President Donald Trump/National Portrait Gallery 

Trump storms Wasilla

Could politics get any stranger than they are now in these un-United States of Trump?

Okay, narcissistic President Donald J. could still take a shot at trying to rebrand America in his name, but short of that?

We’ve now got a spoiled, little, rich-kid who has become the hero of what used to be called the “American working class.” He took his traveling salvation show to the counry’s far north on Wednesday to meet an appreciative crowd in Wasilla, the old hometown of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Palin gets the credit for showing Trump the path to the White House by appealing to those who fear for their futures in a nation being taken over by rules, robots, AI and social warriors. Trump spoke to them clearly when he pardoned a couple of mechanics who’d been convicted of tampering with pollution-control devices on trucks, mocked a heckler as a “spoiled child,” and promised a natural gas pipeline from the state’s North Slope to a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on the shores of Cook Inlet. 

Never mind that the 800-mile-long, $45- to $65-billion project is largely a pipe dream in a world now awash in natural gas. China, long a major gas importer, in April announced the discovery of 26 new gas fields with reserves exceeding 100 billion cubic meters.

And all of this  at a time when the future for natural gas is dimming. BP – the biggest player in the Alaska oil and gas business until it bailed on the 49th state in 2020 – has projected global demand will rise until 2030, but suggests a downturn is likely in the years that follow as renewable energy sources continue to grow. 

BP, along with Exxon, tried for years to find a way to economically justify an Alaska gas pipeline, but it could never make the numbers work. The state and the Glenfarne Group now fronting the project have suggested the line could be built and ready to supply LNG by 2031, at the earliest, but the big hurdle at this point is a lack of financing.

There have been a lot of promises, but nobody has put money on the table.

“The supply agreements secured so far are mostly non-binding,” as the Reuters news service noted in September, “leading some industry participants to suggest this may reflect support for the Trump administration’s efforts to ​advance Alaska LNG rather than firm commitments to purchase the project’s LNG.”

For countries dealing with a tariff-obsessed president, promises of coming to the aid of an Alaska gas pipeline appear an easy way to buy some goodwill now, knowing full well that Trump will be gone from office long before it comes time to pony up the billions of dollars needed to make the idea a reality.

None of this, however, dims the hopes of the true believers who envision pipeline construction jobs and tax dollars to Make Alaska Rich Again.

Lovers and haters

And then there are those in Alaska who hate Trump as much as his fans love him, and they are mightily upset, or so they claim, about what his actions have done to U.S. fuel prices when they should be celebrating what Trump has done to combat climate change.

Here is a climate-change-denying president doing more to reduce U.S. hydrocarbon emissions than any president in U.S. history.

So what if his climate action came by accident when he decided to go to war with Iran? Is it that hard to accept that sometimes bad people do good things, by accident or design, just as good people sometimes do bad things?

Sky-high fuel prices have proven to be one of the few things effective in getting Americans to cut back on their driving, one of the major sources of so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

The demand for fuel for motor vehicles was once thought to be a constant, or “inelastic,” as economists put it. But researchers for the Federal Reserve Bank in 2020 found “evidence that periods of rising real gasoline prices are associated with reduced gasoline consumption.”

“It is widely understood that most consumers rely on gasoline purchases to commute to work and, hence, find it difficult to reduce their gasoline consumption when faced with higher gasoline prices,” they reported. “(But) over time, gasoline demand becomes more elastic, as consumers may trade in their cars for more fuel-efficient models or move closer to work, for example, in response to higher gasoline prices.”

A few even change their driving habits and stop rushing from stoplight to stoplight. The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory studied this behavior in 2017 and found that “aggressive behavior behind the wheel can lower gas mileage in light-duty vehicles by about 10 to 40 percent in stop-and-go traffic and roughly 15 to 30 percent at highway speeds. This can equate to losing about $0.25 to $1 per gallon” in 2017 dollars.

