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Is this a strange country or what?

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First, it is somehow "news'' when a politician in the hunt for attention -- the main thing politicians hunt for -- decides to pardon a turkey.

Then it becomes even bigger "news" when one certain politician who pardons a turkey hangs around the farm to chat while the rest of the turkeys are herded off to slaughter.

And finally it gets downright weird when journalists decide the turkey pardoning and the turkey slaughtering are important enough to warrant national attention, but not something the average American should see. So MSNBC-TV fuzzes out the turkeys dying over the left shoulder of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as she babbles on about the "brutal" nature of American politics.

This being the Internet age, however, no video stays fuzzed out long. Pretty soon the unfuzzed version is up on YouTube.

All of which sets people to arguing over whether Palin was set up by the media or somewhat foolishly chose to stand in front of turkeys being slaughtered while talking about the state of national politics. Whether you are bothered by turkeys dying or not, there is no doubt that what is going on in the background of her interview is distracting.

So maybe the governor was trying to make some sort of symbolic statement about the cycle of life.

Everything dies. That's the way nature works.

Some of us know this first hand. I know I do. One of the few things I've been good at over the years is killing. It is a skill once highly valued. Now, as often as not, people are offended when you confess to having shot charismatic megafauna.

Bird shooting apparently remains OK and fishing so-so. PETA might be attacking the latter, but its efforts to save the fish don't seem to have made any serious inroads. People don't care if or how fish die. Fish are down there near rat and bug level in American thought, and everyone is for killing creatures that bother us.

About the rest, Americans have decidedly mixed feelings, if they have any feelings at all.

America today -- and this includes Anchorage -- is an urban society. Urbanites obtain their meat shrink-wrapped and priced by the pound at the supermarket. They do not think about where the meat came from or what the animal that died to produce the meat might have looked like.

Viewed from this perspective, the Turkeygate video no doubt looked horrifying. There is probably even somebody out there, maybe several somebodies, who saw the video not knowing the turkey they bought for Thanksgiving dinner was once a living, breathing, gobbling bird.

If you have doubts about this observation, I would suggest staying up late some night and watching "Jaywalking" on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

Leno, no doubt, could find someone on the streets of Hollywood clueless as to where turkeys come from, or unaware of huntress Sarah Palin and the Palin phenomenon. In case you've been lost in Hollywood for the past several months or frozen in the Kahiltna Glacier, our caribou-shooting governor was the unsuccessful candidate for vice-president of the country on the Republican ticket.

A way out-of-the-box pick by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, she was such a friendly, smiling, charismatic presence on the campaign trail -- even when she said mean things -- that she became an instant celebrity, sort of the Paris Hilton of American politics.

Back in Alaska now, but still a celebrity, Palin has been waxing poetic about how she believes the press was unfair to her while she trooped around the country accusing now-president-elect Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because he once spent some time long ago with an anti-war activist from the Vietnam-war era who advocated violence against the government to bring an end to that conflict.

That accusation about palling around with terrorists is brutal, all right. And a little wacky to all of us who lived through the Vietnam period.

Almost as wacky, it could be said, as deciding Americans can't stomach the sight of a turkey being killed.

If Turkeygate is a story because Palin engages in the silly business of "pardoning" a turkey then does an interview while the rest of the flock dies, how do you not show the dying turkeys? That's the whole point of the story, and it's not like a turkey never dies on TV.

Surf through the outdoor channels on cable or satellite TV, and you can see turkeys, pheasants, deer, moose, bears, salmon, bass, walleyes, and who knows what else being killed. Granted these are wild animals, not domestic ones.

Does that make it better, or worse?

I don't know, although for me, personally, it's the former. I've always been uneasy with the idea of raising animals just to kill them. Still I can understand people who feel exactly the opposite.

Either way, though, there ought to be a certain respect for the animals dying.

And that's what bothered me about the Palin interview -- her treatment of the turkey slaughter as if it was nothing, as if it didn't matter that it was there.

At the risk of being classed among those big, meanies of the press beating up on Palin, I've got to confess the video left me wondering how it looked to Alaska Native elders steeped in the idea of how we should all show a deep and honest respect for animals even in the process of killing them so we might eat.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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