Chapter 21
Dr. Sloan and John simultaneously reached for the handles of Mrs. Heartbreak’s van—to get into it and toddle along the last three hundred yards to Eveningside—when the chicken scented air of Blue Eye erupted with the roar of penis augmentation devices. Sharon and John clamped hands over ears and turned to stare dully at a large crowd of paunchy, late-middle aged cases of arrested development, pass through town. They were undoubtedly on their way to Eureka Springs for the bi-monthly Annual Blues, Bikes, and Beer Festival.
Each member of this unsightly, noisy crowd sported an important black T-Shirt bearing a slogan. John read ‘Rehab is for Quitters’ and ‘If you can read this the Bitch fell off’ between blinks. Ah, America, John thought: inventor of Prozac and Viagra, expensive orthodontia and Frankenberries, boob jobs and competitive cheerleading. Only here would authentic low lifes riding their only asset be so democratically synthesized into a pack comprised of suburban accountants and insurance salesmen (excuse me, Estate Planning Executives) playing dress-up.
John recalled Matthew Arnold’s worry that ‘America will rule the world by their energy, but they will deteriorate it by their low ideas and want of culture.’ John wondered what Arnold, who might justly be called the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, would make of the parading bikesters. The hilarious meat of Arnold’s observation would certainly be the yawning gap of time falling between Easy Rider and the Marketplace Swashbucklers passing by. Within that gap would be James Dobson and Gore Vidal, Kenneth Copeland and Noam Chomsky, Ted Kaczynski and Glenn Beck, Susan Sontag and Kathryn Kuhlman, yowling cheek by jowl in harmony, each and every mother’s son and daughter conjoined in grief over the destruction of civilization as we know it.
They fill the gap with song, the left-wingers, about shaking the dust off their Birkenstocks over the ravening consequences of the Free Market; the conservative counterpoint yodeling of bourgeois mediocrity undermining the classical virtues and turning us into comfort loving, irreligious consumers and hedonists; hear the hum of freelance pessimists denouncing the latest vacuous realm of unreality: wasteful government spending, lack of government spending, over regulation, under regulation, the sanctity of marriage, the guarantees of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the…Mathew Arnold’s gap is wide and aromatic with the stink of complaint.
The underlining hilarity of the moment, John thought, was that the racketing procession of Harley Davidsons was made possible and even acceptable, by the Puritans and the Protestant Reformation. These merry noise makers were simply expressing their individuality, their triumph over the darkness of mere authority, and their pride in personal freedom. They might belong to—probably belonged to—a church back home that roundly condemns On the Origin of the Species and all that it entails, but is otherwise faithfully committed to Social Darwinism.
Puritan leadership—the Cotton, Mather, and Winthrop families—insisted that personal witnessing and individual, private salvation, were the signs of the genuine Christian. This viewpoint is comprehensively covered in a sermon delivered by John Cotton on January 19th, 1637 and further explained with his issuing of ’16 points of clarification’. This was met with ‘An Elders’ Reply’ clarifying the matter even further and, running true to the protestant experience, resulted in an additional 82 clarifying points later that year.
While we can be certain that Increase, John, and Cotton Mather would roll over in their graves at the sound of Sinatra singing ‘I Did it My Way’ or that 90% of Americans have ‘high-self-esteem’ (you other 10%: God, what losers you are!) they would not deny that individualism itself is the offspring of the Reformation.
Consequently, subsequently, and therefore, that’s why Dr. Sloan and John now observe a mostly tubby parade of freely-expressing Estate Planners playing dress-up on high powered machines in the beautiful Arkansas Ozarks. They have the money and the God-Given Right to be as dorky as they want to be and screw you if your elitist values are appalled by the noise, and the narcissism, of the moment.
