I’ll warn you up front that this is going to be a long one, and it’s fueled by whiskey and tequila, which is already a bad idea; but it’s been weighing on me and whether you think I’m just whining or you think there’s something to think about, I need to tell you.

I’m feeling demoralized, and it has to do with the presidential campaign and my state senator.  I’m an Alaskan, though I was born in Michigan these many years ago.  I’ve lived here since I was 12 years old, which was a long time back.  My parents finally bagged their path to bankruptcy in Michigan and moved the whole lot of us, my three brothers and me, up here in 1968.    I’m from Wasilla, Sarah Palin’s home town, and I swear to God that every word I will tell you is true.

We came here with what my folks could haul in a 28 foot trailer behind a crew-cab International pickup.  They found us a place to live where the deal was free rent as long as you kept stealing electricity from the co-op so the owner wouldn’t be found out.  After he came back from wherever he’d gone, we moved around a lot.  We got kicked out of one place for keeping pigs.  We pretty much squatted from place to polace until my mom’s minister co-signed a loan and my folks bought the first place we’d lived after we moved up here.  The guy who owned this property was commonly acknowledged amongst the neighbors as having an inappropriate relationship with his daughter—this based on the way he would touch her after a few drinks.  No one was surprised when his wife some years later committed suicide.  His oldest son robbed a bank, and got through the Trooper roadblock by setting his very young son atop the pile of stolen cash; but ultimately he was found out, and went to prison.

Remember the Beverly Hillbillies, and their fancy eating table that was in truth a pool table?  That’s what we really had.  My dad liked his drink, and instead of a kitchen table, we had a pool table in the kitchen.  Dad would cover it up with a sheet of plywood at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and my mom found a piece of oilcloth that she’d cover it up with, and we’d sit around that pool table, our chins at a level with the table, and share our holiday meals.

My dad made instant friends with Joe Redington after  we moved up here—the Father of the Iditarod, same guy.  Thanks to Joe, we had food; I have to give him that.  He and my dad would go in Joe’s truck in to Anchorage about once a month, and they’d hit the Sunshine Bakery and pick up all the outdated bread they had set out for the dump; then they’d hit the Carrs store and get all the groceries destined for the dump; and finally they’d go by Salvation Army and pick up what they were tossing.

We ate old bread and frozen Velveeta cheese and thawed-out past-date milk.  We’d go through the boxes of clothes—and this was in the late 60s, bear in mind, and oil hadn’t hit Alaska yet, not so anybody would notice anyway--and what Salvation Army was throwing out was useless to pretty much anybody.  I remember a pair of pants in particular.  They must’ve been about a size 26 waist and about 38 inch inseam, and we marveled that they’d ever fit anybody.  We went through those rejects, and kept out anything that might even possibly fit anybody we knew, and the rest became blankets, as my parents hadn’t really thought about the cold winters, or at least not well enough, and hadn’t brought enough in that line to keep us warm.  So at night, my brothers would pile into the bunk beds in the room next to mine, and I, the only girl, would climb into my own bed, and my mother would come in and heap reject clothes on top of us, six or eight inches deep, until we were buried in them.  And we’d be warm until morning.

Somehow, don’t ask me how, years later, I escaped Knik before becoming some dog musher’s pregnant beat-up girlfriend.  I became an aide in the state legislature, and moved to Juneau, and married a man and had a baby with him.  And it turned out that, despite his brilliance and his having come just this close to a doctorate in medieval English literature, that he really had no ambition.  And so, in Juneau instead of in Knik, I wound up as my registered nurse mother had—trying to support a family on my meager means.  I never finished college.  I was just blessed with an ability to pick up on things quickly, and I knew how to type, and these talents kept us going.

But I grew very fat, and no one wanted to give me a job anymore, and my state insurance said it would cover weight loss surgery, and I had it.  And about that time, when I could not find employment, I went to visit my parents, and applied for jobs, and found one, and ended up moving back home to the very homestead my parents had first lived in, and ultimately purchased, when I was twelve years old.

And so I took that new job, and learned all I could about public relations, and became an APR after passing the test, and a year after being initially rejected by my “peers,” convincing them through my efforts in my job and as a political campaign manager, that I really got it—that I understood and practiced public relations.  And then my  mother died, and I was left to care for my aging alcoholic father, and I divorced my husband, and I just kept going, managing more campaigns, raising my daughter, living with my dad.  And then my dad decided it was a good idea for him to blow his brains out in the front yard, while my daughter was home, and left her to shoulder finding him and dealing with all that trauma.

