Recently a publisher hired me to examine a manuscript for an anthology of Eskimo poems he planned to publish. His poetry editor had gathered the poems rather hastily and there was some uncertainty about just where the poems came from. When I examined the sources, I found most were anthologies and these, in turn, drew from earlier anthologies. The final versions were often three & four generations removed from the originals and, not infrequently, remarkably different from them. Each anthologist had modified the poems to fit his own temperament, above all to fit his audience, until successive editings had eroded all traces of the originals.

Since most people don't know what poetry is, least of all Eskimo poetry, and couldn't recognize it if they saw it, the anthologist's task is clear: give them rhymed sentiments sprinkled with Elizabethan pronouns. This is what they want. This is what they get.

Moreover, make the same thing available in green & yellow. Call it Japanese poetry, Aztec poetry, children's poetry, ghetto poetry, but make it all alike, all part of a single genre, easily digested, familiar & bland. The real thing may stick in the throat, but this goes down without a cough. If an occasional chaser is needed, an introduction will provide that.

The success of Disney's TV series on people & places was based on this formula. Twenty cultures were chosen, scattered among tundra, desert & jungle, but even though the people dressed in different clothes & ate different foods, they were all alike, members of a single culture. That culture was our culture - more accurately, our clichéd image of ourselves that might be called the Hallmark greeting card view.

I believe this same criticism applies to the Eskimo films production by Educational Services, Inc., for the American educational system, though this series is on a much higher level. The audience enjoys a painless, undemanding, mirrored image of itself, under the illusion it is experiencing an alien culture. I cannot find Eskimos anywhere in these films. I can find Eskimos in the writing of Rasmussen. But not here. What I see, instead, is the American educational system, its values, its views.

Nor do I believe these films will survive, the way I'm convinced Rasmussen's writings will survive. I am reminded of art forgeries. Often forgeries, at the time they are made, are widely accepted but when fashions change, their fraudulent nature suddenly becomes clear & people wonder how anyone could ever have been misled by such obvious misrepresentations.

They were misled because what they saw was themselves. Oscar Wilde once remarked that "Wordsworth found in stones the sermons he had hidden there," and apparently we are all Wordsworthians at heart.

Consider that best-selling photography book The Family of Man. Superb photographs of people from around the world were combined with quotations from great poets to make an overall statement: that there is absolutely no difference between people. Though people differ in color & creed, they all love, quarrel, protect their children, etc., exactly as we do. The message is clear: we should love them because they are like us. But that statement has its questioning brother: what if they aren't like us?

Fortunately, that question never arises, for today as we travel from channel to channel on TV, we like everyone we see, since we see only ourselves. True, it's a rather bland self, but it's available in any color and it is our self.

The saddest part of this story is that the subject becomes an eager victim. People who have long been denied public identity, or cast in degrading roles, now rush on stage, costumed according to our whim.