You all really ought to read this. It's the cover story from the Washington Post Magazine this weekend.

Gene Weingarten is a fabulous writer. His only weakness perhaps is his overavoidance of didacticism. In his efforts to let experiences shine through on their own he misses the chance to leave the reader with a sense of anything. I had a similar sense (or lack of sense) from his article on Jerusalem. But that small weakness aside, let's get down to the meat of the issue.

You may want to read the article before going further.

What is wrong with Savoonga? After centuries of living the lives of subsistence arctic hunters, the community is miserable. The people Gene meets are routinely unhappy with their lives at the northwest edge of the American empire. Why?

Perhaps it's alcohol and drugs. Temptations of inebriation from the outside suck away what little income the Savoongans have. But isn't it more likely that Savoongans turn to alcohol and drugs to escape? This answer confuses the self-medicated cure with the disease. Same with gambling. What's the disease?

Is it television? Poverty is a relative phenomenon, and perhaps the television has managed to create a sense of poverty where none existed before, and the hopelessness that is so often both poverty's cause and consequence.

Perhaps it's government handouts. As Alaskan citizens Savoongans get about a thousand dollars a year as their share of oil profits. There are federal welfare programs, too. By taking away a sense of honest toil perhaps these programs strip dignity from Savoongan life. Maybe this answer goes with the one above. You must be poor if you're living on money someone else is giving you.

Gene actually talks about money quite a bit in the article, seeming to believe that the transition from a barter to a cash economy is a major part of the malaise. Sociologists are fond of this, I know. I'm not so fond of it. It seems a little too easy, and a little too soft. I'm not sure that paying for your goods with cash is somehow fundamentally worse than paying with seal blubber. Though I've been wrong before.

While we're on an economic tack, maybe Gene fails to adequately emphasize the difficulty of hunting. Climate changes are moving aquatic game farther and farther out. And then we're back at welfare again, too. A welfare check isn't as humiliating when it's only a small part of your income.

But you know, I want to come back to the television. Gene writes about how the television replaced family talks in the evening for these folks living on an island off Alaska. There's something about television that is so compelling and pervaisive, spreading its sense of cool through antennas and satellites across the globe. It's easy to rip into people who argue that American culture is a profound threat and I've done my share of it. They can't really back up their arguments with anything solid. Sure kids in Kigali say they want Nikes when you ask them, but does that really impact their daily life? But despite the endless inability to better articulate this explanation, somehow I think it does. What is it about cool that we all know it, and know whether or not we are it? And somehow we all do know.
posted by weiss @ 4:23 PM