Sarahpoleon’s Wasilla: A Strip Mall Between Two Cesspools

Y’all know you’re glad to see me back. And I gotta tell you, it’s good to be back. We slogged through 4 days without power or Internet access, and I’m all caught up on the news. That, of course, is the UNFORTUNATE part of the whole deal, but what can you do?

Sarahpoleon likes to point to her stewardship of the town of Wasilla as something you and I should look at when we’re deciding whether or not she’s Presidential material. Strangely enough, I agree with her 100% on this one; I also think you should look at her stewardship of Wasilla when trying to evaluate her.

I would imagine most of you have seen pictures of the town of Wasilla, as I myself have. While Sarahpoleon is trying to sell everyone on it being something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, the Wasilla I see in photographs reminds me a lot of the town I ran screaming from as soon as I was able to do it. Maybe some of you are from “that” small town too; corrupt politicians, stupid people, and an atmosphere that will suck all the ambition and hope right out of you. I am lucky in that I managed to get away without having drunk myself to death, run my car into a tree, or blown my own brains out, the normal routes of demise for people in such places who think too much. I assure you that many of those I hung out with as a younger man did not make it out alive.

Wasilla strikes me as THAT kind of town, rather than the one Sarahpoleon is always talking about. As it turns out, it appears to be worse than even the photos depict it.

Every morning she’s at home here, Sarah Palin wakes up to a postcard view from her lakeside home. Out the windows of her two-story wood-framed house stretch the serene, birch-lined waters of Lake Lucille. Ducks go gliding by the red-and-white Piper Cub floatplane docked outside. With the snow-frosted Chugach and Talkeetna mountains looming in the distance, the scene seems to define the Alaska that Palin celebrates: rugged, majestic, unspoiled.

And, yet, the lake Sarah Palin lives on is dead.

“Lake Lucille is basically a dead lake — it can’t support a fish population,” said Michelle Church, a Mat-Su Valley borough assembly member and environmentalist. “It’s a runway for floatplanes.”

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans “have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we’ve got up here and we want to protect that, so we’re gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don’t want development if there’s going to be that threat to harming our environment.”

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.

“Sarah’s legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth,” said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. “The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it’s not a pleasant place to live. It’s not thought out. And that’s a shame.

“Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can’t understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition.”

Among the environmental casualties of Wasilla’s frenzied development was Palin’s own front yard, Lake Lucille. The lake was listed as “impaired” in 1994 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and it still carries that grim label. State environmental officials say that leaching sewer lines and fertilizer runoff caused an explosion of plant growth in the lake, which sucked the oxygen out of the water and led to periodic fish kills.

“Sarah,” a recent biography of Palin by Kaylene Johnson, features a photo of a beaming Palin, sitting in a rowboat on Lake Lucille clutching a fishing rod. But, according to local fishermen, the Republican vice-presidential candidate would have to be very lucky to reel in something edible.

The Alaska Fish and Game Department dutifully stocks the lake with coho salmon and rainbow trout each year — but the fish don’t last long.

Fishing on the lake “was tough,” reported Alaska fishing guide Carlyle Telford on his Web site when he tried his luck on Lake Lucille last year, “because the vegetation is decaying and floating. When you retrieve every cast, the fly comes back with crud on it.”

In a recent phone conversation, Telford said he hasn’t returned to Lake Lucille since then. “I think the lake’s pretty dead,” he said. “That’s why I haven’t been back.”

Wasilla, where Palin grew up and still resides, sprawls between two lakes — Lucille and Wasilla Lake. Cottonwood Creek, which flows in and out of Wasilla Lake, has also been labeled “impaired” by state environmental officials, after foam was detected on the water surface and subsequent testing found excessive concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria.

The two lakes are the town jewels, the only eye relief along a harrowing corridor of strip malls, big-box stores and fast-food drive-throughs that is Wasilla. “Lord, help me get through Wasilla,” reads one Alaska bumper sticker.

This, then, is Sarahpoleon’s true legacy as an executive. Pollution, incompetence, and ugliness. This is what she proposes to bring to the rest of us as President (and let us not kid ourselves, the likelihood that she will become President is quite high.)

Having watched Sarahpoleon for awhile now, and having read up on her history, I think I can put Sarahpoleon in perspective fairly easily. For that, though, I must take you back to your high school days, back to the days of cliques. As you may have guessed already, I was a member in good standing of a clique known as the “hoods” in my high school; we drank, we skipped school, and (at least in my case) we loved to try to point out and refute teacher mistakes. Sarahpoleon was one of the “popular” (though I never really understood exactly what that meant, since most of us lower animals despised them) clique, a cheerleader type. You remember them, right? They didn’t have a brain in their heads, they tended to be sluts (although that term was reserved for girls of less fortunate status who acted precisely the same way,) and yet-they were always on the honor roll, and their faces were plastered throughout the yearbook because they seemed to be involved in just about every school function there was. They skated based on a combination of parental influence and personal beauty, but they, themselves never understood that. They’d been told that they were “special” their whole lives, and they BELIEVED it; they were ENTITLED to all the things the lesser people weren’t deserving of.

Sarahpoleon is what I have called a “permateen,” one of those people who goes right through her entire life just like she did in high school. She’s still all about the popularity contest, and she still doesn’t have a brain in her head. If you oppose her, then you’re just jealous of her and you need yourself a lesson. If possible, she’ll teach you a lesson herself, just like she did back when her clique would get together and humiliate anyone that didn’t show the proper deference.

Deference; isn’t that the word McCavein’s campaign manager used for how you are supposed to approach her?

I’m not feeling deferential myself. The way I see it, about the last thing we need in the Presidency is a Narcissist permateen who is interested in nothing more than staying in the popular clique. The country has itself some serious problems, and they’re going to call for some serious attention.

You won’t get that attention from Sarahpoleon. Just look around Wasilla, if you don’t believe me.

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