What the Lower 48 is Missing

"It's just, I don't get it... how can you guys vote for a felon?"

No question is more common than that. Everyone I talk to from out of state comes at me with a mix of incredulity and a good bit of condescension when asking how "we" can possibly be so blind. I mean, have you Alaskans not read the news--he's a felon! I know it for sure! I saw it on CNN!

Alaskans do, in fact, watch the news. The difference is that they don't just see 18-second sound bytes on mainstream media outlets declaring Stevens to be guilty before moving on to a story about a cat in a tree or a teenage mother. They receive the news in context, as a continuous series of stories by local outlets following Stevens from the beginning of the trial to the end. They talk to their neighbors about it. It doesn't happen on a stage, far away and removed, where things are black and white; it happens right here, in their backyards and in their towns where they drive by buildings, roads, and bridges that wouldn't be here without Ted Stevens. When you take the end result of the equation out of context and look at it from the false premise of Alaska as what Edward Said called the Other, the inferior, the exotic, as many people do, then it's easy to see the decisions made by many Alaskans as ridiculous or crazy. It's even hard not to.

But, really, people are people anywhere. We all make the same decisions based on the same mechanisms of collecting and evaluating evidence. However, I'll humor the question for a moment, no matter how loaded its premise, presuppositions, and inherent classism. Let's take a small peek into Alaska, and try to give you some semblance of an answer.

A few days ago, a fellow Alaskan blogger over at Mudflats (the best Alaskan political blog outside of this one) attended the greet-Ted-at-the-airport rally held the night Stevens arrived at his airport from Washington, D.C. It wasn't even 48 hours after his conviction on seven felony counts.

In the airplane hangar where the welcoming party was taking place, over 600 people had gathered, including Senator Lisa Murkowski and a few other GOP dignitaries. The people were raucous:

Our emcee was Rick Rydell, a long-time conservative radio talk show icon. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t like outsiders telling me what to think!”[...] Then he went on to say that there were people that call his radio show all the time and say, “How can you not think Ted is guilty?” and then he says, “Why do you think he IS guilty? And then they tell him, ‘I read it on the internet and the Anchorage Daily News.” Laughter and scorn from the audience. And finally he reminded the crowd that “the prosecutors don’t know Ted…I know Ted, and I choose to believe him.”

That last line is the truly crucial one. It beautifully encapsulates the paradigm that a lot of Alaskans are working from right now, based on these basic assumptions, where 'you' is the Lower 48, from the prosecutors to the media:
1. You don't know us.
2. Ted Stevens is one of us.
3. You don't know Ted Stevens.
4. For that matter, you don't know me either, and you're not telling me how to vote.

Read on:

I snapped a picture of the crowd, and a lady grabbed my arm. “You should take a picture of those t-shirts!” she beamed. “Did you see them?? They’re great! They say ‘Fuck the Feds! Vote for Ted!’”

Indeed.