Volume 1, number 8, August 1999 The Tagish Charlie Factor This is how I heard it: Once upon a time Tagish Charlie stood on the banks of the Yukon and said to paleface George W. Carmac, "You know, I think there’s some of that yellow stuff you guys are looking for up that little Klondike creek over there," or words to that effect. And so, before long the great gold rush was on, and Tagish Charlie’s people found themselves up to their kneepits in prospectors and real trouble. I think that event is the first in the historical record of a peculiar pattern into which northerners fall willy-nilly: We can’t resist summoning up disaster. Like long-gone Charlie, we can’t resist prodding the universe. Give us a time when things are going along pretty well, and we grow disquiet. We twitch. We pray down the wrath of the gods. We crave the next boom. We use A-bombs as tools for urban development. We build pipelines. Hey, no fooling, I think the latest glassy-eyed impetus to Build a Gas Pipeline, preceded by Forming a Port Authority, is a case of the Tagish Charlie factor in operation. It’s straight out of the X-Files. Consider: the idea appeared in the legislature from the mouth of a Republican businessman, one of the breed that had been baying for the blood of the Alaska Railroad because it was a public venture in what should be the realm of private capital. (It was, they said, competing unfairly with Private Enterprise—that is, the truckers using the highways, which are of course supported by public funding, but never mind.) Hello? And a pipeline is not a project for private capital? Has anyone told Alyeska? So that was good for a passing giggle. A socialistic-sounding proposal from Mr. Whitaker was as politically valid as moralistic finger-pointing from Mr. Gingrich, and both filled newspapers. Besides, Big Oil has the technology to run gas through the present pipeline when it seems reasonable to them to proceed; surely the Chamber of Commerce sorts would notice that. The idea would go nowhere. Hah. Somehow the twenty-year gap between booms hereabouts has triggered a collective desire for disaster, and suddenly by God (or at least by Mammon) the penny-pinching government of the Fairbanks North Star Borough has every intent of coughing up a hundred kilobucks to fund a port authority. Barrow is with us on this, as is Valdez, if with a little less municipal enthusiasm. (You might think it odd that Valdez isn’t so excited about the idea, but remember they had the big oil-and-money spill only ten years ago. They remember disasters more clearly than we do.) Right, so we have conservative Republicans advocating public ownership of the means of production, we have a tax-capped and financially straitened municipality enthusiastically pledging $100,000 to form a committee—and the borough assembly meeting at which the issue was discussed was a true love fest, with nary a green or libertarian voice raised in dissent—and, best of all, we have the reason that a new pipeline deemed unprofitable by the most bottom-line savvy industry in the world would turn a profit for the towns hoping to build it: They can evade taxes. So, they—legislators, assembly-persons, mayors past and present—assure us that not only will an untaxed gas pipeline bring us profits and inexpensive fuel, its building will of course bring lots and lots of jobs for Alaskans. Right. The way the oil pipeline did. For that one, Alaskans were the only ones who stayed home trying to do the jobs that needed doing, from fixing cars to teaching school. The bulk of pipeline jobs went to Outsiders. Thousands of them. Does no one remember the bumper stickers—"Happiness is 10,000 Texans Heading South with an Okie Under Each Arm"? Who decided that we were running short of Texans? Now that interior Alaska has a bloom of internet-involved businesses, our leaders are working their butts to the bone to bring on another telephone breakdown—or am I the only one who remembers getting busy signals, for hours, when you first picked up the phone? Now that we’re voting on school bonds to bring us back up to standard, let’s by all means proceed directly onward to overcrowding—or are there too few of us still here who remember the joys of double-shifting students? I can imagine only one reason that the citizenry is not collectively rolling in the aisles guffawing over this idea. It has to be the Tagish Charlie factor. Twenty-five years is a little long to run between golden disasters. We’re bored—bring on the next pipeline! | ||
 | | |
