"Northern Exposure" Comes To Life: The Mighty Quinnette Is A Wacko From Up North

The "Hockey Mom" (aka a pit bull wearing lipstick) ought to get the puck out of here. As usual, Eags knows whereof he speaks/writes when it comes to the portion of North America north of California. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave cannot survive a gun-totin', book-banning, anti-science "Republican Woman" True Believer. The Mighty Quinnette is a real ditch, or, uh, something that sounds like that. The Geezer is bad enough, but a female Know-Nothing is beyond the pale. Let her go back Up North and amuse her fellow inmates in the frozen waste. If this is (fair & balanced) horror, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Palin’s True North
By Timothy Egan

Long before the slogan known to 48-hour libertines — What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas — became commonplace, I heard a variant of that in Alaska, and not just at closing time in fishermen’s bars.

Distance breeds isolation, and in Alaska that often means an arm’s-length code of personal privacy. The state is full of people who have left behind marriages, debts and places that simply weren’t big enough to contain their personalities.

As she showed Wednesday night with her acceptance speech, Governor Sarah Palin fits the mold of a certain kind of Alaskan — “take it from a gal who knows,” as she said. The state has a unique political ecosystem, as quirky, odd and compelling as the big land itself.

But it is John McCain’s biggest gamble to hope that there is enough of Palin’s Last Frontier in the rest of the country to carry his ticket to the next frontier.

Of course, she nailed the speech. She faced only an artificial media challenge; “Sarah Barracuda” has been able to talk to an audience, and throw an elbow — well — since high school.

As was self-evident among the sea of pink-faced delegates in St. Paul, the Republican base loves Palin. They love that she carried a Down Syndrome baby to term – “living out pro-life values,” as James Dobson said. They love that she told her church it was God’s will that a natural gas pipeline must be built in Alaska. And they certainly love that she knows her way around a gun.

As Rush Limbaugh said on Wednesday, “Palin is twice the man Obama is.”

But Palin’s style may not play outside of Alaska.

The governor isn’t so much a tough-minded reformer — see her sidling up to indicted Senator Ted Stevens, the earmarks directed to her hometown or the pressure from her governor’s office against a bad-boy former brother-in-law and trooper — nor is she some Annie Oakley throwback.

She is, though, a very recognizable Alaskan.

Among Alaskans, drunken driving, teenage pregnancy, shooting wildlife out of season and courting an independent political party whose founder once said, “the fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” are not disqualifying issues. They’re dinner-table stories.

Every home seems to have a freezer in the garage stuffed with moose meat and 10 pounds of alder-smoked chinook. Owning a small amount of marijuana is protected by the privacy clause of the Alaska constitution, the courts have ruled.

A bush pilot, flying low over a glacier in a wicked snowstorm, once asked me to reach into his glove compartment for a map. A flask of whiskey fell out, and he took a swig – without missing a beat.

But what many of us find, um, memorable, the rest of America may see as alarming, or at least strange. The CBS news survey on Tuesday, taking into account the Palin nomination, showed Obama with a 14-point lead among women. And a fresh Gallup poll suggests that the Palin pick has not helped McCain with Democratic or independent women, to date. It’s hurt.

Shooting wolves out of airplanes is something Palin backs with zest. But most Americans have never seen a wolf, let alone considered shooting one from a Piper Cub.

Palin may be the only nominee on a national ticket since Teddy Roosevelt who knows how to field dress a moose, as Fred Thompson said on Tuesday. But most Americans have never killed a moose, let alone gutted one.

Nationwide, hunting and fishing have been in steady decline for years now. Even in Pennsylvania — the setting for “The Deer Hunter” — license tabs for deer are down nearly 25 percent since the mid-’80s.

When Alaska’s congressman-for-life Don Young brandished a walrus penis bone on the floor of the House years ago, everybody in Alaska got a big chuckle out of it — that Don Young, such a character!

But if he tried that at a school board meeting in suburban Denver, he’d most likely be arrested.

For all-time weirdness, it’s hard to match two-time Governor Walter J. Hickel. He always said he had a “Little Man” inside his head. No matter what his critics said — Wally listened to the Little Man.

I’m not sure of it, but the Little Man may have been the inspiration for one of Wally’s nuttier schemes — to build a $150 billion pipeline carrying freshwater from Alaska glaciers to the arid reaches of Southern California.

In Alaska, this idea was given serious thought. In the Outside, as Alaskans call the rest of the country, it was a joke.

They say Alaska is what America used to be — true enough, in my experience. But it may not be what America wants to be.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Time Comapny

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