everyone else was more or less the same: all coming to Alaska to effectively start again, or propelled out of the Lower 48 by some mounting, ineffable angst with conventional life that Davis found hard to pin down. (“I’d call it ‘American Disenchantment Syndrome,’ ” he said.) They were all here, sloshing around in one equitable middle class, none of them feeling particularly superior or inferior to anyone else. Davis believed this “excessive egalitarianism,” as he put it, served Anchorage during the emergency: encouraging camaraderie, discouraging violence. Moreover, he explained to
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