Palin the phony Alaskan

That Sarah Palin is one unreal AlaskanHere 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.Comment:  For more on the subject, see The 2008 Presidential Campaign.

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