"LETTER FROM ALASKA"
September 22, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_gourevitch.
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Last year, the F.B.I. hit the home of Ted Stevens, Alaska’s six-term senator, and he became a favorite figure of ridicule on “The Daily Show”: an angry little man, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, who had once made himself seem even older than his eighty-plus years by describing the Internet as “a series of tubes”; Jon Stewart called him a “coot,” and portrayed him as a bully and a crook. As I travelled around Alaska in mid-August, Alaskans wanted me to understand that, sadly, he might well be all of that—and a very good thing for the state, too.
I booked a flight to the Ted Stevens
Anchorage International Airport shortly after Stevens was indicted on,
and pleaded not guilty to, seven felony charges for failing to report
more than a quarter of a million dollars in gifts from the same oilmen
who had bought much of the state legislature. I had to change planes in
Las Vegas, but when I got there I was told that my flight to Anchorage
had been cancelled, on account of a volcano in the Aleutian Islands
that had erupted and “burped”—the technical term—a gigantic cloud of
ash into the lower stratosphere. The cloud had drifted in a
northeasterly direction and occupied much of the airspace over the Gulf
of Alaska. More than five thousand travellers were stranded as a
result. The next day, when the cloud moved and I completed my journey,
I learned that, after a similar belch of ash choked out all four
engines of a K.L.M. flight into Anchorage in 1989, Ted Stevens finagled
an earmark on an appropriations bill to secure federal funds for the
Alaska Volcano Observatory, whose missions included the monitoring of
volcanic activity and its attendant hazards. The Alaska Volcano
Observatory became a punch line on “The West Wing,” mocked as a
ludicrous example of congressional pork, which is how it might sound
until you think about your plane crashing.
So Ted Stevens may have saved my life—and that was something a great many Alaskans could say as they looked about at the roads and bridges, the hospitals and flood-control systems, the satellite weather and global-positioning relay stations, the sprawling Army and Air Force bases, the rural landing strips and postal air-cargo flights that sustain existence in Alaska as it enters its fiftieth year of statehood. Much of this infrastructure was the result of Stevens’s work on the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees, and he made no apologies for his transactional approach to politics. On the contrary, as he brought Alaska the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, he boasted that he was doing his job. Still, Stevens’s decision to launch a reëlection campaign in the middle of a federal investigation required more than ordinary moxie.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_gourevitch/
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