HumidCity

I’ve been following all the hubbub about Sarah Palin, but pretty much keeping my mouth shut. However, since I have actually lived in Alaska, I thought I would try and shed some light on what it’s really like up there and how this may play into Palin’s otherwise mystifying rise to prominence.

First, the political climate. I used to refer to Alaska as Planet Rush Limbaugh. There’s something about being constantly bashed by the elements and terrorized by large predatory wildlife that feeds the conservative mythos of self-reliance, even in a state that receives the second-highest amount of federal aid per capita and where each man, woman and child is issued an oil and gas dividend check every year just for sticking around. Frankly, I’m not surprised at all that Palin’s political stance, coupled with her ambition, savvy maneuvering, and proven ability to squirt out more Alaskans quickly catapulted her to governor status.

As far as foreign relations with Russia, I can confirm that the army surplus store in Anchorage had a fine selection of Soviet military wear and accessories. There are some beautiful Russian Orthodox churches on the Kenai Peninsula, and Alaska Airlines regularly stops in Vladivostock, or at least did when I lived there. I’m surprised Palin hasn’t brought up the nefarious history of Russians enslaving the Aleuts and forcing them to club baby seals, which I’m sure Vladimir Putin, if allowed to complete his top-priority evil scheme for retaking the territory in a sort of reverse Seward’s Folly, would try to reinstate. Russia does really loom on the horizon, though, I swear. This gag was an endless font of laughs during the sun-giddy summer months, going something like this: 1. Grab a random tourist in downtown Anchorage while it’s still light out, say 11 p.m. 2. Point across the Cook Inlet to the mountain called Sleeping Lady. 3. Say “look, you can see Russia!” 4. Laugh hysterically if they believe it. 5. Head over to Humpy’s to drink beer and eat halibut-on-a-stick.

I’ve even been through Wasilla. Note I say through, since the most I’ll give it is that it’s a good place to stop and fill the gas tank before heading up the highway to go somewhere more interesting, by which I mean uninhabited wilderness. This paragraph about Wasilla is short for a reason- I wouldn’t want to write anything about it that takes longer to read than it does to drive through the town itself.

Palin’s political maneuvering reminds me of the news stories from the bush you occasionally come across in the Anchorage Daily News, where a bear rips the door off somebody’s cabin, shuffles in, trashes the place, eats a 40-lb bag of dog food in one sitting, then takes a huge steaming dump on the living room floor before wandering off again. (Come to think of it, if that isn’t a metaphor for the last eight years, I don’t know what is). In other words, Palin may look cute and cuddly at first glance, but she actually has claws and an alarming lack of boundaries.

It’s only because most people in the Lower 48 (known locally as Outside) don’t really know that much about daily life in the Great Land that Palin’s being from there carries so much cachet. The truth is, Palin is hardly atypical in her home state– most women in Alaska can shoot a moose (from their kitchen windows if necessary, since the ornery fuckers are prone to blithely hopping six-foot fences, devouring one’s struggling garden, then drinking out of the hot tub), make jerky out of all manner of wild game, operate heavy power tools, and climb up and ski down mountains. But that’s not really typical of the rest of the country, so I don’t get why people in the lower 48 would be thinking “Sarah’s just like me!” Maybe part of her popularity is based on some kind of romantic pioneer fantasy, but really, do the women of America WANT to be reduced to urinating on animal skins to tan them into leather for their children’s school clothes? Because we’re all going to be doing something akin to subsistence living if we let M/P into office. In fact, I think that should be one of Obama’s campaign slogans: “Vote for me so you won’t be forced to eat whale blubber to survive.”

There’s one other salient Alaska factor. The dating scene in the far, far north tends to set up even just reasonably attractive, marginally intelligent women for delusions of grandeur, given that the man to woman ratio was historically something like 5 to 1. Of course, that’s if you are just counting warm bodies. There’s a reason we used to say about Alaska guys, “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” The truth is, in a state where the chief pastimes in winter are sitting under a full-spectrum light so you don’t go insane from cabin fever and placing bets on the exact moment the ice is going to crack come spring, any woman who can manage to put together an outfit not partially spun from musk-ox hair is considered a trophy babe. Palin apparently didn’t notice that skewed dynamic. I guess I can’t completely blame her for that– after all, get enough constant attention from menfolk, even the ones sitting on a tree-stump bar stool with their chest hair growing through their long underwear, and you can’t help but start believing that yes, in fact, you are a brilliant hottie with amazing power over the populace. But VP material? Only if you’ve been smoking that killer Matanuska Valley weed.

-Kami

It�s easy to love New Orleans in the spring and fall. It�s even doable to love New Orleans in the winter, as damp and bitter as it can be. But man oh man, New Orleans in the summer is one unlovable greasy whorebag. And she’s pressed right up next to us, on an overcrowded RTA bus hurtling to Hades, with of course the obligatory broken air conditioner.

