NEWS ANALYSIS
By Katherine Roberts
Sunday, September 14, 2008
As Americans get to know Sarah Palin, they're taking a crash course on life in the Last Frontier. There is her sport of moose hunting, for example.
Shooting the prey turns out to be the easy part. The hard part is figuring out where to do the deed, according to the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation: "When choosing an area to hunt and a means of transportation, remember that you will have about 400 to 700 pounds of meat and up to 65 pounds of antlers to transport from the kill-site to home. That's why many seasoned Alaskan moose hunters say, 'Never kill a moose more than a mile from a vehicle of some sort.' "
No wonder, then, that Palin has been photographed driving a tank-like ATV As for the field-dressing, it's no joke to brave the blowflies while carving up a half-ton animal.
A few weeks ago a national conversation about such arcana would have seemed unlikely. But that was before the emergence of a candidate who has divided the country in unexpected ways not simply because of her record and her views, but also because Governor Palin comes from a place in the West that embodies deep-seated ideas and myths and contradictions about the role of the frontier in the American psyche. In some sense, Palin has become a metaphor for Alaska itself, and as grand a landscape as Alaska is, the current discussion is less about a geographical location than about a state of mind, or states of mind.
"The West was another name for opportunity," Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, in his famous essay that declared an end to the frontier, which in his definition meant the end of free land. More than a century later, the dreams and myths about the West persist. So do fantasies and outright misperceptions. Some originated in the East, with its vision of the frontier as being at once a majestic playground and a site of commercial depredation, of strip mines and strip malls. ("The East," Turner wrote, "has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.")
Other simplifications flourish in the West, with its self-regarding belief in an untamed wilderness brought to heel by fiercely independent souls.
The truth has always been more ambiguous, not least because of the region's tangled relationship with the federal government, which had cleared the land of Indians and offered the handout of the Homestead Act in 1862, itself adopted after some 70 years of debate about the rightful disposition of public lands.
In the 20th century, accounts of the West often centered on this paradox. The inhabitants boasted of their autonomy, even as the government did the dirty work, took the risks and offered sweet deals to settlers, so they could expand the borders of the United States. Without this help, as many writers have noted, the waves of Western pioneers wouldn't have had the luxury of hating Washington bureaucrats.
This attitude, of wanting it both ways, was neatly summed up a half-century ago by the historian Bernard DeVoto as: "Get out and give us more money." The novelist Wallace Stegner was just as unsparing when he observed, in 1986: "Westerners who would like to return to the old days of free grab, people of the kind described as having made America great by their initiative and energy in committing mass trespass on the minerals, grass, timber and water of the Public Domain, complain that no Western state is master in its own house."
Competing ideas about the West have dominated our politics for many decades now. No candidate was so synonymous with the regional ideal as Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who spoke Navajo and posed, like Governor Palin, in rugged outdoor outfits, sometimes with a rifle. "We didn't know the federal government," he said of his forebears who came to Arizona in 1860. "Everything that was done, we did it ourselves."
But, as Rick Perlstein pointed out in "Before the Storm," his history of Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, the land Goldwater's grandfather traveled "to follow a gold strike," in fact "developed as a virtual ward of the federal government," and the money for the first Goldwater general store in 1872 "came largely from contracts for provisioning army camps and delivering mail." Barry Goldwater, who was born in 1909, grew up with "a nurse, chauffeur and a live-in maid," Perlstein added.
As a politician, Goldwater excelled at playing both sides of the game. He railed against federal intrusion in the West, but was first in line to demand the billions of dollars that came to his state from Washington in the form of water projects, to cite one gargantuan example.
Today, the West is not the federal economic colony it once was. Nor is it the uncrowded rural paradise of lore. In fact, it has long been the most urbanized part of the country. This transformation has enticed a new brand of fortune-seeker, from the telecommuting migrants in mountain enclaves to the influx of people into metropolitan "boomburgs" where they are employed in the same jobs as people in the rest of the country.
