Cruise Alaska

Cruise Alaska

A cruise? A big liner that sucks at a town for a few hours and moves on? 2000 people on board, and 500 low-paid long-hours smiling servers? Nine floors of sleeping pods plus eating, shopping and entertainment experiences? A boat so big you get lost at some point every day. Yep, that’s the one.

Alaska, just the bottom right bit of it that is a coastal strip above Vancouver Island. Tsarist Russia had already settled Alaska and this

tail end of it, and claimed it all against Britain in the 19th century, before the USA bought it from Russia for $7.2m. It’s forestry and fishing for ordinary people mainly on the coast; military bases, oil and mineral extraction behind the scenes.

A definite highlight for me: the Hubbard glacier where the glacier breaks off into the sea, viewed from a smaller boat. In overcast light it’s a blue-white cliff, streaked with layers like a geology lesson, and in some places covered with dreamlike images from snow falls.

Excursions in Juneau… my sea-plane trip was cancelled due to fog… so I went to the amazing State Museum, especially pre-European society. A video of seal and sealion gut extraction, cleaning, washing, inflating, drying, cutting and sewing, and an exhibition of the end-product: waterproof parkas for fishing from kayaks.

Excursion from Sitka in a small boat: sea otters, hump-back whales, eagles, seals, jumping salmon, and bears fishing on the shoreline. But especially sea otters, 5-6ft swimmers on their backs, seemingly playing while looking at us. The photos cant do them justice. Ill put a video on Facebook.

Excursion from Ketchikan: a crab-fishing boat with 2 hours of talked-through demonstrations and dragging pots off the seabed.

Pines growing on even the smallest Islands scattered along the coast, it’s a magical landscape.

Those are reasons I’m glad I came on this one-week cruise, plus that I joined 150 others who had bought into The Nation’s on-board political seminars. The Nation is a century-old progressive magazine, broadly left and Democrat-supporting, with a team of successful

independent journalists. It welcomed the leftward shift that Sanders represented, but didnt wholehearedly support him. About a dozen of the journalists are on the cruise with their family in return for sitting on about 20 panels during the week on everything from China-US relations to abortion politics to Artificial Intelligence.

Some people have been on this same cruise eight or nine times. They don’t all go off the boat when it docks for excursions. The cruise is a hassle-free no-chores continuous feast. You can put your feet up for a week, literally, if you’ve still got enough leg muscles. They look forward to it each year, but complain that you didn’t used to have to pay for most of the extras that you do have to pay for now – specials on the menu, spa and fitness centre with acupuncture, casino. They have excess money for the cruise but not necessarily for what are now the extras. Or they begrudge paying extra.

I am totally in tune with begrudging paying extra! I decided to go alcohol- and wifi-free for the week and I suppose I’m heathier for it. I certainly didn’t miss wifi, and instead I’ve caught up with onboard films that I missed when they came out – The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Judy (Garland, in London, her last tour), Braveheart. I rate the first two.

There are also TV channels, my first chance to explore them and what an eye-opener. Fox News is non-stop right-wing, anti-Biden, mostly pro-Trump, not just the people interviewed but the interviewers’ commentary. Explicit and constant propaganda, and this is the channel which is the only one you’ll find in many motels and other private-public places. It reminded me of visiting Venezuela, where all but one newspaper were relentlessly anti-Chavez. Then MSNBC which is more liberal, and also explicit about that. Not left wing, but liberal. So I could see why people from the USA talk about the BBC as unbiased, because the presentation doesn't have a party political flavour. The third onboard channel was BBC America news. I’ve never seen that: a BBC news channel, with US presenters and world news. It’s not the BBC World Service radio, and it’s not funded by the license fee, but it is BBC.

Nancy and Mariamne suggested the cruise for me and then decided to do it themselves – so I’ve had company (that otherwise I might have needed the alcohol for!). It’s been great catching

up and being able to discuss the seminars with people I know well and who know the topics and the speakers much better than I do. They chose an outside room with a balcony – partly because it’s the first outing they’ve had to a large inside peopled event since COVID. They have an ocean-watching escape hole, whereas I have no natural light in an inside cabin. I strangely took no photo of us together, but can put that right as I’ll be seeing them again and again in this trip.

Flavours from the seminars. The journalists are very fluent. Michael Klare that none of us 3 knew about has turned out to be a star for us - consistently offering new insights. He’s another Paul Rogers, another retired peace studies and security studies academic who takes an international perspective. He’s spoken about China and the war-danger from US policy based on their ‘Great Power Competition’ perspective. It won’t allow any Chinese military presence including on

disputed islands in the China sea, and is buying off surrounding countries into US military alliance. He also contributed to a session on artificial intelligence. I think it boiled down to new technology being ahead its legal regulation; military uses investing heavily; and corporates lobbying for regulation that avoids ethical issues for them, by putting responsibility on the user of software rather than the software company.

I would have liked to spread some orange dust on the top table for their climate debate. Biden has protected some land from fossil fuel development including in Alaska. There isn’t time to hedge bets but you wouldn’t have thought so from the speakers. In Juneau we were met by a demonstration from local environmental campaigners who have also complained to The Nation directly about organising their fund-raising tour within the cruise. They want cruises but fewer of them, and better regulation of wages and conditions. Fair enough.

Some of the The Nation big names who were talking were John Nichols, Elie Mystal, Christina Geer, and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel.

There’s been great jubilation among the The Nation cruisers at the indictments on Trump and 18 others this week, and a lot of crystal-balling on whether they will scupper his presidential campaign. Isn’t that’s pointless speculation? Better to focus on how Biden can be stronger, and if he cannot then what can be the alternative.

There’s been so much to take in this week, it’s impossible to do it justice. I’d recommend THIS cruise.

Got to finish with food because cruise bread and butter pudding was to die for.