The Joy Of Doing Nothing
The Joy Of Doing Nothing
A summer reflection from the end of the world
As this blazing summer settles in, I found myself reading two essays lamenting the enormous and impossible task of doing nothing and accusing those who prefer quiet to noise as evil gentrifiers. (Both were in The Atlantic, naturally.) Allow me a brief dissent.
Doing nothing is glorious. It is one of life’s deepest pleasures and ultimate goals. Yesterday, I walked out a couple of miles to a stretch of beach at the end of Cape Cod, where the tide sweeps in and out to create shallow, vast, warm pools of water surrounded by marshes. I brought a book, which was in fact a collection of Cicero’s essays on life and death and old age, but never opened it. I’d already started, and Cicero’s defense of getting old amounts to the idea that you can keep working productively until the day you drop dead, which was not exactly the theme I was after when I picked it up, but I left it in my knapsack for other reasons.
One of those reasons was to use my eyes beyond reading. Words, words, words, anything to be free of them from time to time. The view is always a unique variation on the same, unchanging theme — sand, grass, water, sky — with one obvious exception. A whole stretch of dunes was wiped out a few years ago by a couple of really bad Nor’easters. Most of us saw it as another disaster caused by climate change. But it turns out these dune wipeouts happen every now and again, and, over time, the tidal patterns rebuild the mounds and drifts of sand that eventually become covered again with dune grass, and wild rose-bushes. I’m not saying climate change isn’t affecting the Outer Cape — the erosion is very real just a few hundred yards away — but the sight of these recovering wounds makes me feel a bit better. Yes, everything changes. But everything also stays the same.
And every year in the quarter of a century I’ve been coming here, Provincetown has changed a little. I reviewed a book last month about the Cape in the first part of the 20th century, where artists and playwrights and intellectuals and architects and painters of extraordinary caliber and individuality chose this wilderness as a refuge, and a place to dream up new ways to change the world. This was where Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams reinvented American theater, where Charles Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann shifted the fine arts, where Norman Mailer and James Baldwin hung out together, where Dwight Macdonald could be spotted on a July afternoon playing softball with Irving Howe.
Squint your eyes and the physical landscape is really not that different (thanks, mostly, to the National Seashore and aesthetic restrictions on new building), even though the outside world has changed beyond measure. In fact, many of the utopian dreams championed and debated in this changeless nook — Marxism, Stalinism and Trotskyism, to name a few — became (rather swiftly) nightmares for millions of others elsewhere. Other experiments pioneered amid this captivating, do-nothing beauty: abstract expressionism and the Bauhaus school — the kind of ugly it takes an intellectual to imagine.
And in these years, America too has changed. Through the hellish years of AIDS through the integrative power of marriage equality, the stigma of gayness has eroded like the dunes (and at some point, one assumes, will rebuild in some modest way like the dunes as well). Yes, gay culture is different than it was, more established, less tortured, more diffuse. Gay kids today do not grow up as I did, and it shows.
But when I ask myself if something fundamental has changed in gay life, as integration has arrived, I tend to think less than I may have once thought. I look around me in Ptown: the parties and parades, the costumes, the drag queens, the drinking, the procession to the beach and back, the tea dance every afternoon, the pizza crowds after the bars close, the ebbs and flows of the weeks, the lost bikes and new grudges, the dick dock and the new viruses. It’s all here still, coming but never completely going.
I see the same vacation patterns — the highly scheduled pack-fags who come in groups and do everything together, the loner weirdos strolling the emptier beaches, the scraggly bad street musicians, the ripped already-retired 50-year-old CEOs, the exhausted houseboys and waiters, the effeminate voices that won’t quit. What’s new: hordes of strapping, young straight Bulgarians, on work-study visas doing the shit-work; Massachusetts bachelorette parties, in groups at restaurants, reaching decibel peaks that will clear a room of gay men in seconds; helicopter gay parents dragging their theybies past multi-colored flags representing some previously esoteric sexual taste as if it’s a UN-recognized nation-state. Bear Week, I suppose. More seals and foxes. Monkeypox.
And, yes, it’s noisier, and I’m not here for it. From the pedicabs’ boomboxes, to the speakers perched on the back of narcissists’ bikes to the sad young party boys carting their bluetoothed contraptions through the fricking marshes in case a moment of serenity might interrupt their day, it’s louder than it was. Construction even seems to intensify throughout the summer, with concrete-cutters next door making one week this July particularly memorable, as new money comes in from people who see Ptown less as an escape than as an investment. No, the wealthy are not after peace and quiet. And only a writer from Brown who uses “Latinx” without irony could think so.