Now I know there are those among you who glory in the rising temperatures, but overall, seems like we treat summer the way the rest of the country treats winter: hole up, hibernate, and hope for the best. We venture out of our air-conditioned caves only as the demands of work, food, and the most basic levels of sociability demand. Car engines run hot; tempers hotter. The ugly truth is that we all tend to treat each other a little shittier in the summer, even if it�s just letting loose with more road rage or expressing impatience with that person who maybe irritates you year-round, but not quite so badly when the weather isn�t so hateful.

While northerners escape to sunny climes in winter, we are desperate to go somewhere cooler in June, July, or most preferably- well, you know. Everyone who can possibly manage it gets out of town in The Month That Must Not Be Named. When luck doesn�t favor us with vacation, we console ourselves by pouring daiquiris and snoballs and snoballs-cum-daiquiris down our gullets.

And the sweating, gah, the sweating. Forget delicacy, it�s all been washed away in a torrent of salty effluvia, running into the crevices of your elbows, knees, thighs, frickin’ eyelids, down the middle of your back, and admit it, right down the crack of your booty and associated regions. Summer is the epitome of that �not so fresh� feeling.

Feeling squirmy and pissed-off yet? Okay, now think about it this way: summer is our communal sweat lodge, our big hallucinatory ordeal that allows us to appreciate the rest of the year. We come out feeling somehow purified, taking big grateful gulps of clearer, cooler air, shedding our stinky, sweaty skins and renewing our activities. Summer can be isolating, and sometimes in this one-degree-of-separation town, that�s not a wholly bad thing. It�s always great to hit that first big show of fall, say hi to people you haven�t seen in months, and just enjoy the fact that we all made it through another one (and I�m not even talking about that aspect of summer that has the wind, the rain and the potential for Horrible Things). The distant dream of Autumn definitely shores me up on those summer days when I’m thinking maybe I’ve been sentenced to an endless tour of the hotter circles of Dante’s Inferno.

So, it�s time to gird our collective loins for the yearly ordeal. I hope y�all stored up those delightful days of spring in your hearts, babies, the bitch is back.

-Kami

In high school I had a friend named Craig whose dad owned a race car– a stripped down, souped-up stock car, used for racing on dirt tracks such as the one we frequented in Belleville, IL. I used to go along with Craig and hang out in the pit with the crew members and ride along on the warm-up laps (and even drove the warm-up around the track myself once or twice, what fun!).

Between the short races there would be exciting features to keep the crowd occupied, such as human cannonballs, fireworks exhibitions, and the like. One of the most interesting activities to observe, at least to me, was called “The Dash for Cash.” This was a game in which all the children in the audience would be called to come and gather down on the dirt track. The officiant would produce a canvas currency bag of coins, scattering them across a small area of the track. Then, when the whistle blew, all the kids would make a mad scramble to pick up every bit of small change they could possibly grab. Picture a group of children, already half-crazed from the speedway excitement and an overload of sugary concessions, adorned with ketchup and mustard and the sticky remnants of cotton candy, scrabbling around like some kind of Lord of the Flies extravaganza in the dun-colored dust, clawing and snatching and shoving and groping for pennies and nickels and dimes and the occasional windfall quarter, emerging utterly befouled with dirt, clothes ruined, hair matted with dust, rings of filth around sticky shiny mouths, clutching a couple pocketfuls of hard-won small change.

Suddenly, the gas tax holiday plan springs to mind.

Do its proponents think we’re that immature? That desperate? So infested with the incessant need for instant gratification that we actually believe this is going to do any good?

More importantly, is it worth the resulting drain on our already-imperiled infrastructure? As I understand it, that money goes to fund highway and bridge repair, through direct programs and matching funds for municipalities. Given the notoriously bad state of streets and highways in and around New Orleans, this seems like a ridiculous gimmick to make people think they are getting a “break”- a few dollars here and there on a tank of gas. Yet somehow, three dollars a tank doesn’t seem like much when you just spent $400.00 to repair the suspension on your car, yet AGAIN.

Working-class Americans deserve better than such a pathetic, insulting sop to the current financial squeeze.

Just as a side note, Exxon Mobil reported a $1.7 BILLION profit [Editor's Note: CNNMoney reports this number as $10.9 Billion according to our commenter Alli. See Comments below. -Loki] in the first quarter of 2008; the highest quarterly profits for a U.S. company in history. And most of the so-called “relief” of a tax holiday will just be sucked up by the refinery divisions of such companies, minimizing the actual benefit to the consumer.

In light of those considerations, getting back a few cents at the gas pump makes me feel like, I don’t know, a grimy kid who just had to wallow around in the dirt, fighting off the other brats, for whatever bits of change those who really run the game deign to throw on the ground.

-Kami

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