Really are worlds apart
Toolbox
Willem Lang - Published: July 19, 2009
You've just gotta love Sarah Palin! Unless, perhaps, she's your state's governor, and her antics are distracting the state from its business.
Or unless you're Mitt Romney, trying to make the next Republican presidential primary campaign a sober affair that you can control. Or unless you're Mike Huckabee, fearful of being outflanked on the anti-abortion right. Or unless you're an Arctic wolf, dodging large-caliber bullets fired from a helicopter. Other than those, I can't think of any good reason not to thank Providence for sending her to us.
Named after a feisty Jewish lady – the very first Jewish lady, as a matter of fact – who gave birth at the age of ninety, our Sarah's a chip off that old block. You may recall that the first Sarah felt disrespected by her husband's slave, who'd borne him a son. She complained, and her husband sent the slave away to die in the wilderness with her son. But God saved them at the last second, just as he'll save the media mavens currently savoring our Sarah's discomfiture.
It's hard for us here in what Alaskans call "the Lower Forty-Eight" to appreciate the distance between us and them – and I don't mean just geography – unless we spend some time with Alaskans and listen carefully. The sobriquet is often loaded with sarcasm, as in, "I could never live with all the (deleted) regulations y'all have down there in the Lower Forty-Eight!"
The southern accent is accurate; there are an awful lot of transplanted Tennesseans up there. A group of Vermonters on a Public Radio tour managed to get an audience some years ago with the speaker of the Alaskan House, a Tennessee native and Army wife who, when her husband's northern tour was up, stayed. Imagine the Vermonters' reactions when she declared loudly that "Captain Hazelwood there, the fella that wrecked the Exxon Valdez, he should have gotten a (deleted) medal! Our oil money from Prudhoe Bay there was drying up, and he gave us three year's work cleaning up the Sound at government wages."
Or the fellow, practically immobile in snowmobile duds, who warned my buddy Dudley and me that, coming from New Hampshire, where it never gets really cold, we'd probably freeze our (deleteds) as we skied north for 200 miles on the Iditarod Trail. After giving us that cheerful bit of news, he stumped off to his idling snow machine. We softies clipped into our skis in the icy predawn darkness of February and, hauling sleds, headed toward Nome on foot.
I fished for salmon for a few days once on Afognak Island, a lovely place as lush as the virgin forests of the lower coast of Alaska. The couple who owned the lodge were ex-Tennessean Mormons, but only she was serious about it. She constantly tried to engage me in conversations about Jane Fonda (the traitoress) and government plots to take over the Lower Forty-Eight. He, on the other hand, seemed apolitical, and kept a gallon of bourbon out in his shop, to which we repaired conspiratorially each evening before supper.
His main enthusiasm was guiding bear hunts. While I fished the salmon river, he accompanied me armed not with a fly rod, like most guides, but a black-stocked .375 Magnum. Very comforting; we were surrounded by brown bears on the river. And he literally couldn't believe that we have forests and bears all over northern New England.
All this is by way of emphasizing the differences, which are profound.
Many of us down here have cartoonish images of Alaska – sled dogs howling, Inuit living in igloos, oil field truckers roaring through the night at 90 below. The reality is much more mundane, though it often seems to me that many Alaskans think of themselves as John Wayne – even the women – and different from the rest of us. Governor Palin said as much in a recent interview, where she appeared in waders: "(Resigning) caught people off guard. … It's out of the box and unconventional. That's what we are as Alaskans and certainly how I am as a public servant." Uh-huh. But she often slips into the cartoon mode, as well: "I'm gonna fight for Alaska and Alaskans like a mother grizzly defending her cubs!"
To those who say they wish she'd just shut up and disappear, I say, stifle already! If she did nothing else with her rambling announcement the other day, at least she gave us a few minutes' respite from the maudlin media reminiscences of Michael Jackson.
Imagine her amazement and delight last year when, virtually out of nowhere, Washington came calling. She must have felt like Cinderella – except that Cinderella went by coach and Sarah by private jet. It seems never to have occurred to her that being able to see Russia from her home (which she can't), or that Siberian bombers must fly first over her state, didn't qualify her as an expert in international affairs. It seems to have surprised her to be asked what she read, not if she read; also that if she became the attack dog in the campaign, a role she appeared to relish ("… pallin' around with terr'ists"), she opened herself to the same sort of attacks, which she now regrets are distracting her from her job. So she's quit, the better to serve Alaska and the Lower Forty-Eight.
The left-wing blogosphere hasn't had this much fun since George Bush's heyday. What's she hiding, or hiding from? Speculation ranges from the usual ethics violations (ho-hum) to some sort of insider chicanery, to "some tawdry personal mishap," as one Facebooker put it. I can't believe the Republican Party, whose members express strong support for her, would attempt some sort of Pygmalion effort to bring her up to speed, in spite of her resonance with those who also think Joe the Plumber is the Man.
But she apparently has a book deal (I'd love to be the ghost writer on that one!) worth a few million; and a talk show, even if it falls fairly soon, should be worth a few million more.
In any case, I dearly hope she sticks around. With that Minnesota, fried-potatoes-for-breakfast accent and those cool, steel glasses and the feisty attitude and sense of unjust criticism and fascinating family – we'd really miss her if she faded away. You betcha!
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