The end. Thanks to everyone who hung around.
(XX)
July 7, 2006
The town of Nome, Alaska is about as far from Washington, D.C. as Vladivostok is from Moscow. This fact remains true whether one considers physical distance or the metropole’s relative level of concern for the hinterland. Nome, which is a shorter trip to Vladivostok than most of the continental United States, mostly claims its fame as the site of a string of nearly two dozen unusual disappearances that occurred over the forty years between 1960 and 2004. The locals claim, with some evident twisted pride, that UFOs snatched these poor benighted souls from their beds and whisked them off to galaxies unknown. There were even rumors that, once the American Troubles settled down, Universal Pictures would make a sort of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ movie set in Nome to try to shed ‘light’ on the vanishings.
Alas, sometimes things - and people - just disappear out in that grand empty country, no thanks to grand conspiracies or alien space bats. Nome sits at the convergence of 350 miles of roads running through some of the most isolated territory in Alaska. Put two and two together and a host of rational explanations emerge: people wander off and succumb to the elements, people wander off and succumb to the bears, people wander off and find themselves face-to-face with an uncaught and undiscovered serial killer. Empty woods make for the best mysteries.
Nome was famous for something else in those days, though. It had been struck several times by what satirist Jon Stewart was repeatedly calling the ‘Hillbilly Intifada,’ the hodgepodge of militias and secessionists who’d gathered in the Alaskan wilderness to hunker down in the aftermath of what they believed was a ‘stolen’ 2004 election. What a journey it’d been. At JFK Jr.’s election in 2000, the militiamen gathered at Camp Boggs on the edge of the Chugach heralded the arrival of a hero. Junior’s emergence, after all, was only possible thanks to the bombshell revelations Hale Boggs loosed on Americans before the 1996 election. Now he would expose ‘the ring’ and bring the evildoers sitting so close to the heart of government to justice. Hundreds of new recruits flocked to Camp Boggs, armed and ready to await the call of their new president.
Unfortunately for the ‘Ringworms,’ it was precisely the opposite that happened. The first three months of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s first term were filled with pleas from his FBI Director to deal with the small army massing on the edge of the Chugach. He tried the route of appealing to his fellow Americans’ better angels, delivering an extended address to emphasize that his father may have been killed as a result of a despicable conspiracy, but that the story largely ended there, with no evil, shadowy cabal thwarting his administration as it pushed forward a mild education reform package. The militias didn’t back down, and in June of 2001, events occurred that would make Ruby Ridge look tame.
Worse still, in the eyes of the surviving ‘Ringworms’ and their legion of admirers in the lower 48, Kennedy was a ‘wuss’ in the face of the terrorist menace that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In his first off-the-cuff remarks outside of a Florida elementary school following the attacks, President Kennedy said that, “Islam is a vibrant faith. Millions of our fellow citizens are Muslim. We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion.”
In the face of Karaschuk’s invasion of Ukraine, Kennedy could only offer aid shipments. In the face of terrorist aggression on American soil, he offered targeted strikes. Yes, the Tora Bora operation had felled bin Laden. But to the most angered of Americans, it hadn’t felt enough. To them, the whole religion, indeed, the people who followed it, were fatally flawed, and their entire region deserved a reinvention at the end of an American rifle. ‘Ringworm’ mythology comfortably adapted to suggest that Kennedy was indeed at the center of the great conspiracy - as the new story went, he’d been secretly kidnapped by ‘the ring’ after his father’s assassination and brainwashed to use his father’s death to seize power and cement ‘the ring’s’ influence. Into the breach stepped one man who could credibly assert that he’d been right about Kennedy all along: Pat Buchanan.
The 2004 election was the bitterest in American history. Buchanan’s favorite line was a dogwhistle to the Ringworms: that the Kennedys and their ‘globalist allies’ would stop at nothing to keep a God-fearing American out of office. The New World Order, he reasoned, wanted America feeble in the face of the terrorist menace, and Kennedy was their willing instrument. Buchanan spoke of registering Muslims, and of expanding the garrison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to ‘toss the filthy terrorist scum in and throw away the key.’ Even in an environment red-hot with anger directed at the Middle East, most assumed he was completely unpalatable. They were to be surprised on Election Night.
Kennedy, who many American liberals had imagined to be a transformational hero who would usher in a new Progressive Era, with expansive programs to combat global warming, federalize health care, encourage national service, and eliminate poverty, welcomed a number of leaders from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In the battle over education reform that dominated the headlines in the spring of 2001, Kennedy sided time and time again with the moderates, rankling those who had expected him to recapture his father’s transformative spirit. “Dad was a tax-cutter and a free-trader,” Kennedy said off-the-cuff at one point, responding to the criticism. It fell flat with much of the left wing of the party, and for a time, rumors swirled of a possible primary challenger: first Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, and after Wellstone’s death in a 2002 plane crash, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont. Neither ultimately opted to challenge Kennedy, but the conversation itself dented his support. What commentators originally imagined would be a 48-state rout turned to a narrow contest.
Election Night ‘04 was a nail-biter. On the heels of Kennedy’s famous “He Got bin Laden” advertising push, the incumbent president ran a clean sweep in the Midwest, taking Ohio and Iowa. Buchanan’s aggressive nationalism also turned a rapidly-Northernizing Virginia, leaving the Kennedy ticket at 301 electoral votes. Yet some in the Ringworm blogosphere published elaborate, lascivious accounts of voter fraud, bribes to election officials, and buses taking voters out of deep-blue parts of Illinois to vote twice in Ohio and Iowa. The occasional Fox commentator paid lip service to these thoughts, but to the average American, it was business as usual. Another election. A few men in tricorner hats arrived at the Capitol on the day that Congress was due to certify the Electoral College result, arguing that they, and they alone, represented true patriotism in their fight to recapture the country from Kennedy, but their protest garnered little attention outside of the closed environment of the rapidly radicalizing extreme-right blogosphere. Those who believed the country was irredeemable came to several rendezvous points in the American West and in Alaska, beyond the Chugach and the feds’ reach.
In the first few months of 2005, Nome was struck by a bombing, a shooting, and even a shelling - a group of militamen having seized an old mortar from an armory, they decided to fire a few rounds on the town - and had sustained some damage. Most of the residents weren’t sure what to think. After some small-scale clashes between federal authorities and the militias outside of Nome, the attacks died down in late 2005.
That was when Pegge Begich moved to Nome.
Pegge, the widow of Nick Begich, the Alaskan Congressman who’d been killed in the crash that Boggs survived, had of course later married Jerry Max Paisley, who had ‘confessed’ to planting the bomb that took down Boggs’s flight. Pegge and Jerry’s marriage had not lasted long - after a few months, Jerry would be in prison for an unrelated murder - but the fact that it’d happened at all had raised more than a few eyebrows.
Tonight, Pegge is in Nome helping her son Mark raise money for his campaign for U.S. Senate. She is at the Board of Trade Saloon, one of the oldest establishments in Nome and one of the only buildings to have survived the town’s gold rush period. Dave, one of the bartenders assigned to work the event, is scrubbing down the countertops. He does not care about politics, nor the goings-on of a Capitol many thousands of miles away. He is tired, broke, and ready to go home to a cold beer and a small television that will show him how the Seattle Mariners played this evening. Pegge’s stayed late, long after most of the guests have gone home. She is working the room aggressively to help her son, and she is talking to an older man in a ragged suit who’d paid the requisite $250 to get in the door.
“Look, Pegge, it’s just…I think a lot of people have some questions, is all,” he said.
“Oh, about Jerry and all of his horseshit?” she replied.
“I mean, we’ve got militiamen out there who think Jerry was ordered to kill Hale Boggs. You married him. You never said one way or the other about what you thought about his whole thing. You want your kid in the Senate? Call off the dogs.”
“Everyone knows he was lying.”
“No, they don’t,” the old man replied.
“He was making it up for attention. Mine, to be specific. He didn’t put a bomb on that plane. He didn’t even know how to make a bomb.”
Dave the Bartender paused from his scrubbing. Something important was getting conveyed here, momentous, even. If Hale Boggs wasn’t the target of an assassination attempt, that had to be a pretty big deal. But why? Why, Dave?
The bartender reckoned that the mental anguish of discerning the significance of that information wasn’t worth staying past his shift. He glanced up from spraying a dusty corner of the bartop.
“You all got to get out of here - and I got to get home.”