It has been fully 15 years since the last Sagebrush Rebellion, the movement of boisterous anti-government types who aimed to "take back" their land from Washington, by force if necessary. It doesn't hurt that all those energy companies now drilling on federal lands pay high wages and provide many jobs.
The region's politics, never as uniform as portrayed, is more diverse today than it has been in years. There are now Democratic governors in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, not one of whom was elected by praising the federal government or calling for a Buffalo Commons. Barack Obama is mounting strong campaigns in several of these states where Democratic presidential candidates have often struggled mightily for 30 years.
It is, to some extent, the collapsing of the old distinctions, and with it the continuing convergence of East and West, that explains the sudden fascination with Alaska now that Palin has become a national figure. The state, for all its suburban big-box resemblance to the rest of the West, remains in some ways the last true frontier — at least in the sense that it remains distant and exotic to most Americans, with its mammoth size, its severe climate, its many unpopulated miles.
Its contradictions, however, are the same ones noted by DeVoto and Stegner, only starker and more extreme. While half the land in the Western states in the lower 48 is owned by the federal government, in Alaska, it's closer to 70 percent, and only 1 percent of the state is privately owned.
Alaska's dependence on and disdain for government date back to its territory days. John McPhee captured the paradox in his book "Coming Into the Country," published in 1976: "When one adds in the existing parks, government forests and wildlife refuges and a vast federal petroleum reserve in the north, not much remains, so it is one of the ironies of Alaska that in the midst of this tremendous wilderness people consider themselves fortunate to have (anywhere at all) a 50-by-100 -foot lot they can call their own."
The most cantankerous assessment, perhaps, came from the nature writer Edward Abbey. "Alaska is not, as the state license place asserts, 'the Last Frontier,' " Abbey wrote in the 1980s. "Alaska is the final big bite on the American table, where there is never enough to go around. ... Alaska, like the rest of our public domain, has been strapped down and laid open to the lust and greed of the international corporations. ... Anchorage, Fairbanks and outposts like Barter Island, with their glass-and-aluminum office buildings, their airlift prefab fiberboard hovels for the natives and the workers, their compounds of elaborate and destructive machinery, exhibit merely the latest development in the planetary expansion of space-age sleaze not a frontier, but a high-technology slum. For Americans, Alaska is the last pork chop."
Palin's critics have tried to tie her to all the supposed evils Abbey detailed and some new ones, too relationships that any governor of Alaska might expect to be questioned about. If Palin stood up to the oil companies, was it so she would raise taxes for the state treasury? What about her on-and-off stand on that symbol of federal pork, the Bridge to Nowhere? While she may attack earmarks, as she did in her interview with ABC News, what funds has she sent back to Washington, given that Alaskans get $231 per person in earmarks, compared with $22 per person in Obama's Illinois?
The governor's supporters have painted her detractors as out-of-touch elitists, blind to their own insularity and entitlements and self-regard. Behind this view lurks a feeling of injustice rooted in another difference between East and West, the feeling that access to a particular kind of prestige and power is still off-limits to much of the country, to graduates of the University of Idaho, like Palin, rather than to those who went to Columbia and Harvard, where Obama got his degrees.
This in turn points to a very different though related continental rift, one whose origins are not so much regional as socioeconomic, and rooted less in competing myths about place than about class.
Turner saw all that too in 1893. "Free lands and the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence," he wrote. "They promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East." Economic equality followed, and "this involved political equality."
"Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal," he concluded, "and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West today."
And it may also explain the uneasiness so many Easterners now feel as they are confronted, once again, with their own assumptions about the American frontier.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/america/14roberts.php
A Place in the Auvergne
A Place in My Country
Ian Walthew
Farm Blogs
Ranch Blogs
Rural Blogs
Countryside Blogs
Smallholding Blogs
Urban Homesteading Blogs
Homesteading Blogs
Homestead Blogs
Allotment Blogs
Apiculture Blogs
Bee-keeping Blogs
Auvergne
Auvergnate
Auvergnat
Auvergnats
France
Rural France
Blogs about France
Paris / Montmartre/ Abbesses holiday / vacation furnished apartment rental
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment