Taking a flier on the Anchorage recall
(The recall election aimed at Anchorage Assembly member Meg Zaletel wraps up Tuesday. My friend Michael Carey, a longtime Alaska journalist, has been thinking about what he’s seen in his Anchorage mailbox for this mail-in election. )
By Michael Carey
The writer Ring Lardner (1885-1933) was a master of quips. Here's one: "The Washington Senators played a doubleheader yesterday. The game in the papers and the game I saw."
That's how I respond to the mailers I have been getting in the Meg Zaletel recall. The pro and anti Zaletel partisans seem to be talking about two different women, two different members of the Anchorage Assembly. The battling sides only agree that voters in her midtown assembly district should vote early or on Tuesday.
"The Carey Household" has received eight mailers, and this member of "The Carey Household" expects more. Mailers are a relatively inexpensive, efficient way to reach voters, especially in an Anchorage assembly district. Television would be a waste of money—probably 80 percent or more of the voters would be outside the district, ineligible to vote.
The keep Zaletel mailers are simple and direct. One has a photograph of midtown office buildings over "Meg Zaletel Our Anchorage Assembly Member" and below that a color photo of Zaletel smiling - poised as your earnest neighbor, attractive but not flashy. The flier reminds the recipient "Vote No on the recall" and tells the Carey household where to vote.
I have received several anti-Zaletel fliers and one already is my favorite of the campaign It's about 11" by 8" white on black - mostly black - with a yellow head, "A Radical Leftist New York Group" over a photo of Zaletel and followed in bold white by "Is Funding Meg Zaletel."
In smaller type, the author of the flier adds "She has resorted to accepting funds from a socialist, defund the police group from New York." The author then adds "Vote Yes to Recall Meg Zaletel." (I am not sure "author" is the proper word for the creator of this prose - I thought about "composer" but that brought to mind music.)
The photograph of Zaletel is classic. The respectable middle-class woman of the "keep" flier has been transformed—by distorting her photo and the background behind her—into a deranged war criminal awaiting sentencing. You would have to be a criminal yourself to vote for this obviously soulless woman.
It is true Zaletel did receive big money from a New York group—a labor union that donated $70,000. It's my guess the author of this flier has never met a "radical leftist"—there are not enough in Alaska to fill an 8' by 12' log cabin - and believes a "radical leftist" is anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump's Republican Party.
As for invoking New York City as a threat to the good people of Anchorage, there's a long American tradition of demonizing New York as the home of political radicals, free thinkers, unkempt bohemians, painted women, fortune tellers with thick eastern European accents, and mafia hitmen whose blood runs cold just before it runs in the gutter.
And there have been those in New York who themselves thought of Gotham as Sin City. Joseph Mitchell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, captured one of them in his portrait of the Reverend James Jefferson Davis Hall whom Mitchell long ago called "the most frightening street preacher in the city."
The reverend was particularly disturbed by the theater district, which he denounced as "the belly and the black heart of that Great Whore of Babylon and mother of abominations, the city of New York."
"Every fair evening," wrote Mitchell, he "walks around for three or four hours, shouting at people and threatening them with the delirium tremens, the electric chair, potter's field, and the blue and bubbly flames of hell."
Has Meg Zaletel taken money from the Great Whore of Babylon? If you think so, vote for her at the peril of your immortal soul.
There are people who believe this. But probably not enough to recall Zaletel in this special election.
-Michael Carey is an Anchorage writer.