Death of the Last Decent Republican.

Jay Hammond, conservationist, a primary originator of the Alaska Permanent Fund, a Republican governor with a deserved reputation for honesty, integrity and public service (really? yes, really!) a man who stood up to Big Oil and development with the genuine interests of the people of the state of Alaska close to his heart, passes away.

I disagreed with him many times, but when I think of Hammond's ideas of responsible government and compare them with modern Republicans, it's night and day. I met him once or twice - he seemed cheerful and open. He read his own doggerel poems while campaigning, and knew how to laugh at himself.

The West Coast is sorely missing this branch of the party - it was systematically destroyed by massive corporate interests and their Baptist pulpit bitches.

He once said "private ownership of land is the ultimate lock-up." Good gravy. Yet his considerable vision and influence was not enough to stop the economic and political corruption of Alaska, and the squandering of unprecendented social and environmental opportunities.

(That there are any children in poverty in Alaska was wholly and completely avoidable - and now its poverty rate among kids is the fastest growing in America. It's once leading state secondary education system is continues to weaken. Hammond organized policies that gave the state a clear path to avoid all of this, but the failure stings. Thank you, Big Oil, Republican party, Democratic oil sellouts and delusional Greens).

I've long since stopped paying attention to modern Republicans- life is too short to waste time at the receiving end of unmitigated malicious nonsense. But my respect for Hammond and this all but dead wing of the GOP lingers.

Hammond was very much the embodiment of the actual frontier spirit, which was both individual, free, AND cooperative. At its best, it was not a miser's frontier, nor a conqueror's, nor an exploiter's. He was hardly a progressive, but he never had the 'I've got mine, fuck you," attitude which appears to be the modern GOP motto.

At this last gasp of manifest destiny, there was a core of real generosity, a generosity that seemed to extend to everyone. Perhaps it was too generous, and unable to counter the depth of the duplicity, arrogance and avarice that came inevitably with oil.

His legacy opened up so many possibilities, but his vision I think ultimately failed, through, I suspect, the excessive trust of fellow Republicans in the period of his greatest influence just following the pipeline. You can't suddenly drop $40 billion on a little state and expect it to stay clean. Many of the Democrats of the time were corrupt too, and the state compromised itself out of a bright future for easy money.

But Hammond helped teach me this: the only option in a democracy is openess; in this poisoned climate, I've nearly lost it.