Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

You know, Haines? I was surprised when my folklore started becoming locally useful. I didn’t begin studying the Kung Fu genre expecting it to be a hit at home. (To write Kung Fu characters worth a lick, one must research in a small village with a collapsing economy and corrupt bureaucracy, carefully observing over the lid of a gaiwan for a decade or more. The folkloric product is reliable—but local popularity hit or miss.)

But then the Borough of Haines destroyed our economy, and inadvertently engaged my Muffin Surety Economic Device—a baked-in evolutionary defense mechanism carried by all folklorists in the Milky Way galaxy. You see, a folklorist—quite unlike those lunatic poets—ties our creative inspiration to baked goods. “The only way to really earn a muffin—is with a world-class piece of folklore.” 

And when folklorists engage their Muffin Creativity Drive, it includes a security feature that ensures muffins will be permanently available in the local environment. (Folklore technology at its absolute basic!)

So, I would like to publicly ask why our assembly members are still repeating bureaucratic nonsense in the newspaper—when we clearly elected them to improve the economy?

Like—the election was all the mandate they needed, so what gives? I’m sure someone’s told them, sometime over the last twenty years, that Alaska’s bureaucracy is corrupt—right? Everybody knows it by now.

So why is the assembly hypnotizing further victims for our predatory bureaucracy? Why not just improve the economy instead?

Chris Palmisano