Mar 13 2009
in which sarah palin does not personally hate you
(Uh…long time no blog? I don’t even know, I was busy and then finally got on spring break and everything I wanted to blog about seemed long? Lame blogger is lame.)
Yeah, this is one of many things I should have posted ages ago, back when it was more relevant, but for whatever reason I didn’t think of it until recently…and after all the attention Alaska got thanks to Palin nearly becoming the nation’s vice
president, she and her state aren’t likely to leave the international spotlight entirely for a while. And that’s weird, because in the rather odd position of largest and least populated state in the US, we’re not really used to getting that kind of attention.
It was especially surreal for me, since I was in England before, during, and after the election, and I swear, whenever I met someone new and said I was from Alaska (basically everyone could guess by my accent that I was an international student, I imagine), 9 times out of 10 the other person would respond with something like “Ooh, Palin country. What do you think of her?” I invariably responded with some hemming and hawing, the gist of which was “Well, I like most of her policies…” because, almost as invariably, the person asking 1) was an Obama fan (seriously, almost everyone was over there–and it was kind of amazing just how invested people in Europe were in the US election), 2) fairly liberal, at least compared to me, and 3) of the opinion that Palin was either evil, scary, or “a cunt, and an incompetent cunt at that” (that’s a more-or-less direct quote from a fellow member of the creative writing society who was also, incidentally, an American). All of this tended to make me uncomfortable, especially when opinions of Palin seemed to extend a bit to Alaska in general, because…well, come on. It’s my state and my state governor, and Alaska breeds a bit more of what I’d have to term, for lack of a better word, nationalistic feeling than most other states. It’s understandable if I got a little defensive.
It also struck me as very weird when people acted as if Sarah Palin had something against them personally, but…okay, whatever.
For me, though, it really got annoying when British students made statements of opinion on Alaska issues as if they were facts, in part because those issues were never treated with the evenhandedness they needed, and in part because…well, come on, it took me a day and a half of solid travel to get from here to there. Alaska is a long way away from England, and the parts of it that people were really talking about–the parts with oil and polar bears–are the sort that most British have never seen and don’t know much about. Having lived in Barrow for five years, I’m no expert, but I know a lot more about the reality of such issues than most.
The actual point is that about a month into the term, another student published an article in the environment section of Concrete, UEA’s weekly student paper, essentially saying that if Palin became vice president, animals everywhere would be more or less doomed. Also he made this cute little accrostic out of “Palin” and came up with something for each letter that spelled out what Palin really stands for, supposedly. “I” was “Ignores indigenous Inuit people,” which is kind of ridiculous to begin with (almost nobody in Alaska, least of all Native Alaskans themselves, use the term “Inuit”) but really ridiculous as a throwaway statement with absolutely nothing to back it up.
So I got my own article printed in response. It’s been published in print over in England, obviously, but because they are slow, it isn’t online. So I’m reprinting it here: (more…)