Even in the tidal pools, strains of radio sounds can come skimming across the water, like alien signals. But for the most part, it’s still silent there. The pools only last a few hours, and get warm after traversing the sand heated by the August sun, and they’re shallow enough you can actually sit in them around high tide, your tush on the sand, your head bobbing like a lost buoy above the ripples. At that point on the beach, the men — and a couple of daring dykes every now and again — tend to hang out naked, which is less sexy in the Cape light than one imagines.
And there’s one old man out there I’ve seen for decades, maybe in his 80s now, somehow making it across the marshes (though I saw him once get picked up by a friend in a rowboat) to take his habitual position alone past almost all the crowds, near the dunes roped off to protect the piping plovers, in the sliver of sand between the Atlantic and the pools.
He sits there in the buff looking at the ocean — occasionally crossing to dip into the pools — and so far as I can tell, he does nothing else at all. When people say to me that I’d never retire, I’d get so antsy and bored, so restless and eager for distraction, I feel like pointing to that old dude and saying: watch me.
New On The Dishcast: Sohrab Ahmari
Sohrab is a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal, and he’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative. He spent nearly a decade at News Corp. — as the op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the WSJ opinion pages in New York and London. His books include From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. A new voice for a new conservatism, I tried to talk him through how he got to this place — politically and spiritually.
For two clips of our convo — on whether the free market is actually a tyranny, and how many liberals actually reject democracy, e.g. Brexit — pop over to our YouTube page. Listen to the whole episode here. That link also takes you to a new transcript of our episode with David French, along with listener commentary over Larry Summers and reader commentary over Viktor Orbán.
The View From Your Window
Budapest, Hungary, 11.39 am
Yes, Politics Works — Even On Abortion
I hope that this week reassures many liberals that politics is not something you need to protect yourselves from with court rulings or moral posturing but something worth engaging, even with relish. The results in Kansas — yes, Kansas — exposes the real weakness of the Christianist position — something that the Supreme Court had occluded for decades.
The group that wants to ban abortion entirely in this country is a small minority. What Dobbs did was force them to come up with a sane compromise to regulate abortion in various states. And despite fair warning, they can’t. Because they’ve never really had to. And because they don’t really want to. Dobbs has taken the issue out of the realm of abstract purism and into the give-and-take of compromise.
The stonking majority in Kansas — suggesting a clear plurality for European-style legality within sensible limits across America — now clearly favors moderate Democrats. More importantly, it favors moderate Republicans. Suddenly, hard-right pols are backtracking about the “no-exceptions” ban for the very young or the raped, or downplaying the issue as manically as they can. Real women’s stories — including that of the terrified ten-year-old girl — have refuted the cheap bromides of the far right; and real citizens are not, it turns out, interested in sudden, draconian changes. This is messy and scary for some. But it’s a process we shouldn’t short-circuit.
And abortion is not the only question slowly returning to political debate. Trans extremism — finally removed from the sole purview of woke-captured medicine — is now on the wane throughout Europe, where the craze to change the sex of children has come crashing down as the evidence of something very wrong has trickled in. Belgium joined the throng last month with leading physicians arguing for much more caution in transitioning kids — after Finland, Holland, Sweden, England and France. No doubt some feelings are hurt in debating these questions openly — but lives can also be ruined by bullied silence and postmodern diktats from on high.
We also need to talk frankly about monkeypox and how it’s spread (almost entirely at this point by men fucking other men). Asking a small section of the population to stop going to sex parties for a while is not some grotesque reactionism. It’s treating gay men as adults. Avoiding “stigma” — taken to its logical conclusion — can be another kind of stigma, declaring one group of citizens inherently incapable of taking care of themselves if they’re told the truth. But if one group in America has shown we can look after ourselves if given the facts, it’s gay men. Stop babying us.
There’s also something sickening about the way public health authorities have politicized themselves. During Covid, we weren’t allowed to visit dying loved ones, but we could protest “structural racism” in the streets with no risk at all? And with monkeypox, we can tell people to launder their bedding but we can’t ask men to stop going to orgies? Please.
Some activists even refer to AIDS as a period that proved closing bathhouses, for example, didn’t work. Yes, long-term stigmatization of HIV was and is a bad and dumb thing; we shouldn’t do it. But was Randy Shilts wrong for arguing at the very beginning of the plague that the bathhouses should be shut pronto? No he wasn’t. God knows how many lives would have been saved if his advice had been heeded. In epidemics, initial speed of response and empirical assessment is everything. Ideological purism is as dangerous and useless as the CDC.
