What Exactly Defines Place ? - And Why Are Cultural Consistency And Tradition Such Rallying Cries?

Harper Lent was a longtime resident of Martha's Vineyard, once a whaling capital of New England and now the summer resort of the wealthy.  There are year-round residents on the island, many descendants of those who developed the island as an ideal place for a second home - beautiful beaches, marshes, uplands; cooling winds and temperatures never approaching the stifling heat of the mainland, and isolation. 

 

The tourists and day-trippers who vacation on Cape Cod never make it across the water from Falmouth to Gay Head. There are no large developments, only one or two golf courses, and the island has remained much as it has been for the last hundred years. 

This conservatism, this determination to keep the Vineyard unchanged does not come without a militant community effort.  Mainland money is only a few miles offshore and the demand for land, property, and the status of one of the East Coast's premier summer vacation spots rises with each passing year. 

'I summer on the Vineyard' has always been the sign of wealth, privilege, and taste.  Preserving the exclusivity of the island's residents and the pristine, historic nature of the place itself has become a cause celebre - a defiance some even say channels the spirit of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne fought the Saracen invaders and kept France and Europe Christian. 

France has always called itself La Fille Ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church.  Its high culture, its universal Christianity, its preeminence in literature and the arts are models for the rest of Europe which owes it a debt for keeping the region free from the barbarians of Africa. 

France, Europe, and Martha's Vineyard have recently come under pressure to open their doors.  Culture is a fluid, fungible thing, always changing, always in flux and never permanent.  Critics say that those who insist on preserving a privileged past in a rapidly changing world reflect not a rational conservatism, but a a racist xenophobia. However the assault on traditional Western, European, and Christian values have come under precipitous assault from immigrants from Africa and the Middle East who want no part of that colonial past and seek their place in a new, diverse home. Roncesvalles was  only a temporary victory for Europe.

However, after almost a decade of open borders and unlimited illegal immigration, the nations of Europe have finally resisted and asserted claims that the old Europe - Christian, Western, infused with the very originating principles of democracy, liberalism, and freedom established in Ancient Greece millennia ago - must be preserved at all costs.  Conservative leaders in France, England, the Netherlands, Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe have stated unequivocally that illegal immigration must stop and those in the country who entered without authority must be deported. 

Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy said it best. 'My name is Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother. I am Christian.  I am Italian, and I am a European!', defying the wokism of cultural relativity, secularism, and radical feminism.  An Italy which is no longer the home of the Vatican, the Roman Empire, the Medicis, Michelangelo, and Puccini is no longer Italy.  If left unchecked unwanted Muslim immigrants will turn the country into the Third World morass from which they have come. 

Harper Lent saw himself as an American Giorgia Meloni if not Charlemagne. The Vineyard must not become a garish, uncivilized, boorish place of those without reserve. If the doors to the island are opened, golf courses, mansions, and all the trappings that Jewish money can buy will be universal. 

Yes, as much as he hated to admit it - Harper had prided himself on his embrace of liberal diversity - the Jewish developers of New York most definitely had their eye on the island, and with their characteristic unconcern for anything but money, would be the first to ignore tradition and cultural eminence and invade the island without a second thought. 

When pressed he could not explain why preservation of the island was so necessary and important. Wasn't his objection to change simply because he liked the island his way and not another? And wasn't his defiance no more than the same xenophobia that characterized Europe and its resistance to inevitable demographic and cultural changes?  A stubborn refusal to tolerate 'the other'? 

Was there something sacrosanct about old wood, framed, weathered shingled, modest homes - classically unpretentious New England old money? Was there something innately good and right about a harbor with small sloops, a downtown without chain stores, and nothing bigger than a wood-floored hardware store?

The change that Lent for so long had resisted was already underway. The current Altons for example, the last in the line of residents of the island since whaling days and icons of propriety, culture, and modest wealth, led complex off-island lives.  They had homes in Palm Beach and St. Bart's, full lives in New York and Miami and no more use for an old New England home in need of repair and without the modern amenities to which they had become accustomed.  They sold to the highest bidder - a New York developer who saw the property as an ideal place for a mixed used enterprise.  

These younger islanders saw nothing sacred about the Vineyard.  It was a pleasant summer home, a retreat from the pressures and responsibilities of the city, but no Eden, no anointed place that should retain its special character forever.  

