By ART CHANCE
I’m something of a student of Western history. I’ve had some academic history, but I’m more of an autodidact; I don’t really adhere to the Marxist historical canon of the academy. Besides, I never had the money to go to Oxford to learn about the Byzantine Empire through some lens other than Gibbon’s English Protestant point of view.
I’m very much of the view that there is little that is new under the Sun, and if you know your history, you can find the same fact pattern in the past and it will give you at least guidance into what you face today.
I can barely see the first half of the Twentieth Century in color. I can’t see women and children lined up on the edge of a pit and facing machine guns in the bright colors of a beautiful sunny day in the Ukraine, yet I know that they have bright, sunny days just as we do, since we share the same latitudes.
When my eyes were still up to it, I was a museum-quality model builder and my major interest was militaria from the 20th Century. I can rattle off the MilSpec numbers or RLM names of the often garish colors of World War II American and German equipment, but I still see them in black and white. I can’t see Auschwitz on a sunny cloudless day.
I know the Me-109s that escorted the German bombers during the Battle of Britain were two shades of green with a light blue underside and many had a bright yellow nose and a white rudder to better show off the pilot’s kills and awards, but they’re all gray to me.
A world dominated by authoritarian powers is a world of black and white.
To the point: I don’t have much reason to go to downtown Anchorage; there’s nothing much there anymore other than drunks and drug addicts. I go to the car dealer a couple of times a year for service. I go to a group I meet with sometimes, but these days, I usually just Zoom that.
I used to like lunch at Fletcher’s or Sullivan’s with associates or former work mates, but that has become too much of a hassle. I live in South Anchorage and you can get most anything within a mile radius of Huffman and the Old Seward.
But even that has become a hassle. The fascists running our city government have their conformity Gestapo out harassing merchants and barkeepers, especially those audacious enough to host Republican political events.
People have been “distanced” for so long that they’ve forgotten how to get along. God help you if you don’t wear a face diaper or if you’re only five and a half rather than six feet away in the grocery store aisle. It’s better just to order online and go to Fred Meyer and pick it up.
I made a reservation at a nearby upscale restaurant for a Friday “date night” with my wife. We were on time but they didn’t have a table ready. We couldn’t wait in the bar because the fascists have closed bars. There was probably enough room for “social distancing” in the waiting area, but the ignorant children in charge couldn’t make such decisions, so they told us to go wait in our car and they’d call us.
I gave them the two-word speech and won’t likely be back.
In these times, businesses need managerial competence to make adaptive decisions; they might even need owners to drop down from their ivory towers or return from Hawaii and actually run the place. I’ve supervised twenty-somethings; you don’t put them in charge of anything.
Executive summary: Anchorage sucks.
I went to a political event in Palmer last week. Driving across the Knik River Bridge is like escaping the concentration camp. There are friendly people who aren’t wearing face diapers, our equivalent of a yellow star or a pink triangle, and who will shake your hand. I’ve gone to Palmer and Wasilla numerous times during the period of our incarceration. I can get anything there that I can get in Anchorage. I can fill up my car without paying an extra 10 cents to support the drunks, addicts, and screw-ups.
The lefties in Anchorage and throughout other parts of Alaska have decided that they don’t need or want a private sector. The private sector is the constituency for the corpus of the Permanent Fund. If you need the dividend to get by, you’ve likely made some bad choices in your life.
The lefties envision a world in which the private sector abandons Anchorage. If you want a prototype, just look at Juneau; there is just enough private economy there to provide the basics for the Democrat parasites who live there. They envision the the whole state having a similar economy. Since the primary constituency for the corpus of the Permanent Fund is the private sector, if you eliminate that constituency, you have access to the corpus of the Fund and the parasites can live off money that other people made for many, many years.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
