In Alaska today, it’s difficult to find a profession that hasn’t been turned into a TV show

In Alaska today, it’s difficult to find a profession that hasn’t been turned into a TV show….
It’s hard to miss the paradox in this. Half a century ago, the notion that most Americans would soon be at least a generation removed from skilled manual labor would have seemed remarkable. But now that’s where we are, our relative comfort gnaws at us. The frequency that we respond to in [these types of shows] is the same one that makes suburban accountants buy Ford Super Duty pickups and Brooklyn graphic designers grow fake lumberjack beards. And yet this very desire for authenticity has turned some of the last truly unreconstructed frontiersmen in America into that least authentic of creatures: the minor celebrity.

Charles Homans, “A Soap Opera on the High Seas,” The New York Times Magazine (16 December 2012), 50.

Leave a Reply