Although the community fought both the Altons and the developer, both parties were within their Constitutional rights, and the only weapon in the community's meager armory was zoning law.  That, too however, was based on rather tendentious legal principle, and would not stand up in court.  Furthermore as more and more oldline families' children were anxious to sell, and even longtime, conservative residents were tempted by the windfall of 'New York' money, such lawfare defenses were even less tenable.

Harper Lent had been very comfortable on the Vineyard.  Place mattered, for it was the locus of memory, history, and culture. Nothing shocked or abused his sense of ownership and propriety. If the island changed and became more like every other place in America with its malls, mega-gyms, McMansions, and box stores, his life, his perspective, his personal zeitgeist and ethos would all be threatened.  

In short, his resistance to change was simply a self-interested desire for self-preservation; which of course is what extreme nationalism and xenophobia are. Both are considered noble enterprises by their supporters, but a losing battle.  In a free market society nothing can resist the forces of supply and demand.  Try as one might, change is inevitable. 

It all depends on the change, of course.  The Biden Administration calculatingly opened the borders to tens of millions of illegal aliens who will force changes in electoral districts, ensuring Democrat majorities; and because of progressives' fierce opposition to voter ID laws, the chances of significant electoral pluralities will be certain. Because of this venal, baldly political move, the traditional, white, middle class culture of America will disappear.

This unexpected and unwanted influx has sharpened the social divide, and millions of Americans have come to hate all immigrants as tools of the political opposition and willing recipients of its welfare.

If immigration happens logically and according to supply and demand, no one would care or notice if America became more 'diverse'.  If moderate Muslims were to enter Europe legally and were willing citizens of Europe, there would be no objection.  It has been the venality of the policy, the bald, transparent political agenda that has angered citizens. 

With a gradual transformation of the Vineyard, Harper's children - if unlike the Altons they chose to stay on the island - would never notice how it was no longer the same place settled by their families a century ago; and although that legacy would always be a part of their heritage, they would not need to fight for its survival as their father had. 

Graduality, however, is a non-starter in today's aggressively contentious and demanding world.  The assault on Harper Lent and his old time, weathered neighbors, will continue quickly, abruptly, and painfully. 

Essentially there is no real reason to keep the Vineyard the way it has been. To be sure, it will no longer be the cute, old-fashioned, old New England place that certain tourists preferred, but it will attract another type of visitor; and it will not be up to subjective arbiters of cultural value like Harper Lent to decide who belongs. 

Place in a dynamically changing world of free market economics is irrelevant.  The world of the latter part of the 21st century will be virtual, mediated, and unfettered by such ancient and old-fashioned notions of belong to a plot of land.  Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality will enable the recreation of indistinguishable worlds created at the click of a mouse or a simple voice command. 

Harper Lent is one of the last remaining members of the Old School where parentage, legacy, heritage, and cultural belonging matter.  They will fight with their last breath against the invasion of their idyll; but idyll is all the Vineyard is, and gradually that fantasy will fade away and disappear. 

Fighting for one's turf - one's familiar place, recognizable culture, social compatibility, and links to an acutely remembered past - will also be a thing of the past, an irrelevancy, a piece of ancient history. 

One can feel sorry for Harper Lent.  Because he has invested so much in place, his Eden, the Vineyard, taking it way will tamper with his soul, his identity.  As such, he will look upon his unrecognizable surroundings with regret.  He is too old to be a survivor, to take the next ferry to the mainland, to untether, release, and be free from the moorings which have kept him in his heavily confected, ideal, fictitious world. 

Casting For Diversity - 'The Odyssey' And The Dumbing Down Of America

Christopher Nolan has been widely criticized for his woke film version of the Odyssey, a sword-and-sandals production with a black Helen of Troy.  'We wanted to make Homer relevant for modern audiences'. 

 

The idea is not new.  A production of The Merchant of Venice in Washington a few years ago featured goombas as Venetians, Locust Valley lockjaw WASPs as Portia's socialite clique, and Brooklyn Jews as Shylock's colleagues.  All the stereotypes were there so that there was no mistaking the ethnic character of the actors.   

The Jews were blunt caricatures of money-grubbing Yids who cackle and rub their hands with greed.  The WASPs were insufferable, arrogant twits, and the Italians were imports from The Sopranos. 

