My Alaska vs. Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

I lived in Alaska for about four years when I was little. It was an idyllic place to be a child. All winter long we cross-country skied, skated on the dark ice that covered the unpaved roads, built snow forts and tooled around on kid-sized snowmobiles. (My poor mom hated those winters, because she had to drive). On Halloween, in snowsuits and face paint, we’d pile into an Eskimo sled like a shallow bathtub behind our dad’s snowmobile and he’d buzz around to the neighbors in the dark.

There was no such thing as a “snow day” at school, since it snowed all the time. Kids who lived near enough to school were expected to walk, and the rest of us got dropped off and picked up by snowmobile. We’d walk home from the bus stop at 3:15 and a blue twilight would already be stealing across the snow. It was heartbreakingly lovely. On weekends, we’d spend all day outside playing in the snow. At lunchtime we’d tramp inside and peel out of our soaking-wet one-piece snowsuits, and while they hung drying near the wood-burning stove we’d guzzle tomato soup and hot chocolate.

I remember the utter stillness of the winter woods, black branches against drifts of snow, my breath hanging in the air, the hush pierced by a dropping pine needle or a faraway shout. I would lie on my back, alone in the forest near our house, staring up into the drifting whiteness, feeling the cold seeping through my snowsuit as the silence rang in my ears.

In the summer there was fireweed along the roads and berries to pick: raspberries along the river (where moose liked to bathe), cranberries on the forest floor and blueberries on the mountains (where we would avoid the bears, who liked the berries too). Moose mamas would bring their babies to our garden to poach brussels sprouts and broccoli. During those long summer days I would lie on my bed reading for hours, and at night my parents would call us inside at nine or ten, when it was still light out, and pull heavy blankets over our windows to block out the midnight sun.

Downstairs in the garage there was a freezer full of salmon, courtesy of my dad the fisherman, and also paper-wrapped packages of weird-tasting caribou sausage, caribou steak and caribou hot dogs, evidence of a successful hunting trip. One caribou lasted a hell of a long time, even in a family of six. Our neighbors across the road had their own salmon smoker, an old converted refrigerator. Fresh smoked salmon, warm and juicy from the smoker – ambrosia. They also had a cache, a box high up in a tree to keep food away from bears. Like the spooky, marvelous Northern Lights, to me these things were uniquely Alaskan. Life was different here.

I loved going to school in Alaska. We had Rendezvous Day, where we learned about the fur trappers and gold prospectors of yore and cooked sourdough pancakes right there in the classroom. The whole school sang patriotic songs in the auditorium every Friday: the national anthem, America the Beautiful, My Country ’tis of Thee, and also songs that were peculiar to Alaska, like the catchy Eskimo ditty “A Oony Coony Chuck A Oony.” When we moved back to the Lower 48, I was perplexed to find out that my new classmates did not know these patriotic songs, much less bellow them unself-consciously in the auditorium.

It was in school in Alaska that I began to learn what it meant that we were a democracy, to feel pride in our founding principles: freedom of speech and religion, liberty, the shrugging off of the yoke of tyranny. It was thrilling to learn of the early Americans’ revolutionary fervor in the face of oppression and injustice. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere – these were freedom fighters, embodying a high kind of honor, truth and courage that reached down through the centuries and resonated with me, an elementary school kid in rubber breakup boots. (Breakup: the slushy, icy-puddled weeks when a winter’s worth of snow began to give way to spring.) It was then that I began to understand why dissent – speaking truth to power – is patriotic, that those who love their country the most are the ones who will stand up, despite intimidation and name-calling, when its founding tenets are desecrated. It was later that I learned about the genocide of the Native Americans and the many other stains on our country’s honor, but I also found that it is possible to execrate our country’s failings and still love its immense potential, the core values for which it stands. We denounce its failings precisely because they undermine those ideals.

There are certain similarities between Sarah Palin’s Alaska and mine. The snowmobiles, the caribou in the freezer, even the patriotism. I learned to love my country there, its blue-shadowed, bear-haunted beauty as well as the ideals that had formed it. From every mountainside let freedom ring, and crown thy good with sisterhood from sea to shining sea. But for Palin, a kind of stunted xenophobic parochialism parades as patriotism. For Palin and her cronies, it is “unpatriotic” to question the tyrants who’ve been shredding our Constitution with gleeful abandon for the past eight years. If the authors of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were around today, Sarah Palin would accuse them of “palling around with terrorists,” because they would certainly decry unfettered Executive power, a citizen-funded $700-billion corporate bailout, state-sanctioned torture, preemptive war in support of oil profiteering, the Orwellian “Patriot Act” and Cheney-flavored fascism.

