[Peace-discuss] Re: Fwd: [MAPforPeace] Sarah Palin: The view from
Alaska
Jenifer Cartwright
jencart13 at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 13 14:48:03 CDT 2008
Didja catch DN! today? All the recent support from the Palins for the AK Inde Party (a buncha nut cases) on top of all this other stuff.... Glad she's on the ticket since she appears (along w/ economy) to be causing McCain support to plummet. Still, in consideration of the election-theft factor (a Repub specialty), I'll be relieved when it drops a whole lot farther!
--Jenifer
--- On Mon, 10/13/08, fransears at netscape.net wrote:
-----Original Message-----
Amid "Troopergate" and other government scandals, including killing
wolf pups, an Alaskan writer explains why the Palin phenomenon rings
hollow in his home state.
By Nick Jans
Oct. 11, 2008
JUNEAU, Alaska — I sat on the bank of the Kobuk River in northwest
arctic Alaska on a mid-September morning. Upstream somewhere, wolves
were howling — their chorus filling the silence, close enough that I
could hear the aspiration at the end of each wavering call. Behind
me, the slate-gray heave of the Brooks Range spilled off toward the
north, the shapes of some peaks so familiar I've seen them in my
sleep. The nearest highway lay 250 miles away. This is the Alaska
where I spent half my life, and the only place that's ever felt like
home — the land of Eskimo villages, waves of migrating caribou and
seemingly limitless space.
Though I was beyond the reach of the Internet and cellphones, and
life was filled with rutting bull moose, incandescent autumn light
and fresh grizzly tracks, I knew that thousands of miles to the
south, the rest of the country was getting a crash course on our
governor, Sarah Palin — someone who believes that climate change
isn't our fault; is dead set against a woman's right to choose; has
supported creationism in the schools; and was prayed over by a
visiting minister at her church to shield her against witchcraft.
How was I to explain to all my lower 48 friends and writing
colleagues how such a person could have been elected to lead our
state — let alone been chosen to possibly become vice-president?
Truth be told, I was as startled as anyone when I heard the news. At
first I thought the McCain campaign's announcement was some sort of
bad joke.
In the broadest sense, Palin is a poseur. Alaska is too large and
culturally diverse (it's only a bit smaller than the entire lower 48
east of the Mississippi, and once was divided into four time zones)
to be summed up by some abstract, romanticized notion. And even if it
could be, it sure wouldn't be symbolized by Palin. "The typical
Alaskan? She couldn't be farther from it," says Alaska House
Minority Leader Beth Kertulla.
Still, Palin is a genuine Alaskan — of a kind. The kind that flowed
north in the wake of the '70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and
attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking,
independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into
a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes
and an all-for-me mentality.
Palin's Alaska is embodied in Wasilla, a blue-collar, sharp-elbowed
town of burgeoning big box stores, suburban subdivisions, evangelical
pocket churches and car dealerships morphing across the landscape,
outward from Anchorage, the state's urban epicenter. She has lived
in Wasilla practically all her life, and even now resides there, the
first Alaska executive to eschew the white-pillared mansion in
Juneau, down on the Southeast Panhandle.
Folks in the Mat-Su Valley, as the area is known, overwhelmingly
support their favorite daughter's policies — including a state-
sanctioned program where private pilots chase down and kill wolves
from small aircraft, and another that favors oil drilling offshore in
the arctic sea ice and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These
same voters forage at McDonald's and Safeway in their hunter
camouflage, and make regular wilderness forays up and down the
state's limited highway grid with ATVs, snowmobiles and airboats in
tow behind their oversize trucks. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the
roar echoing across the state, all the way to the upper Kobuk, where
easements for the highways of tomorrow are already staked out across
the tundra.
Like many Alas kans, I resent Palin's claims that she speaks for all
of us, and cringe when she tosses off her stump speech line, "Well,
up in Alaska, we…." Not only did I not vote for her, she represents
the antithesis of the Alaska I love. As mayor, she helped shape
Wasilla into the chaotic, poorly planned strip mall that it is; as
governor, she's promoted that same headlong drive toward development
and despoilment on a grand scale, while paying lip service to her
love of the place.
As for that frontierswoman shtick, take another look at that
hairpiece-augmented beehive and those stiletto heels. Coming from a
college-educated family, living in a half-million- dollar view home,
basking in a net worth of $1.25 million, and having owned 40-some
registered motorized vehicles in the past two decades (including 17
snowmobiles and a plane) hardly qualifies Palin and her clan as the
quintessential Joe Six-Pack family unit — though the adulation from
that quarter shows the Palins must be fulfilling some sort of role-
model fantasy.
