This Is Bowling; There Are Rules

It’s a weird sort of a world we live in.

Wonderful, truly. There’s a visual diversity and ebullience available all over the place. It’s not universal, of course, but that’s the nature of true diversity, isn’t it? It’s the people that say that the culture and its artifacts are monolithic, and bad, that have no idea what a robust society produces. Stuff you don’t like, sometimes.

That’s a house in Madison, Indiana. I do believe I wouldn’t mind sitting on that porch for a good long while. The house it’s attached to is really nothing more than a little ranch house. You could say it was sprawl, and ask that it be flattened, or never built in the first place. Conversely, you could put a plaque on it and get a commission together to decide what colors it should be allowed to be painted, if anyone is to be allowed to touch it at all. It’s likely the same people would participate in both activities without noticing their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing. America’s like that a lot.

It’s really very difficult to lay on dense decoration like that and do it well. It seems like a jumble to many eyes, because we’ve lost the knack. People try, timidly, to go a little way down this route, and make a mess of it. It’s only difficult because we don’t know the rules of decoration anymore, because there’s only been one rule exalted above all: No Decoration. It’s mildly counterintuitive, but I assure you that there’s nothing fussier than an absolute lack of decoration. Everything has to be flawless to pull it off, and nothing is, or stays that way very long.

We drive by the attempts to put decoration on dwellings now and I say to my wife: “Home Depot blew up,” and she knows exactly what I’m thinking without any further comment. Decoration has to be layered on, all of it in keeping with what’s already there and everything else you’re adding simultaneously.

For the most part, no one would have this on their house because they couldn’t picture expending even the effort it would take to maintain it, never mind the effort necessary to produce it in the first place. There is a great deal of contemporary American life and its institutions that answers that description, and that’s not good.

Get some wonderful and keep it. Then you’ll be qualified to make some, maybe.