Booman recently wrote a short piece titled Palin’s Snakebit Hockey Mom Routine. It was about Sarah Palin’s recent misadventure in St. Louis, where St. Louis Blues goalie Manny Legace suffered a hip flexor injury that occurred when he slipped on the carpet placed on the ice for America’s favorite hockey mom so that she could perform a ceremonial dropping of the puck without herself slipping and possibly bruising her precious, Neiman-Marcus-sheathed little ass.
Booman ended the piece with the words “Do you believe in Mojo?”
Now as you may or may not know I have been writing a great deal about Sarah Palin’s connection with an extremist Christian, Taliban-like movement known as “The Third Wave” or “Joshua’s Army”, among other names. ( Sarah Palin And Her Demon-Possessed Witchunters might be a good place to start if you have not read about this phenomenon. Or go to dogemperor’s page over at Daily Kos to be truly frightened and amazed by it. This woman is the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth front for a truly nasty scene. Hitler-level nasty. Check it out.)
Anyway…this “Do you believe in Mojo?” question got me to thinking.
Read on for more if you so desire.
“Do I believe in Mojo?
OHHHhhh yes!!!
I do indeed.
I believe in an expanded version of what is popularly called “mojo”.
mojo-n., pl. -jos or -joes.
1. A magic charm or spell.
2. An amulet, often a small flannel bag containing one or more magic items, worn by adherents of hoodoo or voodoo.
3. Personal magnetism; charm.[Perhaps ultimately from Fula moco’o, medicine man.]
Word Origins: mojo
from Fula
This word originated in CameroonIf your mojo is working, you lead a charmed life. That’s because mojo, in its original sense, is a charm, kept in a cloth bag. Depending on which conjure doctor you go to, the charm can be roots, rats, snakes, lizards, pumpkin seeds, dirt, clay, or steel wool. Those were ingredients mentioned in North Carolina in 1962. Back in the late 1930s, in Memphis, Tennessee, to make a mojo one expert said you would sew a red flannel bag with these ingredients: High John de Conker (a plant known also as Solomon’s seal), black lodestone, Adam and Eve root, and violet incense powders. A 1946 account from New Orleans said that the mojo was “the leg bone of a black cat that’s been killed in a graveyard at midnight.”
If your mojo is working, you have sex appeal. But if someone else touches or even sees your mojo, it can lose its power. That’s the explanation of the lyrics in the 1928 blues song: “My rider’s got a mojo and she won’t let me see…. She’s got to fool her daddy, she’s got to keep that mojo hid; but papa’s got something for to find that mojo with.” Written evidence for the word goes back to 1926 in the song title, “My Daddy’s Got the Mojo, But I Got The Say-So.” Nowadays the word is widely used, often with no reference to a magical cloth bag but simply meaning power, influence, or advantage.
The word is African American. Its origin is uncertain, but it seems probable that mojo ultimately came from Africa. If it did, a good candidate for the source is moco’o, meaning a conjure doctor or person who works magic. That word is from the Fula or Fulfulde language, a member of the Fulani branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Fula is spoken as a native language by two-thirds of a million people in Cameroon, and by four million more in Cameroon as a second language. One other English word that may possibly come from Fula (if not from Mandingo) is yam (1657).
Every religion believes in something akin to mojo.
There was a song during Prohibition in the U.S.. An anti-Prohibition ditty.
50 Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong
Yup.
Good thought.
The current Western-European/American-influenced world is perhaps the first truly secular society ever to exist on this earth. The term “God” is in this culture is largely just a code word for some sort of situational morality, a morality that is most often imposed from the highest reaches of corporate governmental power with an eye only to societal subservience and its consequent profit to the corporate state.
Well…50 quadrillion ancestors are not likely to have been wrong either, and prior to the current dominant culture the idea of religion, of God-consciousness, call it what you will…the belief in some set of higher powers that work on levels not easily perceptible, understandable or controllable by most human beings…was the water in which almost all humans swam. Life was literally inconceivable without it.
There is negative mojo and there is positive mojo. (And then there is neutral mojo as well, but why get truly complicated here. Let’s stay with the normal model for a while. It works, to some degree, and it is easily understood by the most common sort of two-dimensional thought.)
Ms. Palin is dealing with the negative kind.
It works in a manner of speaking, but it always goes bad eventually. Read the Bible or the Koran for more on that idea if you need some backup.
Here is one of her mojo providers.
Thomas Muthee.
Check HIM out.
You figure it out.
And my word is this:
The more violent you become, the more committed you become, the quicker you will see things happen in this region.
This is not the great soul of Gandhi speaking.
It is not the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.
It is simply mainstream bad mojo…YOU know, the kind that was working on Hitler as well (Go here and here for a beginner’s course on that idea if you are in need of such a thing.) … and it is working through Sarah Palin right now.
Watch her.
This will continue after the election.
Palin allies report rising campaign tension
By: Ben Smith
October 25, 2008 08:30 PM ESTEven as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign’s already-tense internal dynamics.
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.
“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said.
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.
Bet on it.
Bad mojo is DEEPLY in action on the right.
Watch it.
And oppose it.
Do I believe in mojo?
OHHHhhh yes!!!
Bet on it.
And you should too.
On the evidence.
Watch it work, and then oppose it on every level possible.
Please.
Thank you.
Later…
AG
