Not So Red, But I Can See Red from My (Alaskan) House

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—9/27/10—NOTE TO READERS: This is a column I wrote a couple of years ago, but feel compelled now to release again. It’s not because of laziness or lack of imagination that I recycle, but because now, in the midst of Tea Party madness and the weirdness of primary elections again, I am once more asked by friends and acquaintances how I, an unabashed liberal, can live happily, even enthusiastically, in a state that is so notoriously red (Republican). My argument is the same. Alaska’s political climate has always been, to my way of thinking, unique and continues to be so. I think it is worth saying it again. Please keep in mind, too, that this piece was first written about two years ago, when the late US Senator Ted Stevens was still alive and was embroiled in investigations into alleged ethics violations.

My e-mail box has been abuzz for weeks now with comments from friends and relatives in the Lower 48, such as “What the hell is wrong with you people up there?” and, “Has Alaska gone crazy?”

The spirit of these questions makes me pause a little. For most of the 40 years I’ve lived in Alaska, I have become used to comments like, “Oh, how lucky you are to live in Alaska!” and, “You live in Alaska? Wow! How neat! How amazing! How enviable!”

I’m not used to these new, less friendly, less admiring comments. It seems, though, that in the last couple of weeks Alaska has quickly gone from being America’s place of exotic fantasy to the laughingstock of the country. It started, I think, with that infamous Bridge to Nowhere, which led to comments about political corruption and irresponsible earmarking; then along came the sudden and unexpected (and somewhat inexplicable) rise and fall of Alaska’s governor of 18 months, Sarah Palin, with all those truly embarrassing interviews and those winks and “You betcha’s,” which, by the way, none of us who live up here had ever known her to do before.

And now here is Senator Ted Stevens, newly convicted of seven felony accounts of corruption, but who, at the time of this writing, is running neck-in-neck with Anchorage’s young Democratic mayor, Mark Begich, for his senate seat. Whether Stevens ultimately wins or not, the damage is done. Just the fact that it is a close race and that at least half of the people in Alaska are willing to send a convicted felon back to Washington to represent them is shocking enough.

One TV news pundit in the Lower 48 said that he wasn’t surprised because everybody knows that Alaska is the reddest of all the red states. That made me pause, too. I guess he was saying that Alaskans would vote for a Republican even if he were an axe murderer. And I guess that’s not far from the truth. But I have always contended that most Alaskans, though they consistently and maddeningly (in my view) vote Republican, are not Republicans in the way their brothers and sisters “Outside” are.

Alaskans tend to be politically conservative but socially liberal. There is tolerance here for almost every kind of weirdness imaginable; even some that cannot be imagined. Look at the people who live and thrive here. Some have come here to escape from even a modicum of conformity. This extreme place attracts extreme characters—of all types. They certainly would not fit in at any of the Republican tea parties I know about. So why are they so red, you may ask again?

In the beginning, Alaska was pretty blue—long before such blue and red distinctions were made in the media. The founding fathers of Alaska, the very men who helped it become a state and who wrote its constitution and formulated its laws, were almost all Democrats—great men such as Ernest Gruening, Bob Bartlett, and Nick Begich. And most Alaskans voted Democrat.

Then, suddenly, something happened. In the minds of some today, it was the blatant and bold and sudden arrival, in the early 1970’s, of Satan to Alaska. He came in the form of Big Oil and Big Money. He made Big Changes. Alaskans got a taste of Big Oil Money and found that they really liked it. They REALLY liked it.

Suddenly, almost overnight, the previously blue Alaskans had become redder than chameleons in a bonfire. Souls were sold and bought with alacrity. Developers moved in—paved, paved, paved; drilled, drilled, drilled; built, built, built. Voila! Anchorage became a suburb of Dallas. Men in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats strode proudly down the city streets; there were more Texas drawls than you heard in a Gabby Hayes western. My wife once commented to me that if she were called “little lady” one more time she was going to scream.

Oil, Texas, money, development, and Republicanism had come to stay.

Ted Stevens quickly found his niche as the friend of the oilman and did, in the process, do some pretty nifty things for Alaskans, at least for the ones who didn’t mind that their beautiful scenic wilderness drives were now lined with strip malls and neon signs and used car lots. (I guess that’s called progress in some circles.)

For nearly 40 years now, Ted Stevens has been an avuncular figure to many Alaskans. He has just always been there. Two generations have grown up under his protective wing and have come to depend on that or, at the very least, have grown accustomed to it. He is indeed now referred to by many as “Uncle Ted.” So, the thought of replacing Uncle Ted with some upstart liberal is unthinkable to many. No matter what “they” say he has done. There is also great resentment that Stevens was tried in Washington and not in Alaska.

It looks to his fans like a plot to discredit him, a vast liberal plot by those unscrupulous politicians in Washington, DC, far away from Alaska, who just don’t get what Ted Stevens and Alaska are all about. These are people who are convinced that Stevens is their only hope to protect them and their unique lifestyle from the Philistines, that is, people in the Lower 48 who represent, shudder, the Government. The Government, any government, but especially the Federal Government, is the great bugaboo to many Alaskans. The famous, oft-repeated line that “we don’t give a damn how they do it in the Lower 48” is true. They don’t. In fact, they will almost always deliberately do it differently than the other 49 states if they can. Why this paranoid fear of Government, you may ask?

Many Alaskans think that their uniqueness, their lifestyle, which is unlike any other, is threatened by Government. In their minds, the purpose of Government is, well, to govern. And they don’t want to be governed. Not by anybody. They are fiercely independent, fanatically stubborn, and hell-bent on living their lives exactly as they see fit. That’s why they choose to live thousands of miles away from the rest of the world, in a place that is often harsh and inhospitable.

And, in their minds, Republicans are less likely to promote Big Government and interference in their lives than Democrats are. Of course, none of us who actually are Democrats see it that way, but many people do. To them, Democrats are liberals and liberals begat political correctness and political correctness disapproves of “Alaskan values.”

For example, I am acquainted with two men—one, a furrier, with a store in downtown Anchorage; the other, a pioneer homesteader who runs a trapline—who have both been harassed and verbally assaulted by tourists from New York and LA who disapprove of the fur industry. Another friend, an Iditarod musher, has been attacked by animal rights activists from Outside, who think that the world-famous Iditarod Sled Dog Race is cruel and inhumane and dangerous for the dogs.

Nothing—I mean nothing—will rile an Alaskan more than some Outsider with disapproving opinions about Alaska’s cultural institutions.

I once had a Native elder tell me that “the White man does not approve of our killing animals.” By “White man,” he meant anyone from outside Alaska, White or not, man or not. “They don’t realize how much we respect the creatures that we hunt, how much we praise them and thank them for our subsistence. The White man,” he said to me, “has lost touch with his ancestors.”

To an Alaskan Native, a subsistence lifestyle is part of his spirituality. Even many Natives who live near a Safeway or a Fred Meyer still pursue a subsistence lifestyle. Alaska’s Natives hunt and trap and fish; they use the meat for their food, the fur for their clothes, the bones for their tools and their carvings. Not because they have to any more, but because it is a vital link with their ancestral way of life. To them, the White man, who disapproves of their lifestyle as being cruel to animals yet blasts holes through mountains and plows down trees and changes the habitation areas of wildlife, is far more evil and inexplicable than they are. And seems totally hypocritical to them as well. So they look to people like Ted Stevens for protection. Naively, perhaps. But there it is.

As a liberal Democrat, I don’t much care for Republicans. But I love Alaskans passionately. And, yes, there is a difference.