Written by Eric Francis   

I was asking myself last night: What is at the roots of all this political controversy we are seeing these days? If you strip off all the categories of liberal and Republican and extremist, what are the values beneath them? What is this whole game we are seeing really about? What if we were all naked, all the time?Let's see. First there is plain old avoidance. The world and most of its societies have some extreme problems on our hands, problems that threaten our survival. Our big systems and often our personal lives feel like they are about to implode. We retreat into either ignorance, drama or the dog and pony show of politics. Avoidance is the first cousin of denial. We have a lot to deny.Then there is a very old tribal struggle that (as it has for a while) happens to be between those who identify as Christian, Muslim and Jewish. People are put in categories based on what side they choose and whether or not they believe that what someone else thinks is a threat really is a threat. To see the racism beneath the whole terrorism thing takes some self-reflection. The only reason that bombing Iraq is not considered terrorism is that one side was in uniform.The naming of an enemy is crucial to the process of ego-identification. If you have an enemy, you exist. If you hate Muslims, you're supposedly a true American, and if you don't, you're a traitor. If you feel guilty about war and hatred, blame God.Next, as mentioned, is the battle between the haves and the have-nots. This can be summarized as self-interest in a kind of brutal debate with common interest, and also another form of old-fashioned enemy making. The problem in the United States is that the poor and even your average suburban types think they are rich, and then fight one another. A postal worker with eight kids can pick up a gun because he doesn't want someone else to have heath insurance -- and instead of referring him for counseling, we put him on TV. (This is true.)Last, there is the issue of how we feel about the female body: whose is it, anyway? Why is it the female body that represents a common battleground where we agree to wage ideological (and often physical) war?Note that the two women getting the most airplay in these Saturn-Pluto weeks are former beauty queens: Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean. That does not mean they're inherently unintelligent; they can speak for themselves and clarify that point. Neither would be getting the attention they are getting unless they had won the genetic lottery and their particular form of beauty is what is the most coveted and valued today. Britney Spears has more Twitter followers than Barack Obama.These women are presented to us as some mixture of sex bait and birthing pod. But they are morally pure. Carrie Prejean is a particularly hilarious example of the sexually pure sex symbol who attempts to enforce her purported morals on others. (This is Vesta turned against herself; there was an interesting Vesta aspect this week as she changed signs into Virgo, by the way -- Vesta conjunct Transpluto in the last degree of Leo.) Remember, Prejean became famous first as a sex symbol; then for her inflammatory comments about gay marriage, which got her Miss California title stripped. Apparently this is not all that got peeled off. Soon enough, she became famous for her sex tapes, which, by the way, featured her alone and I'm curious to see.)Now she is famous for how sanctimonious she is, and is being floated as a potential congressional candidate. I wonder if she has sex, or just makes those videos. Meanwhile, she draws 100% of her power from matching an image of sexual desirability which is amplified a few orders of magnitude by her supposed unavailability. Then we say: but she's so intelligent. What awesome values she has.Sarah Palin is playing the same game. She presents herself as the picture of moral purity, and everyone knows she's a Milf. This affects men and women because men are supposed to want her and women are supposed to want to be like her. The cover-up is that she's some kind of political genius who happens to be hot; who rose from mayor to governor to vice presidential contender to culture queen 2012 hopeful. In fact she can't even get along with her own campaign staff, and could not finish her term. I know why: it would get in the way of her book tour.The Palin phenomenon is beyond cynical -- because the whole conservative movement has built its fortunes, such as they are, on squashing sex from every conceivable direction, creating a culture so sex-starved that it's on the brink of insanity. There is no form of sex except for married, monogamous heterosexuality that is not subject to public moral attack, prosecution or paroxysms of guilt; or death as the wages of sin. Then she emerges as the savior of those starving and thirsting and longing for mother, supposedly maternal but cold as a gun, if you ask me. She is unavailable and at the same time she flaunts her desirability. We have a few emotional blocks from seeing her purely as a sex symbol, one of which is that she's presented as the savior of our purity and our values: the American Dream.This phenomenon was described by Wilhelm Reich, said to be Freud's brightest student but really quite a bit more. He proposed this in the 1930s as the basic recipe for promoting fascism. The formula is, push purity and therefore create a sexual frenzy so intense that it transforms into a mystical longing, which is then answered by a charismatic leader. Any alternative to this is derided (or prosecuted) as disgusting, reprehensible debauchery. Yet here is the catch: if you tally up all these moral issues, notice how many are focused on the female body rather than the male body.Which leads me to mammograms. I don't think there's a woman as close to a computer as you are now who has not heard about the recommendation that women in their 40s not be given regular mammogram screening. This battle is a distraction from the two real issues at the core, neither of which I have heard mentioned, and which again turn the female body into a war zone. So while I'm standing here with a microphone, here's my take.One, do the mammograms themselves cause breast cancer, with their annual dose of radiation?Second, what are the more pervasive causes of breast cancer? Study after study demonstrates that breast cancer is caused or fuelled by environmental toxins such as dioxins, PCBs, pesticides and numerous other chemicals, all of which mimic estrogen and other hormones. These chemicals will show up in everything you eat except maybe an organic carrot. Their manufacturers wear suits and assure us they are safe.But I ask you: why is General Electric, one of the biggest hormone polluters, also one of the biggest manufacturers of medical imaging equipment? And what does this have in common with Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean?