Strange but true admission

My wife and I own a cabin on a lake about 20 miles from where Sarah Palin lives. It's a beautiful spot, year-round, and we love to watch the seasons change - although winter is the predominant season and it lasts a very long time. I like most of my neighbors. They live a fairly rural lifestyle that harkens back to the Alaska of old. All of them, I suspect, own guns - as do I. Guns are a tool here, but they can also be a fetish. Palin's world view was shaped in this valley. She grew up, went to school and started her political career in the Valley. Politically it is an insular and relatively paranoid environment, where the myth of rugged individualism and self-sufficiency can still be actualized to some extent. Thus the politics here are anything but communal, and there is a strong dislike of outsiders, a fear of those who do not think along the same lines. It features an unsophisticated and deeply rooted credo of frontier anti-federal government sentiments and a strong and enduring embrace of the Second Amendment. Guns in Alaska are not just a metaphor, and although that separates Alaska from the rest of the country, it also adds to the suspicion that other Americans are wussies and to the general atmosphere of disdain many up here feel for the less than manly. My thought is that this is probably not the most fertile of intellectual grounds for someone who is interested in the presidency. The worldview shaped here is necessarily skewed and far too narrow, too anti-intellectual and ahistorical to produce a genuine national leader. Palin's fetishes and anxieties  are nearly pathological.