Trying to ignore the US election
No wonder Alaska is a state for curmudgeons. Tea party types. Cranky libertarians. When they look at Mount Denali, they don’t think of spiritual things, they see a government conspiracy to conceal the fact that there is gold in there and caverns full of emeralds.
I once sat at a black-tie dinner across from Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who was a curmudgeon of the first water. He sat and glowered at me and was not impressed by my attempts to make conversation. He knew that I was in public radio and that marked me as a scavenger at the pub- lic trough. His wife, Catherine, sitting next to me, was gracious and funny and we chattered for a couple hours about children and Washington and museums, and she told me that Ted didn’t like formal dinners, which clearly he didn’t. In the course of the evening, I came to admire him for being so determinedly unpleasant. You never see this in an elected official: smarm is the norm, a politician without a grin is like a pitcher without a change-up.
Ted Stevens was an honest man. He was out to serve Alaska and I had nothing to offer in that regard, so nuts to me. I have admired him ever since. In 2008 he was indicted on corruption charges that were bogus, but a jury convicted him; he was narrowly defeated for re-election, after which his conviction was thrown out on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. It was a miserable ordeal for an honest old man. He died in a plane crash near Dillingham two years later. The Anchorage airport is named for him.
My fellow passengers on this ship are off whalewatching, hiking on glaciers, climbing mountains, watching the salmon swim upstream to their deaths. In the tradition of Ted Stevens, I am sitting in my cabin reading the newspapers. He was of a breed of moderate Republicans of impeccable integrity who are in short supply today. He was too flinty to run for president.
The guy who is running this year puts on a cantankerous act, but he has no soul and no idea what he’s talking about and he lies a lot. Ted Stevens was who he was: He looked at a forest and he saw lumber. He fought hard for oil drilling on the North Slope and that oil money made Alaska the Republican state it is. I’m an old liberal and as such am in favour of preservation of wilderness. I am also glad not to be out there in it. Go sit on your thumb, Henry Thoreau, and leave me alone.