I love living way out here in the Outer Cape, but the official religion is awfully hard to take sometimes. Here’s an example, from my local paper, the Provincetown Independent:
A Creature of Habit
Resisting the ‘new normal’ in a universe that does not care
Premises: an indifferent universe devoid of all meaning or purpose; any attempt to establish rational order in government is “evil” (despite the obvious fact that “evil” has no foundation in reality in an indifferent, totally mechanical universe); life is just a pointless interval between nonexistence and extinction that must be filled with trivial distractions like an emotional attachment to a broken coffee mug; and above all, ORANGE MAN BAD.
It’s all just so performative — and so uselessly dark and stupid, as if it’s somehow “cool” to be cynical, jaded and hopeless.
But on further reflection, it’s something worse than that: it’s the end result of a campaign to sever this world from genuine truth, meaning, and beauty. Screwtape smiles approvingly.
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Tom Wolfe became a novelist because of writers like this one. This writer asks us to take his narcissistic doting and banal sentimentality as evidence of mindfulness and largeness of soul.. But broken mugs and limp dog leashes make poor household gods. The whole thing reeks of the autumnal in the Spenglerian sense of that word–the sort of thing a historian from the civilization that comes next will read with a nod.
The political paragraph at the end has the same bloodless quality, notwithstanding its hyperbole and paranoia. If the writer believed any of this with conviction, would he really be grieving over the disappearance of a broken coffee mug?
I was on the Cape three years ago next week. It’s a lovely place but eerily out of time. I remember laughing that there were BLM signs in front of every house, but no blacks living lives that mattered within those houses. It’s America reduced to something thin as the fragrance of a scented candle. Exquisite in its way, but epicene.
. “I remember laughing that there were BLM signs in front of every house, but no blacks living lives that mattered within those houses”
And each homeowner would inch his sign a bit ahead of his neighbors just to make sure?
JMSmith,
It certainly can seem that way, but when you live here you learn that there is another type at home out here as well — those people who, unlike psychologists, retired academics, writers of unstructured verse, independent editors and columnists, and so on, make their lives in ways that require actual contact with stubborn physical (and social) realities: carpenters, roofers, mechanics, cops, fishermen, oystermen, electricians, tree-cutters, and such like. They aren’t scented candles, and they make good company.