A production of Hamlet had Hamlet speaking the famous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy like a high school drop out. 'To be or not to be?' Hey, whatever, that's the question.  The rest of the elegant verse, the philosophical conundrums within, and the metaphorical allusions were lost, downplayed, or altered to make the speech 'relevant'. 

What does this say about American audiences?  Are we so dumb that we cannot situate ourselves in Ancient Greece or Elizabethan Venice?  So insular in our thinking that the mythical structure of The Odyssey is too remote, or that the interchange between gods and men so complex and unbelievable that it must be reduced to thunderbolts and violent storms?

Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus brought Greek myths to the stage and for the first time wove the stories of gods and men into a dramatic structure.  Oedipus slept with his mother, killed his father and spent a lifetime perplexed by the accusations, and defiantly rejected them until the truth was inescapable.  

Yet he thought he was killing a highway robber, not his father; and had no idea that the woman he married was his mother.  Sophocles anticipated Freud by two thousand years; and this melodrama is too difficult to understand?

Agamemnon goes off to fight the Trojan War because of the abduction of Helen, the most beautiful, desired woman of the known world; but she might have gone off with Paris of her own volition, taken with the young, handsome, dashing prince. If so the ‘abduction’ was a casus belli at best; and modern audiences are expected not to understand the geopolitics of the affair or its sexual dynamics? 

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's queen takes a lover during the long years of the Trojan conflict while her husband is away, finds out that he has sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods to assure favorable winds, and then is doubly incensed when he comes home with Cassandra, his concubine.

This psycho-social drama is considered beyond our means?  If the sexual dynamics of an ambitious, sexually adventuresome woman, a she-bear of a mother, and a vengeful, vindictive, jealous wife were not enough, we only have to reread Ibsen, Strindberg, or any melodrama on prime time television. 

The relationship between Clytemnestra and her children, Electra and Orestes, is another modern, Freudian classic.  The scenes where Clytemnestra plays on mother-love to cajole and manipulate Orestes so that he will not take vengeance on her for the murder of Agamemnon is classic - obvious, common, and understandable - and Electra's hectoring of her brother to man up and take their mother's life is no less familiar. 

The courtroom drama where Orestes is brought to justice for the murder of his father was one of the first trials by jury in Western literature and has all the elements of a modern courtroom drama.  The play is filled with legalisms, and familiar codicils, accusations and defense, and is straightforward and inimitably understandable. 

Shakespeare's complex metaphors, drawing on mythical, Biblical, and historical references are not easy to decipher.  The iambic pentameter and the Elizabethan language are challenges for the modern reader; yet the stories are familiar.  How can King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello not resonate with modern audiences?

What makes these classics so difficult for modern American audiences?  Literary illiteracy is one reason. American children are educated within a system that emphasizes self-esteem, cooperative learning, and personal expression.  Logic, exegesis, objective analysis, and the ability to frame, write, and present cogent arguments to defend a hypothesis are gone.  Most public school students graduate from high school with a third-grade reading ability, unable to read a menu let alone Shakespeare. 

Second, patience.  The modern audience, brought up in an age of quick-cuts, MTV, rapid-scrolling, and high-res visuals has no patience for complexity, to delve for meaning, to decipher difficult allegory, to grasp the subtlety of lyricism. 

Third, and perhaps the worst of all is the progressive dismissiveness of the past as racist, colonialist, misogynist, and dangerous - a world to be expunged, removed, and forgotten. There is one approved lens through which to observe events - race, gender, and ethnicity; or stated another way, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Fidelity to a racist, misogynist, colonialist past - i.e. accurate recreations or representations of the life and times of Elizabethan England or Ancient Greece - is to be racist, misogynist, etc. 

 

Just when it seemed that deconstruction and the likes of Derrida and Lacan had passed from notice and these philosophers decommissioned as arbiters of existence, American progressives took up the cudgel. Literature is only of value if it is seen through these arbitrary lenses.  Genius, talent, creativity, artistry are fictitious concepts. 

Christopher Nolan is exemplary of this neo-deconstructionism and its woke application.  His Odyssey is worth nothing in itself.  It is only the basis for a rip-roaring, swashbuckling story peopled with recognizable faces.  It represents the further dumbing down of the American mind, the downward sweep to the bottom. 

