Alaska Scapegoat Ranch, Volume 5 number 9, October 2003 A Great Escape-Goat Listening to the radio one afternoon last week, I heard yet another scapegoat opportunity bellowing out of the speakers. Seems that Alyeska Pipeline Corporation is further dehumanizing its workforce by closing down pump stations along the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline. By dehumanizing, I mean cleaning house: No Human Beings On Site Evermore! Always looking to save money and destroy families, they are firing real people and replacing them with—now pay attention here, Permanent Fund Dividend recipients—Automation! Automation, such as automatic alarms to give notice when someone, for instance, shoots a rifle hole through the belly of the great pipeline beast. This is the anniversary month, after all, of that domestic terrorism of our greatest source of wealth. Comforting thought, isn’t it? Alyeska has always told people concerned with pipeline safety that its pressure-sensitive monitoring system could detect minuscule leaks. However, when the first pipeline bombing and leak occurred in the winter of 1978, it took at least a day, and perhaps more for Alyeska even to notice the pipeline had been bombed and was leaking, and this was right in Fairbanks’ backyard: out in the Columbia Creek Valley north of the Chena River and south of Chena Hot Springs Road. A pilot flying over it in a small aircraft detected it visually. Alyeska probably never would have detected it. Ah, but that was oh so long ago.... Now it’s a new millennium and people, live human beings, are just too much trouble to employ and feed, so we need automatons. Great idea. They’ll keep us free from terrorism. " Hal... Hal... Open the pod bay door, Hal." I say this begs for a direct insertion of Scapegoat anti-technology into the situation. Why go to the electronic option when in the event of a really bad screwup, the scapegoats are already there, on site, ready to accept blame and be punished in the vitriolic Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, and butchered and burned by the cherubic utterances of Senator Leasehold Murkowski, or the sputtering blather of old Ted "bomb the antichrist beast with dollars" Stevens. Which brings me to the senior senator. My my. We haven’t yet contributed to the senator’s war chest, so to speak, so he has not been entering the scapegoat option into federal budgets to our everlasting glory and security. But methinks it is time, if Ted can stand up on the floor of the senate and lambaste the universe to support an 87-billion-dollar "landfilled with money" strategy in Iraq, all the while telling us how it will bring the boys and girls home faster and save future expenditures. Well, it is hard not to smell the scapegoats roasting on an open fire at these worst of times, or, sorry, is it best of times? Ted, I wish to Satan you would be so emphatic and forceful in asking for money for education, or health care for Americans, or Head Start, or anything at all sane and humane. But I digress. That would do nothing whatever for our Alaska agricultural development here at the Scapegoat Ranch. Scapegoats are here, at the ready, for the coming crash of just about anything Alaskans can imagine, and we do a pretty ripe job of creating havoc and imagining even more. And we have the most powerful senator in the country in charge of the money stream. More next time on five-kiloton nukes, drafting scapegoats for war duty, and investing your permanent fund in a permanent war economy. Stay tuned. Otherwise winter is very long and boring.
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