Gas was about half the price then that it is now, so figure on savings of 50 cents to $2 per gallon today. Frankly, given today’s gas prices, if you’re not using your cruise control as much as possible while on the highway, you’re an idiot.

Don’t take it from me, though. Take it from Motortrend magazine, which concluded cruise control “absolutely” saves fuel, and reported that a Canadian study found a 20 percent savings.

Trump’s good

Declining greenhouse gas emissions are, however, only part of the picture. A peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Public Health found that higher fuel prices also translated into less dangerous roads.

“We found a positive association between higher gasoline prices and safer roads,” researchers reported there in 2015. “This finding was generally consistent across age, gender, and race, with some exceptions.

“The results have important health policy implications for using gasoline prices and taxes to improve traffic safety.”

In terms of the environment, public health and road safety, there’s a significant upside to higher gas prices, but there’s no way you’re going to hear this from those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) because, well, Trump and the war with Iran.

TDS now has many of them turning to social media to rant about how much it costs to fill their gas tank.

Here’s a tip: Drive less. Maybe, if you’re living in Anchorage, you could even ride your mountain bike to Hillside or Kincaid parks to go for a pedal instead of driving the bike there. Mountain bikes are allowed on the city’s multi-use trails, and even on the roads.

And riding versus driving saves fuel. Just sayin’.

As for the war with Iran, which also enters the picture in these discussions, it’s easy to be outraged if you’re an anti-semite (and there are plenty of those in this country) because slowing or stopping Iran’s effort to build nuclear weapons promises some security for Israel, the “Jewish state.”

Then again, if you’re one of those who fears nuclear weapons in the hands of religious fanatics of any religion who believe everyone dying is a good thing, it’s easy to be with Trump on the Iran attack.

And if you’re a member or supporter of Queers for Palestine, well, just never mind. Supporting people who would throw you off the top of a tall building or worse for the “crime” of being homosexual is so nonsensical that all one can do is suggest psychiatric help.

Not that political views on anything make much sense in this country anymore or maintain any sort of intellectual consistency.

Consistently inconsistent

Right here in AK, we’ve got former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, who was voted out of office and is now back running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, proclaiming that “in Alaska we take care of ourselves” while campaigning on the failure of incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan to deliver enough federal benefits for Alaskans.

Meanwhile, Sullivan, a Republican, is campaigning on all the federal goodies he did deliver because fiscal conservatism appears to have fallen out of favor in a state where most folks lean right or consider themselves conservatives.

Sullivan did back the attack on Iran, which could make some pacifists reject him on purely moral grounds, but when it comes to Alaska, killing people in other countries does not appear to be the big issue surrounding that war.

The big issue in the 49th state – as the drumbeat of television and internet advertising along with the incessant telephone and text push-polling will remind you every day – is that the war has driven up the cost of living.

Most of the professional, political propagandists – Republican and Democrat alike – appear to believe the thing dearest to the hearts of Alaskans is personal selfishness. Thus the promises as to which Senate candidate can deliver more from the federal government, along with the bashing of the same candidates for doing well for themselves.

Peltola is taking heat for ending up with a high-paying job as a lobbyist after losing her seat in the House of Representatives, and Sullivan has come under fire for making money in the stock market by, among other things, investing in foreign salmon-farming companies.

Funny, isn’t it, that the Alaska Permanent Fund, which sends Alaskans their annual Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) checks, invested in some of the same salmon-farming businesses, and nobody said a word.

For their crimes, both Peltola and Sullivan should be sent to that special hell reserved for capitalists, shouldn’t they?

But here’s a secret for you: Nobody goes to Washington, D.C. to get poor. Maybe they should, but they don’t. And it probably would be bad if they did because, for better or worse, money talks in the world of the ruling class.

Especially “dark money,” which talks out of both sides of its mouth.

