Sarah Palin, Sarajevo
Oct. 3rd, 2008 07:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraOkay, this is something that's been bothering me for weeks:
I know people who live in Alaska. None of them sound like Sarah Palin.
Where did she get that accent? It's a Minnesota accent.
In other news I'm halfway through The Kite Runner, having polished off A Thousand Splendid Suns last weekend.
When I was 18, I took all the money I had made working as a model in NYC and ran off to Europe. And so it came to pass that some time in the spring of 1970 I ended up in Sarajevo, a city (I remember scribbling portentiously in my journal) that reminded me of Oakland. (I still have those journals but since I make it a point never to reread anything I write in a journal I forget the exact words.) I think what I meant by that comparison, little solepcist that I was, was that Sarajevo's downtown too was filled with all these brown, four-story office buildings cloaked in an aura of benign industrial neglect. I wasn't impressed by it -- it was too much like places I already knew. When I travel I want foreign to be foreign -- I'd like it best if the trees were blue and the sun was purple.
Fourteen years after came the Olympics and right after that came the Seige.
And I was horrified by the seige because this was a place I had been to, this was a place that seemed to follow all the rules I was familar with (although, of course, they spoke another language.) I mean there were traffic lights there!
And suddenly it was all anarchy and machine gun fire and people living in the ruined infrastructure of those boring brown office buildings.
It was my first intimation that when it happens, it happens fast.
It happened fast for the nice, middleclass protagonist of The Kite Runner.
Could it happen here? Or do the oceans insulate us?
I know people who live in Alaska. None of them sound like Sarah Palin.
Where did she get that accent? It's a Minnesota accent.
In other news I'm halfway through The Kite Runner, having polished off A Thousand Splendid Suns last weekend.
When I was 18, I took all the money I had made working as a model in NYC and ran off to Europe. And so it came to pass that some time in the spring of 1970 I ended up in Sarajevo, a city (I remember scribbling portentiously in my journal) that reminded me of Oakland. (I still have those journals but since I make it a point never to reread anything I write in a journal I forget the exact words.) I think what I meant by that comparison, little solepcist that I was, was that Sarajevo's downtown too was filled with all these brown, four-story office buildings cloaked in an aura of benign industrial neglect. I wasn't impressed by it -- it was too much like places I already knew. When I travel I want foreign to be foreign -- I'd like it best if the trees were blue and the sun was purple.
Fourteen years after came the Olympics and right after that came the Seige.
And I was horrified by the seige because this was a place I had been to, this was a place that seemed to follow all the rules I was familar with (although, of course, they spoke another language.) I mean there were traffic lights there!
And suddenly it was all anarchy and machine gun fire and people living in the ruined infrastructure of those boring brown office buildings.
It was my first intimation that when it happens, it happens fast.
It happened fast for the nice, middleclass protagonist of The Kite Runner.
Could it happen here? Or do the oceans insulate us?
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-03 11:29 pm (UTC)"A few hundred Alaska Natives were joined by small numbers of "Alaska sourdoughs" between 1900 and 1930 when hundreds of "colonists" relocated by the Federal Government in the early 30's colonized the eastern Matanuska Valley between Wasilla, Palmer, and the Butte. The colonists came as part of the Matanuska Colony "New Deal" agricultural experiment sponsored by the federal government."
It doesn't say this here, but these relocated people were from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
http://www.metafilter.com/74764/The-Matanuska-Colony-The-New-Deal-in-Alaska
I've never seen anybody use this to explain Palin's accent, but I think the pieces fit.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-04 04:38 pm (UTC)