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She didn’t laugh at my joke. She didn’t think it was funny. Neither did I, but probably for a different reason.

I asked, “Buy them with what?”

“They give us food, we give them culture. Isn’t that the way it works?”

Ah, I thought, she’s following the Mumford line of thought. I asked, “What if the people in the country don’t like opera, or Oprah, for that matter?”

“It’s not just opera. Good food, books, ideas, the whole cultural ferment.”

“And if people in the country like their own food, their own ideas, their own culture?”

“They’re going to need protection.”

“From whom?”

“Roving bands of marauders. Bandits who will steal their food.”

“What if the only marauders are the people from the city?”

She hesitated before saying, “Manufactured goods, then. Because of economies of scale, people in the city can import raw materials from the countryside, work them into things people can use, and sell them back.” Her first degree was in economics.

“What if people in the countryside also don’t want manufactured goods?”

“Modern medicine then.”

“And if they don’t want that? I know plenty of Indians who to this day refuse all Western medicine.”

She laughed and said, “So we go the opposite direction. Everybody wants Big Macs.”

I shook my head, and more or less ignored her joke, as she’d ignored mine, for maybe the same reason. “People only want all this stuff after their own culture has been destroyed.”

“I don’t think it’s necessary to destroy them. Much better to convince them. Modernity is good. Development is good. Technology is good. Consumer choice is good. What do you think advertising is for?”

Maybe both Henry Adams and the Roman satirist Juvenal should have mentioned advertising as well as bread and circuses. And maybe they should have mentioned the importance of dictionary definitions for keeping people in line. I stood my ground. “Intact cultures generally only open their doors wide to consumer goods at gunpoint. Sure, they might pick and choose, but not enough to counterbalance the loss of their resources. Think of what NAFTA and GATT have done to the poor in the Third World, or in the United States. Think of Perry opening Japan, or the Opium Wars, or—”

She cut me off: “I get your point.” She thought a moment. “Instead of manufactured items, give them money. A fair price. No ripping them off. They can buy whatever they want with all their money, or rather our money.”

“And what if they don’t want money? What if they’d rather have their resources? What if they don’t want to sell because they want or need the resources themselves? What if their whole way of life is dependent on these resources, and they’d rather have their way of life—for example, hunting and gathering—than money? Or what if they don’t want to sell because they don’t believe in buying and selling? What if they don’t believe in economic transactions at all? Or even moreso, what if they don’t believe in the whole idea of resources?”

She got a little annoyed. “They don’t believe in trees? They don’t believe fish exist? What do you think they catch when they go fishing? What are you telling me?”

“They believe in trees, and they believe in fish. It’s just that trees and fish aren’t resources.”

“What are they, then?”

“Other beings. You can kill them to eat. That’s part of the relationship. But you can’t sell them.”

She understood. “Like the Indians thought.”

“Still think,” I said. “Many traditional ones. And cities have gotten so large by now—the city mentality has grown to include the whole consumer culture—that people in the country certainly can’t kill enough to feed the city without damaging their own landbase. By definition they never could. Which leads us back to the question: What if they don’t want to sell? Do the people in the city have the right to take the resources anyway?”

“How else will they eat?”

We heard the wind again outside, and rain began to spatter against the windows. The rain often comes horizontally here in Crescent City, or Tu’nes.

She said, “If