[Rhodes22-list] Politics - Small Town America

[Brad Haslett]

Long before gay rights ever turned into a national issue, we had a
"gay" issue in my hometown of 650 people.  A local school teacher (who
4 years later encouraged me that I could learn to fly) was accused of
being gay and was being fired by the local school board based on
accusations by a handful.  My father worked away from home during the
week as a construction worker and didn't have time for local politics,
what little there was, but he jumped in on this issue with both feet.
Louis stood up in front of a gym full of people, maybe a hundred but a
big crowd for anything other than a basketball game and said, "let he
who is without sin cast the first stone".  I can remember to this day
cringing with embarrassment at watching my father make what I thought
was a fool of himself.  His argument won the day.  Folks, this is a
big country but it consists of neighborhoods, and villages, and
eventually cities.  Never underestimate the power of little towns and
the people who derive their values from there.  I leave you with this
article from none other than the big city magazine of Time.

Brad

-----------------

So his name is Levi.

That's about the only thing that I didn't know about Bristol Palin's
pregnancy. The rest of the details I picked up almost without trying,
while talking about other things with townsfolk — some who know the
governor and her family well, some who don't. It was, more or less, an
open secret. And everyone was saying the same thing: the governor's
17-year-old daughter is pregnant, the father is her boyfriend, and
it's really nobody's business beyond that.

I happen to agree.

This tiny town wedged in between the Chugach and Talkeetna mountain
ranges has intrigued the whole country since John McCain's surprise
Friday announcement that Wasilla's favorite daughter, Sarah Palin,
would be his running mate. Sure, some of the interest was a prelude to
attacks on Palin's readiness for national office. But Wasilla also
offered a welcome chance to get specific about the geography of a
politician. It's one of our most cherished myths, that a leader can
come from somewhere and you can guess at their qualities not just by
what they say, but where they live.

Well, here's the deal: small towns have their own value systems, and
in this situation those values are more a lot more valid than the
dispassionate, pushy inquisitiveness that political journalism
encourages.

I just got off the phone with a longtime Wasilla resident. She had
urged me to find time today to go up to Hatcher Pass—"the most
beautiful place in the valley!"—when I mentioned that the story on
Bristol's baby is now national news. Her voice slowed. "Oh," she said.
"I'm so sorry. That's so unfair."

Wasilla seems at times to be utterly without guile. It's a large part
of the town's charm, and it's exactly the quality that could make an
unorthodox pick like Palin pay off. Don't get me wrong — she's a tough
politician with sharp enough elbows on her own. But still, she appears
to be more steeped in the values of her hometown than any politician
I've ever come across.

Maybe that means Palin is a little too much Northern Exposure for
America—after all, her father's good friend Curt Menard happily showed
me a picture of the governor as a high schooler in 1981, in a root
cellar with family and friends, helping skin and cube and cure a whole
moose. It's enough to make you almost miss fake hunters like John
Kerry and Mitt Romney.

People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like
teen pregnancy not seem like anyone's damn business, but it's also not
seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is.
This is dangerous country — it's not just the roughneck jobs on cable
reality shows. It's real life here. I listened to the absolutely
heartbreaking story of how the godfather of Track Palin, Sarah's
oldest son, died in small plane crash just minutes after having
dropped off four kids. Another family invited me into their home and
told their incredible story; with one son in Iraq, their other son was
working on a conveyor line in Anchorage, got caught in the belt and
had his head partially crushed. He lived to stand across the kitchen
table from me and his parents, looking fully healed just three months
later, grinning at his dumb luck and wondering what comes next in
life. "It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage
pregnancy isn't such a big deal," his mom said. "Bristol—and lots of
other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine."

If you haven't guessed yet, the people here are genuinely friendly.
Even those in Palin's inner sanctum who have been told since Friday
not to talk to reporters by McCain's media team, are almost apologetic
that they can't be neighborly and chat, since you came all this way to
little Wasilla. And those who can talk, do. All weekend they had the
decency not to pretend that they didn't know the governor's eldest
daughter was pregnant. But they also expected decency in return, that
I wouldn't be the kind of person to make sport out of a young girl's
slip.

The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days,
Bristol's pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin
is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is
not opposed to birth control. So you probably can't tag her for
consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies.

You can argue that it was hamhanded of the McCain campaign—they had to
have known, right? — to somehow let this drop just a few days after
the announcement. Pregnancy does show, and it does have a ticking
clock. The story was going to come out eventually.

As for the idea — sure to be floated—that the avowedly anti-abortion
Palin may have pressured her poor daughter to ruin her life by
carrying an unwanted baby to term, I wouldn't bet on it. The Palin
family seems to share the same pro-life values going back at least as
far back as anyone here can remember, and it wouldn't be at all
surprising if Bristol wore those values, however imperfectly, as her
own. At least, that's what the town thinks. And Wasilla, above all, is
pretty sensible.