay. Isn’t sex for procreation? Why would two males or two females become romantically involved if they can’t have a child together?
You can breed a chihuahua that weighs 2 pounds. Or you can breed an Old English Mastiff that weighs 300 pounds.
I mean raise other people’s children.
That’s why, throughout the world, gays are the unofficial backbone of the adoption system. Without them, many children would suffer terribly, never finding wiling, dedicated adoptive parents.
Last October, a law school placement director friend of mine forwarded me an email with a juicy piece of big law gossip. A former associate at Sullivan & Cromwell had offed himself. He was 39.
Most of the Western world seems to have had a good laugh this week at an unidentified Arab ambassador to Dubai.
The worst part is that couples often become hyper-focused on the wedding itself. These affairs can be enormous undertakings nowadays, which grow into monsters that gobble your life. The wedding -essentially a big party for your relatives – can become the shared dream.
Instead of bemoaning the death of family – or whatever you want to call it – how about we face the fact that you can’t judge the quality of a relationship based upon its longevity. You might spend a marvelous three years with someone and decide that it’s time to move on. Or you might stay together for sixty years and be totally miserable.
An adult is a whole person, not a half person. And if the other whole person leaves to try something different, he remains a whole person.
The People’s Therapist displayed his legendary tact and discretion during a recent interview with the lovely and talented Kashmir Hill, Associate Editor of the esteemed yet tasty legal blog, 
For more juicy brilliance from the lovely and talented Kashmir Hill, you can also check this out 
Children need a lot of attention. When they don’t get it, they’ll often act out – misbehave – in a desperate attempt to be paid attention to, even if the result is negative attention.
We can only hope a father figure – perhaps President Obama could fill in for Judge Zoll? – will arrive to give Brown the attention he needs. Maybe he should be forced to write a 1500-word essay on how his siblings would feel watching him destroy a chance at decent, affordable healthcare for millions of Americans.
Prince William, for his part, might choose to marry someone like Princess Diana, or he might not. His mother may well have been a lovely, giving person and the perfect model for a mate.
Christine Daniels was a transsexual sportswriter. For many years, she was known to thousands of sports fans as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, writing under the byline “Mike Penner.”
The news has been full of reports of Heidi Montag-Pratt and her claim to have undergone 10 separate plastic surgery procedures in one day. That includes rhinoplasty (a nose job), breast augmentation, lip collagen injections, chin reduction, and god only knows what else.
But, like the Buddha, his self-barrier remained intact. Within, he located a place of calm. The clamor and tumult outside only strengthened his resolve to walk the Middle Path – the path of moderation.
The recent arrest of the actor, Charlie Sheen, on domestic violence charges will make for a very brief, very important post.
Dear and Brad and Angie and Madge:
The testing child is also distrustful. If his own birth parents disowned him, why should he trust you? So he tests you. If you claim to love him just as much as your birth children, then how will you react when he smashes a toy, or refuses to obey you? He wants to know if your love is real – if it is the truly unconditional love he needs so badly. He may attempt to drive you away in the process of testing your love. There could be some tough times ahead as you struggle to enforce boundaries in a way that communicates love and safety.
Rage is helpless anger.
A patient told me she couldn’t get over a guy she’d been seeing.
Adult love is very different from child love. It begins with loving yourself.
3. You respect him. The best relationships contain a note of mutual awe. You think your partner is pretty darned terrific – and he returns the compliment.
Dr. King would have turned 81 this week – an excellent opportunity to discuss ageism, an insidious form of discrimination.
Sometimes a patient will stop during a session, mid-sentence, look abashed, and say:
The first thing the People’s Therapist notices about the Tea Party people is that they come to everything from a sense of deprivation. They are always – always always always – talking about their money, and how they don’t want anyone to get their hands on it. It’s theirs. They need it.
The People's Therapist 