And in the years that followed, I finally met a good man, and married him, and found a new job, and went to Chicago to speak at a Ragan conference, and there met people I’d admired for so long—the Women of Like Minds, Mark Ragan, but best of all David Murray and Steve Crescenzo and my dear friend Bill Sweetland.  And they greeted me as old friends greet each other—with warmth and affection and lasting friendship.  They let me know that, regardless of roots or insufficiencies, they liked me and wanted me among them, and I felt like they admired me.

And then John McCain, the doddering idiot, who may once have been great but who demonstrated his own unsufficiency, selected Sarah Palin to be his running mate.  And Sarah Palin created a world-view of Wasilla.  As if we didn’t already feel like Valley trailer trash.  She exposed all of us, naked, in an unexplained view to the whole world.

I voted for her when she ran for governor.  She has a fresh appeal that’s hard to resist, and I didn’t.  I believed her when she said she would be different, would stand apart from the crowd.  And she has, in some ways; I will give her credit for the good deeds she’s done as our governor.  But then I started hearing from people who lived still in Juneau; people who had worked for her, or knew people who had.  And I heard from people who’d stayed in Wasilla when she was mayor, and who told me of her intolerance for anyone who didn’t share her Fundamentalist views, and what their fates had been.  I heard it all too late to make a decision at the ballot, but I did hear it, from people I had good reason to trust.

So when she became John McCain’s running mate, I knew that he’d picked someone extremely capable of picking up quickly, but I knew her foibles as well.  And then McCain’s staff decided to remake this Wasilla beauty queen, but they couldn’t do it fast enough, and the Katie McCouric interview was the result.  It was irrecoverable, but for that I blaim their campaign; they should have trusted her to be herself, which can be very appealing at first blush.

And then came our Senator Ted Stevens’s sad time.  Anyone living in Alaska knew what a shit Bill Allen, his accuser, has always been.  Regardless of what the jury decided, having been exposed to Bill Allen for many years, I think it far more likely that Ted Stevens was the victim of friendship betrayed than he was of a man acting without conscience.  All of us have had a “bad” friend—one who we knew was immoral but who was amusing and compelling enough that we just couldn’t slight him.  Bill Allen was that kind of friend to Ted Stevens.  I know this in my heart.  Bill Allen liked having Ted’s place in Girdwood—a lovely ski resort town—all to himself.  He had a key.  He told Ted he’d handle the remodel that Stevens wanted to please his wife.  They’d been dear friends for many years.  Ted Stevens’s mistake was trusting in a self-serving ass.  And now see the result.

And so all of this is what people not from Alaska judge Alaskans by.  We are fools, “hillbillies,” and perhaps we are.  But there are many of us who are smart, and who have worked hard to pull ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps, and who are now dismissed not just by fellow Americans, but by the world as idiots, inbred yahoos.

And this is wearing on me.  I absolutely did pull myself out of destitution and poverty and tried hard to make at least some small something of myself.  And now these people I respect cannot help but judge me by the inept local beauty queen and the corrupt Senator.  I have lived most of my life here.  I—obviously—have my own opinions.  But I can’t tell you how depressed I feel, living in this shadow.

And that’s all, really, that I have to share with you today.  Just how it feels to be judged by others when I had nothing whatsoever to do with the disaster.  Enron employees must have felt similarly betrayed when their turn came.  We try so damn hard.  And if you haven’t been to an Alaskan village and known the reality of eliminating yourself in a honey-bucket; if you haven’t known the real benefit that the Anchorage “bridge to nowhere” would bring to this state; if you haven’t known abject poverty and the hope and possibilities that development brings to the lives of every person affected—well, maybe you should pause.  Come here.  See for yourself.  Are we idiots?  Or are we trying as hard as we can to create a place where Native cultures and the inherent beauty of this state are preserved at the same time as we try and create jobs and some sort of economy that can sustain us, and benefit not just a few crooks like Bill Allen, but people who struggle every day to pay the utilities and try to make sure the schools are good and do all the things that every American does to make life better.

I had to get this off my chest.  You may disagree, and I respect you; every place has its trials.  But please don’t dismiss us.  You haven’t lived here and you can’t really know until you do.