Will the Real Obsolete Man Please Stand Up?

An empty, pointless transience overwhelms America.

BRIMFIELD, Mass. — “We are living in a throwaway culture,” Pope Francis observed this summer. “What is useless is discarded.”  The pope speaks of people, specifically the elderly, the unborn, and the disabled, i.e., the inefficient. Disposable, however, seems an all-purpose adjective for our age.   Some people rebel against their times. They gather for six days three times a year in Brimfield, Massachusetts.  Subscribers, click here to read the full magazine. Not a subscriber? Click here to become a Patriot member today and receive access to The American Spectator in print and online! “There’s truth to the old phrase, ‘They don’t make things like they used to,’” tattooed thirtysomething Ryan Piccirillo, proprietor of Memory Hole Vintage, comments as he offers a Betty Boop statue for sale. “A hundred years from now the antiques we have today will still be the antiques that are collected. I don’t think much of the stuff that’s manufactured in 2021 is going to be collectable in 2121 because it will all have deteriorated and broken. They build in obsolescence to the products they create and they just break and wear down, whereas the stuff that was made 100 years ago was built to last.”   At the Brimfield Antiques Show, a WABAC machine disguised as a high-end flea market, one encounters old stage lights belonging in the present under the spotlight, so-antiquated-that-they-appear-futuristic diving helmets that take our breath away, long-silenced National Cash Registers bellowing the big cha-ching, vintage Kodaks coming into focus of the cellphones of passersby, and Underwood typewriters the subject rather than the instrument of scribes. They put the “super” in superannuated.  Used objects reincarnated as curios defend the past from the present’s slurs against it. And 21st Century Man, narcissistically horrified by relic-reminders of his own inadequacy, by nature recoils. Throwaway culture lacks the conscious ideology inspiring the recent mania for ancestor character assas...