Sunday, May 31, 2009

Levi and Tripp Johnston from Wasilla's budget hotel, the Agate Inn on Lake Lucille

"You can feel the Palins. From my budget hotel on Lake Lucille, I can see
the big wooden wall that surrounds their house, and a roof beyond it."


From the GQ article May 2009:
And he shall take issue with Sarah Palin. And he shall not abstain from loving Bristol. And he shall spend much time hunting bears. And, yes, he shall be a good man
By John Jeremiah Sullivan; Photographs by Ture Lillegraven

Late Frontier Myth, Early Formational Stages

The bird opened its belly, delivering more men onto the ground. They squawked at the boy and led him into the bird, and the bird moved off, and the ram forgot what had happened and went to check on his ewes, and the father returned to the locally owned gun shop in Wasilla, where they said, “Aren’t you supposed to be sheep hunting?” and he said, “Yeah, I was, till the Secret Service came and took my sheep-hunting partner!” and they laughed.

Levi was in the bird. It flew with him all the way to a city in another world, in what he would describe as the south, in Minnesota, and dropped him into a sort of conference room, full of talkative people—some of whose faces he knew without knowing how—and a guy was touching him, and before the smell of the open country had left his nostrils completely he was leaning back in a chair, having makeup applied to his face, to his eyes and neck, and gel worked into his hair. They had cut his hair. Indeed they had given him a superb haircut, probably the best he would ever have, a haircut designed to shape away the last traces of baby fat from his cheeks and define his jawline, and they stood him in the corner and dressed him from head to toe in new preppy clothes and looked him in the face and said, “You do not say a word.”

“Those words exactly?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” he answered.

If facts were unstable—it may not have been the Secret Service, it may have been campaign operatives

In roughly the past year, Levi has experienced:
(a) having dad leave home
(b) seeing mom get arrested and face incarceration, in national news
(c) watching own son be born, with Sarah Palin also in room
(d) dropping out of high school and taking electrician job
(e) losing fiancée, son, job for reasons that mystify him and may be political
(f) becoming instantaneously megafamous—Antichrist to some, slab of sweet Arctic man-beef to others—but either way finding self at center of momentous events with zero comprehension or aid after having left home to go on sheep hunt.

2 comments:

  1. Do you think there is credence to the persistent rumor that he has another son Conner, his first born when he was 13 years old?

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  2. I have heard the rumor about Levi having other children, I don't know how credible. When he writes his book, he will need to tell all or he will not be believable. That includes the true story of unsupervised teens in Wasilla and their penchant for alcohol and "partying," slang for using drugs.

    I think I read somewhere that Sherry and Keith Johnston had a son named Conner that is no longer living? I never heard his age, that could have been to cover up for Levi? They would be able to keep their family secrets, if not for being mixed up with the Palins. It looks like even the McCains were trapped in their hoax.

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