Middle Israel: Palin, Obama and the new American wilderness

The two biographies encapsulate US's choices in the face of a thankless world: sycophancy and escapism.

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
amotz asa el 88 (photo credit: )
amotz asa el 88
(photo credit: )
American commentators' immediate responses to Sarah Palin's abrupt arrival in their midst were, for better or worse, ideological, spotlighting her conservative views and policies and probing the extent to which her personal life reflected them. But I am not American, and my first thoughts upon sight of this strange election season's latest twist were geographic; how vast, varied, grand and exotic America sprawls so many light years beyond Washington's budgets, Los Angeles's banquets, New England's poets and New York's turrets. It is difficult enough to digest what stretches from Mt. Rainier to Cape Canaveral and from the White Mountains to the Mojave Desert, but this election has brought the world - probably also many Americans - to a US that reaches even further, all the way to the thick of the Pacific Ocean, where Barack Obama was born, and to the threshold of the Arctic Circle, where Palin was raised. Of course these two Americans are unique not only cartographically but also biographically, and the question therefore, besides which of the two will survive November's poll, is what their joint emergence says about the state of the American nation. THEY SAY of Alaska that it is the last frontier, but that's not true: it is beyond the last frontier. The American frontier, as it was studied and romanticized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was about centuries of movement from east to west by settlers, developers and other agents of civilization. Even the regions that remained sparsely settled were part of this specter, as they led to the last frontier, the West Coast, which eventually became heavily settled. Not Alaska. That place, though more than three times the size of France, is home to a population smaller than Jerusalem's. Anchorage, what in Alaska passes for metropolis, shares space with some 250 moose in the winter and a thousand in the summer, as well as several hundred bears, both black and grizzly. In the winter, when temperatures sink to minus 20 and 30 centigrade, wolves howl hearing-distance from the suburbs, sometimes attacking dogs while their owners walk them. In the spring visitors are warned to avoid the city's coastal strip lest its tidal mudflats swallow them. All this is happening in Anchorage, which lurches on Alaska's southern rim and is the closest anything there comes to a metropolis. Alaska, therefore, is not a frontier; it is a wilderness, both in the foreboding and the enchanting senses of the term. Yes, it has been serving the American civilization well, supplying it with furs, fish, whales, gold and now oil, but it never was and is not likely to become substantively populated anytime soon, nor will it become in the foreseeable future smoothly connected to Mainland USA, which Alaskans proverbially call "the Outside." All this considered, Czar Alexander's sale of Alaska to the US in 1867, for a measly two cents per acre, seems a bit more sensible than ordinarily realized. All this says nothing good or bad about Gov. Palin's suitability for the job she is seeking, only that the geography from which she emerged is probably the most unique in the history of American presidential races. Most, that is, with the possible exception of Barack Obama. OBAMA'S BIO-GEOGRAPHY could hardly be more antithetical to Palin's. Unlike the Alaskan governor, who spent almost each of her 44 years in the remote, frosty and sparsely settled land to which she was brought from Idaho as an infant, the Illinois senator's origins span three continents. His childhood, which ran back and forth between Honolulu, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, could hardly be more far-flung, dizzying and rare, even before considering his biological father's roots in Siaya, Kenya, which add yet another horizon to an already uniquely cross-cultural biography. Much has been said about this background embodying the American melting pot and experience of immigration. It doesn't; just like Alaska is not the historic American frontier. On the contrary. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, married successively one Muslim from Kenya and another from Indonesia, and both marriages ended in divorce. If anything, this Kansas girl's procession from Middle America through Hawaii to the outer world ended in a disillusioning disharmony that is emblematic of America's ongoing misunderstandings with much of the world in general, the Third World in particular and the Muslim world most of all. FACED WITH all this bizarreness, many question both candidates' potential appeal to the average American, whose background is so different from both Obama's and Palin's. Now, after Obama's color and its meaning to the voters have been discussed ad nauseam, discussion is shifting to the meaning of Palin as a hunter, beauty queen, hockey mom, pro-lifer and mother of a mentally disabled baby and a pregnant teenager. All that, like both candidates' admissions that as students they experimented with drugs, or Obama's Ivy League elitism, or Palin's having attended four different colleges in Idaho, Hawaii and Alaska before finally graduating are important, but they miss the point. The point is America's relationship with the outer world, that sense which most Americans have come to share in recent years, that much of the world that owes them the freedom, confidence, prosperity, invention and self-empowerment that it cherishes not only does not thank America, it resents it. In casting their votes this fall, Americans will be making many statements - about abortions, the deficit, the environment, Iraq and whatnot. Yet above all these issues will hover Obama's and Palin's passive statements about the non-American world: He, a product of America's magnificent failure to engage the Third World, will represent the quest to appease America's many detractors despite their unwarranted obnoxiousness, while she, like the state she governs, will represent the urge to escape the Old World, all the way to the brink of its inhospitable edge. Has it really come down to that? Do 9/11, Iraq and the rise of new non-democratic superpowers leave America with no choice other than sycophancy or escapism? For more on that, stay tuned for the next American presidency.