A Life of Saying What You Aren't

...and saying what isn't

Ojai, California is affluent and artsy, one because it is and the other because it insistently says so. It’s a small town of a few thousand people who live in a sheltered and enormously pretty valley, of barefoot hippie chicks valeting their German SUVs, and it’s the place where the local activist who for years rode her bike mostly in the nude eventually left for Oregon to “teach yoga and design a stuffed animal and organic clothing line.” It’s…naked yoga organic something, but with resort hotels that still have a few affordably priced rooms for a Tuesday in March or April if you book right away:

Ojai magazine, like Ojai, is two things that sit side-by-side and pretend not to notice each other. The advertising content is for boarding schools, estate planning and wealth management services, and real estate listings like this:

Or this one, which for whatever reason I couldn’t get the cat to not stand on:

The advertising content speaks entirely in the language of exclusion, of enforceable apartness and high status. God help us, but middle-aged estate-brand lady realtors — picture batik scarves — are the last people in the world who use the word “hip” without kidding. This hip and ritzy mid-century modern sits on three full acres of prime gated Ojai ranch property….

It’s gated-estate marketing, page after page of it.

The editorial content is all — all — about living simply, resisting the profound evils of capitalism, and the value of a disruptive left-focused social militancy. The cover story describes local documentary filmmakers who are making films about young activists who are standing up to corporate greed and pollution. There’s a story, with recipes, about cooking with sustainably harvested wild acorns like the Chumash to whom this land truly belongs. And the editor’s welcome note at the front of the issue, dreaming of the day when we will eliminate “the traditional narrative of profit over people,” laments “the broken paradigms of consumption and caste.”

The day the broken paradigms of consumption and caste are rejected, Ojai magazine will have no advertisers; the language of exclusivity and status will stop paying for the narrative of simplicity and activism. But the person who wrote this shit knows that, and makes her living on knowing it.

Twenty-first century wealth and high social status require an endless and elaborate performance of saying what isn’t: lamenting the narrative of profit over people, but doing it from the saltwater pool on your $7 million hillside estate. Laurence Fucking Olivier didn’t perform this much theater; it’s a whole existence built on faking every moment of your life. Cf. Nicholas Clairmont’s 2020 essay, “The Language of Privilege,” which stripped the matter of wokespeak down to bare bones: “Doesn’t it actually just favor rich people?”

Trained in doublespeak, taught through a system of cultural cues to spend all day every day saying things that aren’t, the credentialed striver — the person who wishes to feel high-status, who seeks an education and a job and relationships and a home that communicate an elevated social place — learns to chant. Recall that truckers went to Ottawa to stand for the principles of informed consent and medical autonomy, and remember that they were met by counter-protesters who chanted, “Trans rights are human rights”:

Marie Oakes @TheMarieOakes

Ottawa Freedom Convoy counter protestors are chanting “Trans rights are human rights.” I don’t think they are at the right protest.

People outside the ritual caste regarded this performance as the statement of a non-sequitur, entirely missing the point. The point is the recourse to a prepared phrase; the point is to reject a hard conversation in favor of a ritual performance, which restores a threatened social structure. You have no ritual for “informed consent,” so you transition to a thing a known ritual will address. Stop being transphobic with your demand for informed consent! For another iteration of this performance, see the high-status performer John Kerry lament that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will, you know, something something climate change. Get to the script; fall back on a ritual expression.

Watch what happens when a person of this type finds that real things are forcing their way through the crust of her ritual-barrier:

Rebecca April @RebeccaApril10

NZ

It’s an implosion. For people who’ve built an existence in which status is built on the relentless retreat behind the walls of the ritually unreal, enough of these moments of implosion turn into one giant implosion. It becomes an end. Not soon enough, but still.