That Sarah Palin is one unreal Alaskan
Last updated October 17, 2008 9:30 p.m. PT
By SETH KANTNER
GUEST COLUMNIST
I'm sitting on my bearskin chair beside the
woodstove, in Kotzebue, Alaska, 50 miles above
the Arctic Circle, while outside the ocean begins
to freeze over. Inside I have about 49 things piling up to say to you, America.
I'm an Alaskan -- born in an igloo, enjoy whale
muktuk, all that -- and in case you aren't sick
of our state by now, I'll start off with an
apology for one of our residents: Sarah Palin.
Wendy Wahman / P-I
We Alaskans are not generally so magazine-pretty
like her, nor are we so confrontational and
vapid. Most of us don't have those peachy cheeks
-- we have sunburn, windburn and frostbite. Our
fingernails are dirty from actually gutting
moose, not yakking about it. Our hands are
chapped from picking thousands of salmon out of
nets, not holding one up for the camera.
Having said that, here in Alaska we are
accustomed to getting jobs we're not qualified to
fill. In our far-flung villages and towns we have
big money surrounded by big wilderness; the
combination causes warped career opportunities.
Sort of an Edge of Nowhere phenomenon -- cousin to the Bridge to Nowhere one.
For example, in the village closest to the
wilderness homestead where I was raised, I
remember standing in my friend's cabin when his
dad got a call on the CB radio: "People are writing you in for mayor."
"Nope!" my friend's dad transmitted. "Tell 'em
no, I ain't doing that." He spit in a can, peered
out the door at his Honda generator -- idling
rough -- an extension cord running up the hill
and under his door, to power the rerun of "Dukes of Hazzard" he was watching.
If he'd lived in Wasilla 25 years later, he could
have responded, "Call Sarah, she'll want it."
Similar stories abound. Jimmy: who got the
dogcatcher job by telling the interviewer, "I can
shoot a shotgun, .30-06, .308 " Or my friend Ian,
who this summer worked with computers -- until he
was named CEO of a $45 million corporation.
Tougher in Alaska? Not necessarily. Here most
anyone can be dogcatcher, city planner, governor,
with little or no experience. That's one beauty
of our state -- although, often the only thing
keeping it all working is the lubrication provided by obscene amounts of money.
Sitting on this worn-to-the-hide bearskin chair
of mine, scribbling, I pause to glance at a
month-old newspaper before I stuff it in the
stove. Lo! There's yet another photo of Gov.
Palin; she's sitting in a glass office in
Anchorage, with a bearskin, too, draped across
the back of her expensive couch. Sarah's wearing
heels. The bear's wearing a fake head with a
plastic snarl. In the foreground on a glass table
crouches something with pincers -- a taxidermied king crab!
I'll have to show this photo to my Eskimo friends
I grew up with. We simply never contemplated such
wanton unAlaskanness. Why not eat the damn thing?
We ate this bear I'm sitting on, including the
paws and jaw and fat -- some of which we ate raw,
while some got rendered for piecrusts.
Out beyond my window, the slush ice is
thickening. In the west lie the Bering Straits.
Yes, Vladimir Putin and Moscow are over there
somewhere -- a little closer than London. Plenty
of us reside hundreds of miles closer to Russia
than Palin ever did down in the big-cities of
Wasilla or Juneau. In the past 40 years, Russians
have motored across a handful of times, Russian
Eskimos, in homemade boats. One that I know
stayed and married. She's an Eskimo dancer and
ivory carver, very capable and beautiful, in a
real way. And, I guess like the rest of us now,
an overnight foreign policy expert.
By now the world knows our Gov. Palin is an
expert at swishing around in color-coordinated
this and that, with her makeup, fake Minnesota
accent, and her mooseburger and mean-spirited
commentary. We can only hope people realize she's
a pretty unreal Alaskan, one who is simply
skimming the gravy off our hard-earned Alaskan
mystique to mix with her varnished nonsense.
(And yes, some Alaskans do sell varnished moose turds, also.)
In the Arctic, where global warming is melting
our world regardless of Palin's lone charge
against reality, her alleged appeal leaves many
of us cold. With our long winters and tough
trails, we still value a beaver hat and common
sense more than high heels and clip-on hairdos.
We simply don't want another leader less intelligent than we are.
Eight years with the cowboy and copilot
Halliburton at the helm has been hard on our
land. Too much polluting, an unnecessary war
draining our economy and both men too cool for
global warming. We can't afford to turn now to a
beauty contestant and an old guy who's acting
like he's run the Iditarod too many times without
winning. (Beating his dogs, he's so desperate to win.)
Come on, people. Our ice is melting. Your jobs
are turning to dust. Everyone's bank statements
are on the verge of being firestarter. Your
heating oil is $4 a gallon, ours is $8.
John McCain's answers to those problems? Heck, I
honestly don't know what he stands for this week.
Talk about a shifting ice floe. But his running
mate, we've heard her answers: She's already sued
the polar bears, now she's chanting, "Drill, baby, drill!"
Wake up, folks. Sarah Palin is America's bridge to nowhere. Get off it.
From up here in the Arctic -- not left or right
but north of the campaign trail -- the reality is
clear and cold: When John McCain chose Sarah
Palin, he wrote America out of his will. It's
time for us to write him out of our future.
Seth Kantner was born and raised in the Arctic
and is a commercial fisherman in Alaska's
northernmost salmon fishery. He is the author of
"Shopping for Porcupine" and the best-selling novel "Ordinary Wolves."