For Palin, the glorious, irreplaceable, ancient tundra exists to be tapped like a glorified gas station, and the cherished tenets of our democracy are to be mocked and twisted beyond recognition. Yes, my dad hunted caribou – something I would shudder to do – to help feed his family on an Air Force salary, but he is as horrified as I at Palin’s enthusiastic championing of aerial wolf-hunting, and the bloodthirsty bounty she proposes to offer for each chopped-off left wolf foreleg.

I hear my Alaska has been paved over with WalMarts and Targets. From the photos I’ve seen of the down-on-its-luck strip mall known as Wasilla, you’d never know just what a beautiful place it is. Unlike my dad and brothers, I have never been back. I know you can’t go home again, and people say that things were never kinder and gentler the way we like to remember them – although perhaps a happy childhood is an exception, creating memories of peace and wholeness and idealism before divorce and loss and disillusionment can establish their toeholds. I take heart from the anti-Palin Alaskans who are coming out in droves; her brand of jingoistic Americanism doesn’t entirely hold sway in the Last Frontier. But still, now more than ever, I choose to remember Alaska the way it was.

Blog envy.

Sometimes I am so impressed with some other blogger's wit and savoir faire that I think "I really couldn't have done that any better myself" (an embarrassingly rare sentiment, perhaps).

Exhibit A: this stupefyingly bizarre photo.











Exhibit B: Wonkette's fucking high-larious field day with said photo, published the next morning. The next morning! Don't these people have day jobs?

Vote No on Prop. 4

Proposition 4, for those who might not be aware, is about parental consent. It is about amending the California constitution to force pregnant teens to obtain said consent before obtaining an abortion. There's a mandatory waiting period of 48 hours, too – just enough time for your parents to beat you up or send you to a convent or both. Or else, in another breathtaking breach of your privacy, you could run the gauntlet of the law and try to prove to a judge why you shouldn't have to inform your parents. Whee!

Allow smart-assed little Kaitlyn to make up her own mind about her body, her life, her future? Heavens, no! Never mind that most teens who get pregnant do involve their parents. Never mind, moreover, that the ones who don’t probably have damn good reasons for it.

Would the knuckle-draggers behind this ballot initiative really prefer that teenage girls go get illegal abortions? Oh...right...of course they would. Most of them don’t give a flying fuck about real teenage girls. They are grimly determined to strip them – and us older girls too – of our constitutional rights. The right to determine our reproductive destinies makes us equal citizens. Without it we are slaves.

It all brings to mind those heady days when we marched on Washington for reproductive freedom, busloads of college students and senior citizens and sensitive men shouting "U.S. out of my uterus!" I made a ton of money on "Dykes for Reproductive Rights" t-shirts. We waved signs with wire hangers that said "Never again!" That was before the internet. Now I do all these slightly more grown-up (read: lazy) things like writing emails to my Senators and signing a dozen progressive petitions a week and sending donations online.



California voters have defeated this sort of ballot initiative before – twice. It just keeps coming back, like a nasty fungus under the bathroom carpet. Go here for a good Los Angeles Times op-ed on the subject.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: no one has any business telling a woman what to do with her body. You can believe what you want, but your rights end where her body begins. You cannot control someone else’s sovereign self – and no, a fetus is not sovereign, at least not before it is viable outside its mother’s body, not while it requires her consent and her blood vessels to fulfill its potential. It may have rights, but its rights do not trump those of the girl or woman carrying it. She is the one with the SAT test, the orchestra rehearsals, the abusive dad. Or maybe the four other children, the meager paycheck, the violent boyfriend, the partner-track job or the diabetes. The point is, she’s the one who gets to make the decision. Not you.

No matter what the Just Say No abstinence-only-teaching spittle-flecked bible thumpers think, people – including teenagers – are Going To Have Sex. And the reality is, women and girls with unwanted pregnancies Will Have Abortions, whether they are safe and legal or not. If my college boyfriend had gotten me pregnant, you can bet your boots I would have done whatever it took to get an abortion, legal or otherwise. Wouldn’t we prefer, since it’s gonna happen, that it’s done legally, with sterilized instruments, by a trained, caring doctor? Because the doctors who perform abortions, by and large, genuinely care about women and girls, their families, their lives and their futures. They are principled and, in this dark era of death threats and clinic bombings, truly heroic. Pick up This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund and I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down.

The people who want to outlaw abortion are too often the same people who oppose paid parental leave and social services for poor women and their babies, and slouch mutely on their couches while the Roves and Rumsfelds of the world send tens of thousands of young Americans off to war to bomb the arms off Iraqi children, before coming home in festive flag-draped coffins.

Every child should be a wanted child. That old bumper sticker sentiment from the patchouli-scented flowering of the women’s movement still rings true. When women get to decide when and whether to give birth, families and communities get healthier. (Don’t even get me started about the Shrub administration’s ritual denial of funding to organizations that provide family planning in developing countries.) No woman or girl should be held hostage to a being inside her body that she does not want to bring into the world – with all the accompanying sickness, pain and risk of death – for any and all of the reasons that she might list on those forms at the courthouse. Every child born should be a blessing, the answer to fervent prayer. And lord knows that in these days of global overpopulation and dwindling resources, every child not born is a blessing too.

