Fun as Forestry; Love as Lumber — Ursula K. Le Guin’s Changing Planes — Part 8

In state “fiscal forestry,” however, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a
volume of lumber or firewood. If the princely conception of the forest was still utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism confined to the direct
needs of the state.

-James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

Scott’s book is a critique of how governments and industries work together to itemize the world. Oftentimes, it produces terrible results. The reason is that a forest is much more than just lumber, and an organic ecosystem responds to more factors than we could immediately realize. Yet companies and institutions still abide by this ridiculous assumption that their data is perfect.

Towards the end of the 20th Century, much of art was railing against the threat of corporations. Movies like Vanilla Sky (2001) and They Live (1988) unveiled a world where the goal of enjoyment involved buying stuff. The discrepancy in demand meant that corporations had to engineer desire. David Foster Wallace wrote on this enjoyment factor in Infinite Jest, and is likely the most well-known of the bunch to tackle the problem head on. But Ursula K. Le Guin had a go as well.

In her chapter of Changing Planes titled “Great Joy”, our narrator is introduced to a plane that cannot be reached by “Sita Dulip’s Method”. That is, until now, these planes had been reached by a bizarre method (see my first post) that involved meditation with a twist. But The Holiday Plane™ can only be reached by airports in Texas (LoL). What follows is Le Guin at her most satirical and scathing. She would never be found dead in the many islands that await those who bring their credit cards onboard, but her Cousin Sulie is thankfully willing to tell of the experience.

Out of all the worlds that Cousin Sulie likes the most on offer from the Great Joy Corporation, it is Christmas Island. It is just as horrifying as you can imagine: a place where it is Christmas all year round. The shops are always open, there are reindeer every which way, and there are candy canes ready to eat every meter. And Cousin Sulie loves Christmas Island so much, that she briefly considers philanthropy.

Sulie told me that she feels it a great pity sick children cannot be taken to Christmas Island. “Poor little mites who just can’t wait those months till Santa comes-if they could only see Santa’s Ride in Yuleville!…But it is a pity. You can’t just take a poor little sick child to suffer and worry in a busy airport even though it would be such a treat for them.”

Page 140

Cousin Sulie assumes that, because she loves Christmas, and she knows that many American families love to shop, that children would adore Christmas, no matter their class. Typical American charity involves something like this, a band-aid of sorts where we do not seem to care about just how exactly the child happened to become poor, or little, or sick. Instead, the shock value of their brief happiness outweighs the systemic problems. Or so we assume.

If Christmas Island is not your fancy, there are others. For every holiday there is an island. Valentine’s Island is full of pink and white, plenty of lace. Bicycles built for two (never three), “smiling native children dressed-barely-as cupids”, and so on. There’s New Year’s Island which offers a wide variety of parties that reset each night. And then there’s Hollo-Een! Island, which has the strange problem that families in Texas who are religious resort to: “They all describe Hollo-Een! as clean, safe, wholesome family fun,” Sulie describes. “Absolutely nothing ‘harmful’ or ‘disturbing.’”

In other words, for all these venues, imagine the most pristine and corporatized isle of products you can typically buy associated with whatever holiday you fancy, (usually in Walmart) and then imagine that it has been copy-pasted to an entire theme park. All the rough edges, the disappointments and bizarre twists, the stories told that come out of their own accord, those are all gone. What replaces these holidays is a kind of mechanized experience, like DisneyWorld, but for what a corporation would imagine the holiday to be.

It’s not the forest, it’s the lumber.

I think when many Americans attempt to describe the feeling of alienation, holidays are easy to point to. Valentine’s Day has no relationship to romance beyond the tangential. Love is accommodated for a product. Halloween as a Trick-or-Treat experience is usually devoid of the inspiration that death plays in (eventually) all our lives. And Christmas was lost long ago.

But the problems of consumerist takeover do not stop at just holidays. Despite recent news of racism in the United States, America seems perfectly willing to be open to diversity, but only if it can be monetized and standardized. Is Olive Garden really Italian? Is the movie Halloweentown (1998) really a place anyone would want to live? Let alone visit?

The exploitation of the native peoples of these planes (as they existed before the Holiday Islands arrived) gets a mention from Le Guin as well:

The Agency, as may be imagined, is overloaded with the tasks of registering and investigating newly discovered planes, installing and inspecting transfer points, hostels, and tourist facitlities, regulating interplanar relations, and a thousand such responsibilities. But when they learned that a plane had been closed to free entry and exist and was being operated as a sort of prison camp for its inhabitants to the profit of the operators, they acted at once, decisively.

Page147–48

Oh the fantasies of science fiction.

The Agency was able to return these planes of existence back to the indigenous peoples, who owned the means of production for these Holiday Parks. But Cousin Sulie had no plans on visiting Christmas Island that year. “It just doesn’t seem like Christmas,” she explained, “if it was a different nationality.”

Yikes.

Typical American behavior from a tourist. You have probably seen them. They go to European countries in khaki shorts and long white socks. They are fully willing to branch out to new experiences, but only seem to desire the experience in an American way. If there were ever a people so ideologically rigid, and outlandishly optimistic about it, it would be the American. The Catch-22 of American taste has resulted in an Italian restaurant at every gas stop along our highways, but it is cheap and sterile. After a favorite blockbuster film, young men churn out to Halloween parties dressed as the Joker, or Captain America, without any of the horror or irony (respectively) that the characters contain. The only culture we seem to be interested in is of the kind that can be bought. It is like if Americans had the chance to go for a walk in a beautiful forest, we would instead ask for the lumber in stacks to arrive to our house with two-day shipping.

It has been 20 years since Ursula K. Le Guin wrote this story, and the problems of American standardization of culture have only worsened. And Don Delillo was writing about the “hyperobject” in the Most Photographed Barn in the World before that. What if this problem of copy-paste culture has existed long before? What if, in our quest for a City on a Hill, we saw only one such city planted on every hill?

“This land is my land,” Thomas Pynchon joked in Bleeding Edge. “This land, is also my land.”

Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on March 30, 2021.