Only the familiar, the recognizable, and the quickly understood are standard literary, dramatic, or cinematographic fare.  Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are left on the shelf.  Who would ever want to, let alone be able to 'plow through' War and Peace, one of the most civilized, accomplished, complex novels ever written?  

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's masterpiece of religious inquisition, family dynamics, personal characterization, and broad Biblical exegesis all tightly woven into a story of three brothers and a dominant father is never read - too long, too involved, too difficult, modern readers say.  Is there an abridged edition?

Lawrence, Stendhal, Goethe, Ronsard, and a hundred other writers are left out of curricula.  Dickens, a master, 'approachable' storyteller is one of the few classic writers included in today's library list. The Tale of Two Cities is a marvelous love story, full of longing, loss, desperation, renewal, and eventual happiness.  Who doesn't cry at the ending?  Great Expectations is a coming of age story with pirates, love, ambition, social class, and adventure. 

Along with fidelity, authenticity has gone by the wayside in casting and production of modern films and plays.  Helen of Troy, considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, was white with classic European features.  The black, African world did not exist for Ancient Greeks.  Its slaves were white, its vision was Aegean, Baltic and European, its standards of beauty were classic.  One has only to look at the statuary of the time when the ideal woman looked no different from the classic beauties of Hollywood, Bollywood, or Istanbul. 

The social order was elite, monarchical, and fixed.  The great epics like the Odyssey were not about struggles of inclusivity, identity, and self-esteem, but supremacy, struggles between the gods and man, and the myths that define human nature. 

Only in one Shakespearean play - Othello - is race featured; but the story is less about the struggle of the black man than about evil, duplicity, psychology, and the fragile relationships between men and women. Othello is a Moor, but only in one early scene is he taunted with racial overtones; in all the rest he is simply Venice's most powerful general. 

Cleopatra was Egyptian, a descendant of the royal Ptolemaic line, a beautiful, powerful queen; and while much is made of the 'sybaritic East' it is not with any sense of diversity of inclusion, but with portrayal of the Roman Empire and its colonies. 

There is not only merit but insistence that these plays remain authentic to the vision of their authors and to reflect what they saw, understood, and realized. 

Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind a number of decades ago (1987) and in it he wrote of the dumbing down of America, victim of liberal cant, assumption, and political idealism, and the increasing inability to think, to reason, to reflect, and to consider. 

His vision was accurate; but even he couldn't have imagine the depths to which American ignorance has fallen. It is indeed a country without a sound, intellectual and moral ethos - that of the Founding Fathers when framing the Constitution - without which any serious consideration of the past and its relevance to the present and the future is impossible. 

Fidelity and authenticity are the keys to historical analysis; and the worst historian is the one who looks at the past through the lens of the present. 

Christopher Nolan has fallen into the trap of inclusivity and in so doing has lost every ounce of cinematographic relevance. 

Ugliness - The Race To The Bottom In A Reverse Progressive Utopia

Melanie Barnum was committed to the principle of public education.  It represented the best of America - a place for all regardless of income, race, or ethnicity and the perfect example of the storied melting pot. 

Her children were sent to public schools although thanks to her husband, a successful business owner, they could have gone to private schools; and in Washington, DC there are many which have educated the best and the brightest for over a century.  

As everything in the Nation's Capital, they are divided by politics. St. Albans, modeled after the English 'public' schools Eton and Harrow, is soundly traditional, Episcopalian, and conservative.  Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school proud of its abolitionist past and early progressivism has been home to the children of liberal lawmakers and public servants for almost as long. 

Other schools, while not of the academic standing of these two institutions, nevertheless pride themselves on the same educational rigor, social discipline, and moral principle.  

Families which can afford a private education for their children, do so without reflection.  The idea of diversity as an ideal means nothing when it comes to preparing their sons and daughters for the successful life expected of them.

Some schools, like Sidwell Friends, let their abolitionist past get the better of them, and adopted an affirmative action admissions policy which within a few short years challenged the intellectual superiority of the school. Progressive parents, while committed to the principle of black reparations, became increasingly hesitant to send their children to a school which although acting on principle, necessarily lowered its academic standards; and sent them instead to the best private boarding schools - Exeter, Andover, St. Paul's, Groton, and Loomis. 

 

Other DC private schools held the line, admitted a few minority students but only on the basis of academic performance and potential. 