So, Californians, please give your sisters credit for being full human beings and vote No on Prop. 4. Thank you.

Holy matrimony!

Yay for the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled yesterday that queers can get legally married and enjoy all the rights, responsibilities and wreckage of wedlock. The Constitution State actually flexed its constitution, getting in line behind Massachusetts and California as a flower girl for equal protection under the law. Don't you ladies look lovely!

Can I just say, when you look for "gay wedding" pictures online, you get lots of sweet family shots of two handsome grooms and their photogenic children and dogs. When you search for "lesbian wedding" pictures, you get lots of porn.

Anyway, Connecticut. Three's a charm. They're dominoes, I'm telling you. Dominoes!

No more separate but equal in Connecticut. Bring on the wedding planners, with prenups, liberty and justice for all. Mazel tov!

Cinderella, your coach is ready.

Just something fun for fall. Add one fairy godmother and have a ball.

Sarah Palin “debates.”

Courtesy of Adennak over at the Daily Kos:




















’Nuf said.

Scotch vincit omnia.

That’s what I had engraved on a silver flask for my friend Lane a few years ago. It was technically her birthday, but it was really just another excuse for us to bond over our shared love of the single malt. We pondered the virtues of Balvenie (12-year-old) and the smoky Lagavulin, debated whether adding ice or water was permissible (I voted for water, on those nights when we wanted to prolong our warm and pleasant intoxication). Even better, Scotch didn’t give me a hangover.

It was always good for impressing the girls, ordering Scotch. (It impressed the boys, too.) It somehow held onto a reputation as a man’s drink – a dad’s drink. I remember my dad swirling the tawny liquid in his thick square glass when I was a kid. It was a mystery to me back then. It had definitely been an acquired taste – but once acquired, enthusiastically indulged. It had something to do with that time in college when an older woman (she a junior, I a trembling sophomore) bought me a bourbon in a smoky bar with the clear intention of seducing me. I was duly impressed, not to mention stricken with terror.

Eventually I was the older woman, or at least the one ordering Scotch when everyone else was still sipping Cosmos. There was a brief fling with Mojitos and one or two icy Martinis, but Scotch was reliable, comforting, powerful, refreshingly not sweet. Drinking Scotch, I was serious. In a family of Scotch-loving Finns (my brothers and my dad were always swapping bottles at Christmas), I was finally one of the boys.

I can’t tell exactly when or how the occasional glass of Cabernet started to drift in. It may have been somehow tied to the fact that Lane and I were drifting apart. I got into a serious relationship, which meant more romantic dinners (ergo, more red wine) and fewer nights with my friends at the bar (ergo, fewer chicks to pick up). I suppose that, after all, there were new worlds to conquer.

I wonder if Lane still has the flask. I have a bottle of Balvenie in my cupboard, but I only break it out when I’m entertaining, in case someone else wants a nip. Oh hell, I’ve gotten old.

Why I love Rachel Maddow, part 2.

On last night’s Rachel Maddow Show, the eponymous Maddow was interviewing Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas about the bailout, or credit contraction, or whatever they’re calling it today. He was actually quite coherent and persuasive for a Republican. At the end of his interview, when Rachel thanked him for coming on her show, he said “Yes sir.” Quickly recovering, he added “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

With great good humor Rachel came back with “That’s all right. Hey, happens all the time!”









According to the stunted semiotics of American culture, short hair = male. I remember being called “sir” myself when my hair was as short as Rachel’s (funnily enough, with that short cut, courtesy of a little divey barber shop on St. Mark’s Place in the Village, I also turned more female heads than I ever had before). I would glance down at my not insignificant chest and then shoot the offender a raised eyebrow, triggering blushes and stammered apologies, which I would shrug off much as La Maddow did.

Maybe I just haven’t been watching enough television news, but I have never before seen a pundit on a mainstream news program inhabit her glorious androgyny with such insouciance and charm. (Rachel's butchness is toned down for television, and those sweeping eyelashes are enough to set anyone’s heart aflutter, so maybe John Culberson was so bowled over by her brilliance that he was momentarily blinded to her gender. Perhaps somewhere in his reptile brain that brilliance registered as, by definition, male.) Ellen DeGeneres doesn’t count (well, okay, she does count, especially with those adorable wedding pictures, Portia at her side, winning hearts and minds in blithe repudiation of the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative trolls).

It’s awesome to watch Rachel’s disarming friendliness, acerbic wit and sardonic facial expressions winning fans and establishing her as a heartthrob for women and men, hets and queers alike. She’s striking a blow for hot, brainy, funny dykes everywhere – though few on the national stage are as hot, brainy and funny as our Rachel. She’s a groundbreaker, and she’s making it look fun.