Money Quotes For The Week
“Jesse was real. I am a real mom. … There’s records of Jesse’s birth. Of me. I have a history. And there’s nothing that you could’ve found … that I’m Deep State. It’s just not true. I know you know that. That’s the problem. I know you know that. And you keep saying it. You keep saying it. Why? Why?” - Scarlett Lewis, a Sandy Hook mother, to Alex Jones, in court this week (via Matt Labash).
“He’s a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters,” - Dick Cheney on Trump.
“It is a measure of our political dysfunction that a Democratic president cannot deter a Democratic House speaker from engaging in a diplomatic maneuver that his entire national security team — from the C.I.A. director to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs — deemed unwise,” - Tom Friedman.
“We need a national mask mandate. Period. That’s how we beat this virus,” - Scott Weiner, a California state senator, in October 2020.
“If people want to have sex, they are going to have sex,” - Senator Weiner, this week, refusing to urge gay men to change behavior to stop a viral outbreak.
“Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. And that is why you’re being arrested,” - a British policeman.
“Hobbits do not need to be in charge. Hobbits do not want to rule the world, should not want to rule the world, and could not rule the world. Hobbits do not even need to be governed by hobbits — they just need to be governed as hobbits. Governing them as elves, though, generates significant irritation and is best regarded as hobbit abuse,” - Curtis Yarvin, stumbling upon Toryism.
The View From Your Window
Mt. Baker Wilderness, Washington, 12 pm
Dissents Of The Week: A Dog’s Breakfast
Not much pushback in the in-tray this week. Over on the pod page, Larry Summers responds to a listener dissent, while a reader defends Rod Dreher against my criticism of him on Orbán. Here, a dissent over my latest lead item:
You wrote about Biden, “That B+ on the climate depends of course on whether the Schumer-Manchin deal struck this week can get to the president’s desk.” I don’t expect you’ve read the 725-page Schumer-Manchin bill — no one has, not even our 535 members of Congress. But I’ve read some of it. It’s a dog’s breakfast of supposedly revenue-raising measures to reduce the deficit with a few sops to the left on the ACA and climate change.
Almost all economists agree that the most efficient way to reduce emissions of CO2 is to increase the cost of emitting it. Instead, we get countless subsidies for various favored industries, industrial policy by another name, to be paid for with illusory tax increases that are certain only to make lawyers and accountants richer. I’d be curious to hear a good defense about how $7500 Tesla subsidies to families making up to $300K/year is a good way to combat climate change. Or how will a $4000 subsidy for families making up to $150K for buying used Teslas do anything other than make the sellers of used Teslas $4000 richer? And that’s just a few examples in the climate part.
As Milton Friedman noted, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” I think it’s a mistake to grade either Biden or this bill’s authors based on intentions, however noble they may be.
Politics is messy. And climate change, in my view, is an emergency. I don’t disagree, for example, that a carbon tax would be better. But now? With gas prices through the roof? The most important question with respect to the IRA is: compared to what? I’ll take it — and it caps a surprising string of legislative victories for Biden.
If you missed last week’s big batch of dissents over Ukraine, here’s the link. And our page of dissents on DeSantis continues to get traffic — check it out. Our most trafficked dissents page was on abortion in the wake of Dobbs — newly relevant this week. Keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
A grizzled man perseveres:
In The ‘Stacks
Damon Linker scores the results of Tuesday’s races. The cynicism of Dems who targeted a pro-impeachment Republican is bottomless. Thank God for jungle primaries.
In Kansas, the most effective pro-choice ads were conservative ones. (It’s a reminder that the state is more moderate than you think.) Filipovic, who doesn’t believe abortion should be put to a vote, urges Dems to run on the issue. Coulter looks at rape culture in the context of the ten-year-old in Ohio.
We finally zapped Zawahiri. Dexter Filkins is on the Dishcast next week to discuss.
Yglesias and Maher clash over population growth. Scott Alexander breaks down the trends — at the current rate, the Amish will overtake us all.
So where are the rich supposed to live, Xochitl Gonzalez?
Thailand is quickly becoming the best country in the world for cannabis.
Leave Juul alone! We need Moynihan around for as long as possible.
See why David French calls online porn “America’s worst industry.”
Jonah Goldberg ponders Trump’s “new manliness” and wonders, “Will Hawley’s Manhood have a soft debut?”
Is South Africa on the brink of anarchy?
In a rare blog debate these days, Damon and Rod go back and forth over Orbán.
The Great Awokening gripped the UK too, of course.
The Puritans were actually cosmopolitan liberals? Also, “compared to decades ago, conservatism now appears more reasonable,” proffers Thomas Prosser.
Some advice for analysis paralysis.
Need a cure for arachnophobia? Try gardening.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.