The Great Alaska Culture of Corruption greased Sarah Palin's rise over the last fifteen years, and her self-destruction today in front of what remains of the news media made me cautiously optimistic -- maybe we're finally ready for Enlightenment? I wouldn't count those Thanksgiving turkeys just yet, but the body count in indicted politicians is staggering [even while some of them have been sprung on judicial technical errors].
The city of Wasilla was little more than a truck stop the first time I saw it in 1971. In 1974 the Parks Highway opened, cutting 230 miles off the trip from Anchorage to Fairbanks, and Wasilla and the western part of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley began an explosive growth that has continued through boom and bust cycles.
The Mat-Su Borough is a massive, mostly undeveloped block of land the size of Rhode Island. Its growth has not been well planned. Palmer, a neighboring city of Wasilla [and bypassed by the Parks Highway] was established in 1936 as an agricultural colony by a WPA project. Until the early '70s it was still pretty much a pastoral small town surrounded by narrow roads running between spread out dairy and vegetable farms.
The book Johnny's Girl by Kim Rich describes the way the atmosphere in the metropolis of Anchorage [50 miles south of Palmer and Wasilla] was changed virtually overnight with the onset of construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. Rich's father was a small-time gun dealer and wannabe gangster who was ratted out by cronies and found buried in a shallow grave at the foot of a glacier in the Mat-Su in 1973 -- gunned down after spending a week chained in a tool shed in Palmer. None of his alleged killers were ever brought to trial.
High profile Anchorage attorney and all-purpose gadfly Neil Mackay was acquitted in the death of his ex-wife in a downtown Anchorage car bombing in 1975, and later acquitted again for the 1982 shooting death of his ex-wife's brother [who had been trying to get Mackay re-tried for his sister's murder] by hired assassins. [By the time Mackay died, penniless and visibly senile in the early '90s he was almost forgotten.]
In 1971 the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act left dozens of native tribes with substantial cash and leverage, and the development of Bush Alaska villages escalated. By the late '70s there was a statewide influence-peddling scandal that involved the North Slope Borough and several state officials and [mostly Seattle-based] construction contractors.
Sicilian-born developer Peter Zamarello arrived in Anchorage way before the pipeline and bought large parcels of land around town that later became prominent commercial centers where he developed shopping centers and apartment complexes. Was he just really smart and accurately predicted the future, or did he buy influence with city planners, mayors and state legislators? Both were reportedly true. When Zamarello left town in 1987, bankrupted and totally snowed in, he still managed to leave with a good chunk of his hundred million dollar empire. Today he is back, developing again albeit on a smaller scale.
Bob Uchitel was an ambitious young road paving contractor who made his way to Anchorage from Valdez in the late 1970s. He started the first cable TV company in the state, and was constantly promoting large projects and events that would transform Anchorage into a serious world contender as a shipping hub and go to destination for tourism and recreation. By the time of his death in the mid '90s he was a recluse and victim of cocaine addiction, scrawny and spent.
I'll add Chris McCandless to this group, even though he's nothing like the ruthless small-time power players I've been sketching -- because he was hoping to experience the real Alaska wilderness, and found it no longer exists. And he's one of many whose Alaska experience ruined their life.
Wasilla today is still partly untamed and rugged. It's main business district is a sprawling maw of acres of pavement, freeway bridges and access roads and every big box store and fast food restaurant on the planet. In 1995 there were less than a dozen homes there with a tax valuation of over $250,000. Today there are thousands worth more than $500,000 [for now]. Around 1997 Wasilla was the fastest growing municipality in the U.S.
Anchorge has had similar shocking growth, but at least we talk about the pros and cons, and insist on minimum standards for environmental impact, even if we have a long way to go. Politically, Anchorage is becoming a Democratic Party stronghold, with several districts locked down, and Republican majorities being pushed to the southern and eastern fringe [and of course, the Mat-Su]. There's still less than 0.7 million people in the entire state, with 2/3 of them in Anchorage and most of the rest concentrated on the road/railbelt running up to the second largest city, Fairbanks.
Mat-Su has been increasingly plagued by crime. A semi-remote riverbank recreation area, Jim Creek contains a few acres of junk and target practice ranges organized on an informal basis. Bored teenagers steal cars in Anchorage and the valley by first removing the battery, and coming back later for the whole car, driving it to Jim Creek and setting it on fire -- as a rebuke to someone who made them miserable. A friend of mine managed to subdue and detain a 16 yr old burglar. The police came and hauled him to jail. Two weeks later her car disappeared and turned up two months after that, burned down to the metal at Jim Creek. Cars were being burned in an East Anchorage neighborhood for awhile a couple summers ago. Wasilla really is the methamphetamine capital of Alaska. Bristol Palin's onetime almost mother-in-law Sherry Johnston's side job was more typical than one might believe. Last Oct. 31st in Talkeetna [a small town, main claim to fame is sightseeing tours and delivering climbers to Denali base camp], two twenty-something men robbed a group of children [the oldest was 12] of their Halloween candy at gunpoint.
Murder is down but property crime and inexplicable crime is up. Six homeless people have been found dead in the last few months -- no leads yet, at least no public information. There was a man going around Anchorage chainsawing [cutting all the way through but not felling] wood electrical poles.
Alaska used to be a place with a reputation as a last refuge for scofflaws and miscreants. The lack of resume' checking [at least in the pre-internet age] was legendary. In the early '90s a state legislator from a solidly Republican Anchorage Hillside district was found to have faked her education and experience on her official resume'. She said she had been on the city council in Helena, MT. A reporter thought to check on it, called Helena and got the [female] mayor on the phone -- and found out the mayor herself was the only woman who'd ever been on the city council.
The two largest daily newspapers in the state, the Anchorage Daily News and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner are running skeleton crews these days. Neither of them played any role in uncovering the 2006 Alaska political corruption scandal. The legislators were going around in hats that said CBC, and probably half of Juneau knew it stood for "Corrupt Bastards Club". How hard would it have been to start asking around and connecting the dots? Instead both papers have mostly acted like Palin's personal publicity agents.
The license plate on my car depicts the steep mountainside trail leading to the gold fields outside Skagway, issued on the 100th anniversary of that gold rush. I wondered, why on earth would they want to commemorate that? Wasn't it just a big debacle, a clusterfuck, an epic time of human misery, misinformation and exploitation? But it's also strangely appropriate -- because all the same drivers and situations are in effect today, but like racism they've just gone underground.
See ya, Sarah!! Woo-hoo!