I finally got around to watching a few episodes of Sarah Palin's Alaska the other night, and to tell you the truth its hard for me to fault Kate Goslin's performance for her guest-starring stint on the show. If you have never watched the show and decide to give it a shot, let me give you some good advice. You are going to want to make sure you are as close as possible to a soft, comfortable bed with the thickest, warmest blanket you can find.
Not because the show is so boring it will put you to sleep. Far from it. No, its because by the time you get through one episode you will be fucking exhausted just from watching it. And cold.
I have always imagined Alaska to be a land of scenic beauty and wonder, one of the last great nature refuge's on earth. And I'm sure it is, but you might not notice that from this series. Here, Alaska seems like a lonely, cold, and desolate place.
In one episode, Sarah and family visit a woman who lives in a large trailer way off somewhere in a secluded area, more than one hundred miles from her nearest neighbors. She related how one night when out foraging she was attacked by a bear which grabbed her by the head and dragged her off. As the Palin's felt her head and remarked on the evidenced left by the bear's crushing jaw, she related how she later sewed her head up by herself. Something's missing here, I thought. How did she get away from the bear? I never heard her explain, but I might have missed it running for the aspirin.
The main thing to remember about this show is-these people. Never. Stop. It's sunup to sundown activity. In an earlier episode, they went fishing, not with rod and reel, but to check their salmon nets. After one dry run, they went back the next day and took in a hefty haul. I shivered every time Todd or his partner reached into that frigid water to pull that thing in.
Todd is trying to train son Track to take over the family fishing business, but unfortunately, the Palin's son has-during his sojourn in Iraq-grown soft and lazy. He and his buddy neglected to clean up the tool shed, which they left in the biggest mess you could possible imagine. They were roused out of their sleep by little sister Piper some time after Todd and Sarah discovered the transgression and, sure enough, took it on themselves to clean up.
"No, please don't", I moaned to myself. "Please, take it easy. I can't take anymore."
But they just kept on. Not just Sarah and Todd, but the whole family. In that same episode, the middle girl, Willow, was up to her elbows in fish blood helping some of the other extended family members prepare dinner. And this, by the way, was on her birthday.
Her sweet sixteen birthday.
All of them were there, and all of them were working, constantly. This might sound like a put down, but its not. If anything, this show is proof positive that these people are the real deal. If Sarah becomes President, don't worry about her not being up for the job, or taking too many vacations. I seriously wonder if any of them even know what the word vacation means, in addition to other words, such as rest, relax, etc.
I am not exaggerating when I say that if I could go back in time one hundred years or so and tell the story of one of these programs around a campfire, by the time I was finished somebody would say "okay its my turn. Once there was this giant lumberjack with a big blue ox."
There are two different fallacies regarding Sarah Palin. One group thinks of her in negative terms, that she's a hick, or an opportunist, or that she's inexperienced and unqualified for high public office. One recent example of this is Aaron Sorkin, who recently penned a rant for the Huffington Post in which he criticized Sarah's apparent delight in killing animals, even though he admitted he himself was a meat eater. Apparently he thinks people that produce meat for supermarkets and restaurants wait until the animal dies of old age.
More to the point, these kinds of people are typical of the elitist, snobbish buffoons who like to portray themselves as the pillars of society. They know in reality that their lifestyle requires the hard work and sacrifice of other, and even the shedding of blood in some instances. They just don't want to have to know about it in detail, and in fact, they have a visceral reaction to the very people their very lives depend on. They want to pretend that they are too civilized, above all that, while people who live the life of the Palins are to their way of thinking too common, too crude, to regard seriously as their equals, when the fact of the matter is, people like the Palins are their superiors in every way that matters.
But there is another group of people who are just as deluded, and that is the people who think Palin is "just like us". Okay, in the sense that there are certain intrinsic values she might share, yes. But believe me, there is nothing ordinary or average about Sarah Palin.
The last thing I saw before I stopped watching was Sarah and an older in-law waiting to kill a caribou once it got in range, until it stopped and seemed to stare in their direction. "Something's wrong", whispered the older man.
Yeah, I think I know what that something was. That caribou stopped in his tracks and was thinking "Oh fucking dammit, I see a Palin at seven o'clock!"
I never saw how that turned out either. By that time my bones were so cold and sore, and I was so exhausted, I had to crawl off to bed.
