Yes, It Is All About Me, Why Do You Ask?

September 29, 2008

Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

* What if you won a prize [scroll way down to find Computerworld] and nobody noticed?

I faux-pout, or mostly faux-pout, as my co-workers were quite sweet in emailing their congratulations. Also, they are quite sick to death of that story. Even so, what crumbs fall from the table of journalistitude, I will happily sweep into my tiny prize pile (a pile that now numbers a whopping two, unless you count that children’s fiction prize from college). At this rate, I will be getting my National Book Award right around the time I’m shopping for my assisted-living downsize.

* Of the many, many reasons you might find to be hating on Sarah Palin these days, only a select few of us have this trump card: she’s ruined our vacation, retroactively. Yeah, we went to Alaksa this summer, but now nobody wants to hear about my busted knee, our bear adventures, the glacier kayaking, the mountains, the ocean, the wilderness, or the halibut tacos at Café Cups in Homer. No.

It’s all Sarah, Sarah, Sarah all the time. (Kudos to D for asking not “Did you see her?” as everyone else has, but “Why didn’t you take her out while you were up there?”—a much more relevant question.)

I don’t mind this reaction from my friends and acquaintances half as much as I mind the fact that she’s gotten inside my head—now I can’t think of the funky Alaskans we met without recasting them as Palinbot crazyheads, unfairly or otherwise, and I can’t think of the stunningly beautiful places we saw without thinking of the underlying political machinations of Sarah and the rest of the AK delegation.

* Pundits from the left, center and right—and even some of her own party honchos—are dumbfounded that Caribou Barbie keeps repeating her line about having foreign policy experience because Alaska is between Russia and Canada.

But only I, with my vast, one-week store of Alaskan experience, am here to explain the thinking behind those remarks: What she’s not saying is that lots of Alaskans, maybe most Alaskans, and if not Sarah then certainly her husband, fully believe and behave as if Alaska were a sovereign state.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s Philip Gourevitch from the New Yorker, observing the same phenomenon:

Many Alaskans enjoy being disconnected from the Lower Forty-eight, which is sometimes referred to as if it were a foreign country.

If AK were in fact its own country, then of course as its chief executive, SP would indeed have foreign experience. Hence the disconnect in her defense of her foreign policy experience.

The Pakistan and Supreme Court gaffes I can’t explain away, but I’m sure someone else can.

I’ll be waiting.