Editor’s Note

DISCOVER OJAI MONTHLY

Bret Bradigan

OJAI, SINCERELY YOURS

“The ironic man, with his sly stillness and his ambuscading ways, may be viewed as a pest to society.” — Thomas Carlyle, “Sartor Resartus.”

David Foster Wallace called the counter-reaction in the 1990s to corrosive irony “The New Sincerity.” These expressions of vulnerability may have best been voiced by Daniel Johnston, who died last year after decades of struggling through mental illness and depression to write such haunting and beautiful songs as “Love Will Find You in the End,” and “Life in Vain.” Other musical acts such as Arcade Fire and Cat Power also exemplify this brave openness. Filmmakers Lars von Trier and Miranda July, with their absence of cynical distance from and between their characters, also model this new sincerity.

Many commentators such as David Brooks mocked this earnestness as the debris of a certain kind of liberal mindset that they thought should have faded away with the 1970s Back to the Land movement and the Whole Earth Catalog. We now live in the age of Four Seasons Landscaping, Ben Shapiro and anti-vaxxers. To engage in a little snark myself, that’s hardly an improvement.

This arch-ironic, meta-level smug dismissiveness of those who want to make the world a better place is seductive. How much easier to sit on the sidelines and snipe rather than roll your sleeves up and act? And what fat targets some of these do-gooders make of themselves, with their delusional belief in their own moral superiority, their privilege reeking of solipsism’s florid stench. This is the kernel of much of the “alt-reich” owning the woke libs that has led us these past five years into the chaos and disintegration of America’s standing in the world.

These impulses are not new, as Richard Hofstader, 60 years ago, titled one of his best-known books “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” While he dealt most proximately with the John Birch Society and its allegations that Eisenhower and Gen. George C. Marshall were “commie symps,” the book was a trip through the fever swamps that have always stewed in the recesses of our discourse. The earnest abolitionists of the fledgling Republican Party of 1850s had to make common cause with the nativists of the Know Nothing Party and their conspiratorial ravings about first, the Papists, then the international Jewry. Before that, at the dawn of our republic, the alleged puppet masters were the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians.

Ojai itself got caught up in witch hunts of the McCarthy era, as we were a haven for key members of the Hollywood 19 — those brave blacklisted souls who refused to name names or give legitimacy to the demogaguery of the right-wing mob. Talking about public art, we should be erecting statues of Dalton Trumbo, Paul Jarrico, John Howard Lawson, Michael Wilson, Floyd Crosby (whose son, David, might strike a familiar note), among them. These are people who paid a real price and whose courage contains lessons for generations to come.

Our recent elections repudiated the tide of sneering cynicism. From the passing of Measure K’s $45 million investment in our public school students to a political novice deciding to run for mayor because she read Ojai resident and author Gay Hendricks’ “Big Leap: Conquer Your Fear,” this election showed that Ojai’s values are flourishing. Our new pandemic-driven wave of residents were drawn here in some part because of our values of showing up and being the change we want to see in the neighborhood, as well as the world.

With anything, there’s a balance between sincerity and insufferability. As the lyric goes, “A little irony is like yeast, it helps us rise. Too much? We rot, we fester, we draw flies.” More than anywhere I’ve ever lived, Ojai manages to strike that balance.

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