The Vampire State

The Vampire State | Anthony Esolen | Catholic World Report


Just loosen your collar—this will all be over in a moment.

“They live in the northernmost
community in Canada,” said the fellow at the hamburger joint. “They’re Inuit,
and have been living there for more than 2,000 years. They used to follow the caribou
herds from place to place, but the government has settled them down, and now
they have a permanent village, with the houses built up high, above the
permafrost.”

He then told me that the
government had given them a quota for fishing turbot, and if they fell short of
the quota, the government would make up for the shortfall by a cash grant. Until
recently, they’ve attached themselves to international fishing expeditions, but
now they have purchased a ship of their own. That was why they had flown the 4,000
miles from the 15th parallel to our island on the 46th—to take possession of
the ship. The cost of the ship was borne by the government. I don’t know
whether the $20,000 for four round-trip plane tickets was also borne by the
government—that is to say, by other people, with the government middlemen
taking their substantial cut—but it wouldn’t surprise me.

“I suppose,” I said, “that living
in such a forbidding place, they don’t have the social problems they have in,
say, Yellowknife,” the capital of the Northwest Territories, notorious for
alcoholism and family breakdown. My reasoning was simple. You can’t survive
from one year to the next unless you preserve moral order.

“No, they have the same problems
there that they have all over the Territories,” he replied, and he put the
blame squarely on Ottawa. “Paternalistic” was the word he used.

The conversation caused me to
consider what a place like Yellowknife has in common with, say, Detroit. Yellowknife
is a small town on the Great Slave Lake, in the midst of the richest mineral
deposits on Earth. It is, for all that, a deeply dysfunctional place. Detroit
used to be the jewel of the Great Lakes, the auto capital of the world. It is
now a pit of crime. Whole neighborhoods have been abandoned. The current mayor,
Dave Bing, has ordered some of them to be plowed under, to turn them back to
grasslands, perhaps for pasturing sheep.

It’s not just Detroit, and money
alone is not the problem.

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