The Chronicle of Higher Education

magazines for the coming apocalypse. Not all survivors are survivalists. Survivors merit admiration for their grace under pressure and indomitable spirits. Survivalists invite a wide berth and perhaps an ATF raid on their compounds. Yet, for all their differences, survivors and survivalists inhabit similar imaginative environments. They both live in postcataclysmic dreamscapes where people under extreme duress unlock and contemplate the secrets of human existence. If the plane crashed, if the government collapsed, if the plague descended, who would survive? Individuals with the skills of Grylls and the guts of Glass.

But Hugh Glass had never heard of survivalism. He had never seen a Boy Scout or read the Scout motto, and he could scarcely imagine the existence of a character like Grylls. Glass and his colleagues didn’t assume they could manage disasters or escape suffering. They didn’t think they could overpower nature. They lived in a world without action heroes; instead of “survival techniques” and “extreme preparedness,” they mouthed words like “endurance.” They couldn’t teach people how to avoid hazards because they were always walking smack into them.

With his high pain threshold and penchant
for safety violations, Glass resembled the
hands on the Deadliest Catch’s crab boats more
than the strapping survival guides. Watching
men battle storms, sleeplessness, falling ice
chunks, and 400-pound traps while keeping
their cigarettes lit on heaving, slime-covered
decks is the principal fun of Deadliest Catch.
We tune in to witness masculine agony. The
producers know their audience, so they focus
on greenhorns and strung-out vets. The
rookies bumble into trouble while the old-
timers explore the dead-end of careers meant
for younger bodies. The captains, cozy in
their wheelhouses, philosophize for the cam-
eras. They typically instruct their underlings
to meet pain with stoicism. “You ain’t a man,”
once spoke Captain Phil, “until you’ve pulled
out a tooth with a pair of pliers.”
Glass would have recognized, and no doubt
agreed with, that wisdom. He worked with
a guy who once asked to have his ear sewn
back on with needle and thread after a grizzly
bear jumped him. For the fur trappers, man-
hood and physical toughness were a package.
And others sold that package too. Soon after
his ordeal, Glass greeted readers in St. Louis
newspapers and a Philadelphia literary jour-
nal as a national representative. Through his
workplace accident, he modeled America.

It’s harder to see for whom or what the crab ;shermen on Deadliest Catch stand. The show nods toward all sorts of higher motivations— God, country, the eternal struggle against nature—yet the narrative conceit that drives the men hardest is the “crab count.” They suffer to win a race, to ;ll their holds the quickest with the most pounds of ocean ;esh. The weight transfers directly to the heft of their checks. Yet who pays for all that? In the end, the crews withstand physical torment so that you and I can stuff our holds at all-you-can-eat buffets. They bleed for seafood conglomerates and well-padded consumers.

Glass’s workplace mishap didn’t serve him all that well either. The public learned his name, but he died poor and alone. He never pro;ted from his sojourn in the limelight. His adventure fed an aggressive nation engorging on its manifest destiny.

Workers who suffer for our entertainment
deserve better compensation than D-list ce-
lebrity. Perhaps we can start by acknowledg-
ing the creepiness of our voyeurism. Risky
jobs hurt people all the time, and the tragic
consequences of industrial accidents usually
play out before a small circle of family and
friends instead of an international cable-
television audience. The mere act of seeing
a ;sherman pull out his own tooth with a
pair of pliers neither alleviates his misery nor
elevates his suffering. The guy needs a union
and a dental plan, not groupies.

New from Knopf

Never underestimate the entertainment value of human suffering in the workplace.

Jon T. Coleman is an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His book Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation was published recently by Hill & Wang.

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