The Doppelgängers from west Texas

This afternoon I sent this e-mail to a few people:

I’m watching the video of Perry’s announcement. What I’m about to say is not a prediction, but a passing thought, nothing more than that: I think Bachmann will win the nomination. Romney doesn’t stand for anything. Perry would seem to have an advantage over Romney, in that he has a stronger ideological profile, but I think that his Texas persona, especially his hard Texas accent with its absence of diphthongs (for example “lahk” instead of “like,” or “Washington’s desahr,” instead of “Washington’s desire”), after eight years of the same from Bush, will turn people off. Also, like Bush, Perry does the evangelical Christian thing, and, like Bush, he mixes it with the neoconservative thing. [And see this comment for the close fit between evangelical Christianity and neoconservatism.] All this makes him too similar to Bush.

Perry does say some good things, he has a commanding presence and a lot of political skills. But intuitively I don’t see Republican voters choosing someone so similar to Bush. So, even though, on paper, Perry would seem to be the person best able to beat Obama, it’s Bachmann who represents the “new thing” and my thought of the moment is that she will be the nominee.

Shortly after I sent that e-mail, James N., who had not seen it, sent this to me:

Wikipedia tells us:

A doppelgänger is a tangible double of a living person in fiction, folklore, and popular culture that typically represents evil. In the vernacular, the word has come to refer to any double or look-alike of a person. [LA adds: Note that in the title of this entry I am not merely calling Bush Perry’s Doppelgänger, but am calling them both Doppelgängers, because they seem like doubles of each other.]

The word also is used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection. Doppelgängers often are perceived as a sinister form of bilocation and generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person’s friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one’s own doppelgänger is an omen of death. [LA replies: This would seem like a good reason not to support Perry, since the election, as president of the United States, of a Doppelgänger of a recent disastrous U.S. president would be an omen of national death.]

In Norse mythology, a vardoger is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance. In Finnish mythology, this is called having an Etiäinen, i.e., “a firstcomer.” In Ancient Egyptian mythology, a “ka” was a tangible “spirit double” having the same memories and feeling as the original person. In one Egyptian myth titled “The Greek Princess,” an Egyptian view of the Trojan War, a ka of Helen was used to mislead Paris of Troy, helping to stop the war. In some myths, the doppelgänger is a version of the Ankou, a personification of death; in a tradition of the Talmud, to meet oneself means to meet God.

- end of initial entry -

August 16

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

I have a theory in respect of Mitt Romney that is at least as plausible as the Doppelgänger theory in respect of Rick Perry. Romney’s hair, perhaps too often lacquered, became an entity, a primitive but powerful one, in its own right. The hair “uploaded” Romney’s personality, what there was of it, into itself, deleted it, and “downloaded” itself into the now-inert body. For some time Romney has been his hair. This process is a new variant of body snatching, which has afflicted American politics for many decades (since 1956, to put a date on it). I am still investigating what occult causality produced Hillary Clinton.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 15, 2011 10:14 PM | Send