How else can one explain dark-money groups running a campaign against the state’s crazy ranked-choice voting system, claiming that the initiative to get rid of ranked choice isn’t really about ranked choice but about allowing “dark money” into Alaska politics?

This is all so marvelously confusing that it would be hilarious if it were funny. But this is now where we are in these un-United States of America, thanks in part to Palin.

Mama Grizzly

Remember our once news-cycling-dominating pitbull with lipstick? She of the famous proclamation: “Don’t retreat; reload!”

Palin at one time had a shot at becoming the country’s first female president. The possibility was real enough that in 2011 her family motorhome tour of the East Coast caused what The Philadelphia Inquirer described as a “media frenzy.”

“….Palin’s magical mystery bus tour stormed into Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon, chased down the Schuylkill Expressway by as many as 15 news-media vehicles while helicopters tracked the ragged caravan from the sky,” it was reported there.

“The strange trip has no public schedule – information about stops is posted on the SarahPAC website only after they are made – turning the political press into paparazzi who must stalk the bus to cover Palin, who seems to enjoy stirring up the frenzy.”

In the end, Palin lacked the discipline or the will to run for president, but Trump saw the path she’d taken and followed it to new extremes. ‘Don’t attack, reload” morphed into attack, attack, attack, a political view that Trump has never abandoned.

A one-time hellraiser, Palin now seems almost tame in comparison to Trump.

She, in 2011, put figurative crosshairs on a map of candidates she wanted to see defeated in upcoming Congressional elections. Trump is considering live-streaming the very real execution of someone by a firing squad. Admittedly, the man sentenced to death is a deranged, Islamic extremist who shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood and injured 32 others because he wanted to “best serve God.” 

But there’s still something a little distasteful about making a crazy person the subject of a snuff film. Then again, this is a new America.

And it’s not just Trump. Almost every politician on the scene is now wanting to be like Trump. Even supposedly “Sweet Mary” Peltola, the one-time Congresswoman for all of Bethel, is making like a Palin-esque “mama grizzly” on steroids in her bid to unseat incumbent Sullivan.

The country has moved a long way from the George W. Bush of 1999 who campaigned for president on the theme of wanting to be “a uniter, not a divider.” Today’s campaigns are all about appealing to the “base,” which is how the political pundits describe the effort to achieve victory by creating a mob bigger than your opponent’s mob.

The idea that compromise is the glue that holds democracies together seems to have gotten lost somewhere. If you’re not at least a little worried about how this ends, you should be. Democracies are not known for their lengthy lifespans.

There is considerable debate as to which actually lasted the longest, but there is a case to be made for former President Bill Clinton’s July declaration that “America has become the longest-lasting democracy in history,” and it has only been in existence for 250 years.

The way the country is increasinlgy polarizing, you have to begin to wonder how much longer this democracy can last. In looking around at the families and friendships disrupted, and sometimes destroyed, by differing political views while the political advocates continually amp up the divisiveness, it’s hard to miss the pick-a-side parallels that led to the country’s Revolutionary and Civil wars.

England thought the first war impossible because the complaints of the colonies seemed so insignificant and then….

There was more substance to the Civil War, but Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman blames technology for that deadliest of all American wars. 

‘Technology changed the economics of slavery – for the worse,” he writes at History. com. “The cotton gin vastly increased plantation owners’ potential profits, creating the incentive for more slavery characterized by ever greater brutality toward the enslaved. By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the Southern commitment to slavery was grounded not only in pseudo-scientific racism and religion, but also in the continuing economic self-interest of slaveholders.”

Technology is again disrupting the U.S. socially and politically, and the politically active are increasingly driven to opposite camps, with one full of those of the view that government should control almost everything in life and the other of the view that government already has too much control and should refrain from doing much of what it does now, with the exceptions of spending money to wage war and build ever more roads because in our carbrain society, road building seems to be about the only thing that the right and left can agree on anymore.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that the one thing most Americans still have left in common is that the vast majority of them are drivers?