Palin can claim to know Alaska; the fact is, she's seen only a
minuscule fraction of it — and that doesn't include Little Diomede
Island, the one place in Alaska where you actually can see Russia. So
she can ride an ATV and shoot guns. Set her down in the bush on her
own and I bet we'd discover she's about as adept at butchering a
moose and building a20fire at 40 below zero as she is at discussing
Supreme Court decisions. And that mountain-woman act is only the tip
of a hollow iceberg.
Palin, and by extension, the McCain campaign, has hijacked our state
for political purposes, much to the chagrin of the tens of thousands
of Alaskans who loathe what she stands for. Her much-touted
popularity among residents has eroded over the past six weeks to
somewhere in the mid-60s — not exactly what you'd expect in support
of a home girl making a White House run.
There are no doubt a variety of reasons for this decline, but many
Alaskans are embarrassed — not just by her, but for our state and
for ourselves. What's with the smug posturing, recently adopted fake
Minnesota accent, and that gosh-darn-it hockey mom pitch? Maybe it
plays well in Peoria (and presumably Duluth), but it's all an
act. "She's definitely put on a new persona since she's been a
vice-presidential candidate," says Kertulla, who has worked closely
with Palin for the past 18 months. "I don't even recognize her."
Affectations aside, there's plenty about Palin we Alaskans do
recognize, and all too well. She's already proven to us that her
promises of transparent government, attendant to the will of the
people, are bear pucky. We know about her private e-mail accounts and
her systematic obstruction of the Alaska Legislature' s investigation
of the so-called Trooperga te scandal. But let's turn to her
environmental record, where a similar pattern of obfuscation
continues.
First, Palin pushed hard, along with sport hunting and guiding
interests, to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have stopped
the state's current aerial wolf control program, which had been
criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Research Council for flawed science. Now her administration has
pointedly refused to respond to repeated public information requests
(I'm one of the petitioners, and a potential litigant), regarding
the apparently illegal killing of 14 wolf pups at their dens on the
Alaska Peninsula this spring by state personnel, including two high-
level Department of Fish and Game administrators. A biologist at the
scene admitted to an independent wolf scientist that the 6-week-old
pups were held down and shot in the head, one by one. This inhumane
practice, known as "denning," has been illegal for 40 years. But a
simple request for information on the details of this operation,
including to what extent the governor was involved in the decision,
has resulted in a typical Palinesque roadblock and a string of
untruths.
Our I-love-Alaska governor was also instrumental in defeating a
ballot initiative to stop development of a gargantuan open-pit mine
incongruously known as Pebble near the headwaters of the most
productive salmon watershed in the state, Bristol Bay. T he current
mine design calls for building the world's largest earthen dam to
hold back an enormous lake of toxic waste — this in a known
earthquake zone. Crazy stuff, yet Palin openly opposed the
initiative, in lock step with international mining corporations that
invested millions of dollars in a misinformation campaign.
But Palin's certified anti-environmental whopper is her lawsuit
against the Bush administration (of all outfits) for listing polar
bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. She claimed
Alaska's own experts had completed a review of the federal data and
concluded that the listing was uncalled for. The truth was, state
biologists had come to the opposite conclusion. But that report was
never released, and her researchers had a gag clamped on them. Palin
simply didn't want anything to get in the way of offshore oil
drilling in moving pack ice — where there is no way to contain, let
alone clean up, catastrophic spills.
Whenever science or rules get in Palin's way, she blows them off.
Says homesteader Mark Richards, co-founder of the Alaska Chapter of
Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (a moderate conservation
group), "Palin, like Governor Murkowski before her, is part and
parcel of the good-ol-boy network that says, `Alaska is open for
business.'"
Want to talk to Sarah? As governor, she has been accessible only on
her carefully chosen terms, a trend we're n ow witnessing on the
national stage. And how about those Katie Couric moments when she
drifts just a skosh off a well-rehearsed script? Are those a recent
phenomenon, brought on by all this new information, pressure and the
liberal-gotcha media? Nah. She's been spouting "political
gibberish" (to quote gubernatorial opponent Andrew Halcro) since she
arrived on the Alaska scene. Yet somehow she continues to get away
with it.
In the end, Palin's attempt to cash in on the Eau d'Alaska mystique
as she supports its destruction sickens those of us who do love this
land, not for what it will be some day, after the roads and mines and
pipelines and cities and malls are all in, but for what it is now.
What we see before us is the soul of an ambitious, ruthless, Parks
Highway hillbilly — a woman who represents the Alaska you probably
never want to meet, and the one we wish never existed. That said,
we're all too willing to take her back. The alternative is just too
damn frightening.
Writer and photographer Nick Jans has lived in Alaska for 30 years.
He is the author of "The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal
Obsession with Alaskan Bears," a member of USA Today's board of
editorial contributors and a contributing editor of Alaska Magazine.
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