Melanie Barnum resented this white flight, this abandonment of moral principle and right behavior, and openly criticized those families who left proper democratic schooling for the aerie of the wealthy and the privileged. 

This obduracy, this unshakeable adherence to a questionable principle, was the hallmark of her overall thinking.  She was a lifelong progressive who never once questioned the canon and was seen at every march for abortion, every conference on affirmative action, Diversity Equity Inclusion, and climate change. 

More telling was her embrace of what the Movement called 'the fancy of beautiful privilege'.  They abhorred the train of blonde, blue-eyed young women who made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, who were featured in Presidential cameos, and who became the signature of right wing conservatism. 

These women were the icons of a political philosophy which favored appearance over substance. The stereotype of the ditzy blonde was never more current than within progressive circles in which unattractiveness meant seriousness.  The ethos of diversity produced its champions - the obese, the misshapen, and the short.  The physical characteristics of the women were reminders, physical examples of Thomas Hobbes' famous statement about life being short, brutish, and ugly. 

Ugliness made a point.  Shabbiness was a sign of oppressed white poverty and thus a symbol of commitment to social change. Worse was the fashion statement that accentuated these unfortunate traits - blue hair, tattoos, nose rings, and Dollar Store clothes. 

Melanie, always a stalwart progressive who was never ashamed to act out her principles, volunteered at a local DC public school. Most of the children read below grade level, and she was recruited as resource volunteer to help them.  What she found was far worse than she expected.  Not only did these children read below grade level, they could barely pick out letters from a basic primer. 

They came to school intermittently - truancy in the DC schools was well over fifty percent - and were from dysfunctional, fatherless homes, raised by illiterate grandmothers, and had little incentive or ability to learn.

Melanie's charges not only couldn't read, they couldn't add simple numbers.  The educational algorithm being what it was, classroom exercises were aimed at improving the lot of these students while any students with ability or especially talent were forgotten, recruited into groups of 'cooperative learning' where they learned nothing and were expected to help 'the less fortunate'.

As much as she hated to admit it, the school was a morass of low-level intelligence, educational indifference, in an atmosphere of social ugliness. It was nothing like St. Albans or its sister school, Cathedral, where prominence was universal and the Greek ethos of physical beauty, athletic prowess, and intellectual achievement was standard. 

She berated herself for the comparison.  The St Albans and Cathedral students were beneficiaries of white privilege, legatees of wealth and Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and were members of an elite ruling class that perpetuated insularity and anti-democratic sentiment. 

Yet there was something alluring about these schools - boys in white shirts and ties attending high church services, showing skill and prowess on the athletic fields, all a universally attractive student body, and being prepared for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 

She shook off the vision, plugged away at little LaShonda trying to get her to recognize the difference between an 'L' and an 'I' with no success. Despite the millions spent by DC to upgrade the physical infrastructure of the school - large, modern windows, wide corridors, study spaces, etc., it was still a miserable place of desultory learning where discipline - the reining in of dangerous anti-social behavior - was the teachers' seemingly only responsibility. 

Her attendance at her adult meetings - all rallying points for strategic revolt against conservative efforts to set back progressive advances in diversity, distribution of wealth, neutering of the corporate classes, and climate sanity - only deepened her depression.  These women were morose and unpleasant.  The problems they were facing could only be met with anger, frustration, and hostility.

There was no optimism let alone brightness and certainly no happiness.  The unkemptness of the women, their deliberate lowering the fashion register to near zero, the clambering for recognition despite their profound unattractiveness left Melanie withered. 

If there are so many problems in the world, then how can a conscionable woman look at herself in the mirror, tart herself up, put on something designer and go out with a clear conscience?  No, desperation requires the look of desperation. 

The old adage states: 'Give a liberal long enough and he will become conservative' - testimony to the eventual distaste for idealism - and the evolution of Melanie Barnum was no different.  In her case it was ugliness that did it.  She could have put up with the febrility and the ponderousness, even the absurdity of many progressive claims; but she couldn't take the ugliness and the disdain for anything positive, beautiful and stunning. It was a race to the bottom, and she had had enough. 

Finally and at long last, she could look in the mirror and see a still quite beautiful face; run her hands over her breast and down her thighs and know that she had kept her figure, run her fingers through her still luxuriant hair and step out and be noticed.