Just Pretending

I think that one of the reasons that I wanted to start this fan blog was the song "Just Pretending" from Pollyanna's Attic. For those of you who stumbled unwittingly onto this Carolyn Arends blog, Pollyanna's Attic (PA) was released this past May (on time, too!) and is a collection of songs that Carolyn had held "close to [her] heart but had never recorded." The songs are a little bit darker and "grumpier" than her usual fare, but they are nonetheless masterful expressions of certain ideas that contribute to her Weltanschauung. PA is not one of my favorite albums, but I would be a fool not to see and appreciate the lyrical and musical artistry therein. But, this post is not a review of PA. This post is an argument against the ideas of "Just Pretending."

I was reading an editorial in the Wall Street Journal from September 1, 2006, entitled "Survivor Strategy." This article, about the current season of Survivor's dividing teams along racial lines, was not signed by any particular author, but it was a wise article, indeed. When I read the following sentence, my jaw dropped, because I had never before read someone so succinctly state an idea that had festered in my mind for years: "The therapeutic ethos of recent years has encouraged each of us to get every thought off our chest, lest we suffer from the ordeal of civility." That gave me a jumping off point to articulate why Carolyn's song, "Just Pretending," has really bugged me these past few months.

First of all, the song is brilliant. The lyrics are funny and pointed and very economical. The music is catchy and memorable. She sings it, of course, wonderfully. But, I think, at least in my experience, the point of the song is off-base, off-kilter, misguided. Here are the lyrics:

Just Pretending
Carolyn Arends and Spencer Capier
Nice shirt, and khaki chinos
Dessert and cappuccinos
SUV, he looks good in it
Driving past his credit limit
She's climbing that Stairmaster
Up to Happy Ever After
Though she never seems to get there
She can't stop
No she can't stop
Why do we try so hard?
Life's not some greeting card
Models and movie stars
They're just pretending
They're just pretending
Family full of achievers
Beat the Jones and be the Cleavers
Give the lawn a manicure
No rough edges, that's for sure
Sunday the whole congregation
Doesn't seem to need salvation
Everybody's just terrific
All the time
All the time
Why do we try so hard?
Life's not some greeting card
Models and movie stars
They're just pretending
They're just pretending
Everybody's under pressure
Got to get our acts together
Living out these scripted roles
Tidy and predictable
What if we just all agreed
To wear our hearts on wrinkled sleeves
And live the mess and mystery
Of a real life
Live real life
Why do we try so hard?
Life's not some greeting card
If we're not who we are
We're just pretending
Why do we try so hard?
Life's not some greeting card
Models and all those movie stars
They're just pretending
They're just pretending
© Songs of Peer, LTD./Mr. Marley's Music (ASCAP)/ Spencer Capier Music (SOCAN)

Two different themes of this song are mistaken, I believe. The first is the idea that everyone has this deeper self that they hide from the world in order to conform with society. I think that, for a majority of people, their fancy car, their lovely house, their chisled bodies really are the things that are foremost in their minds -- not masks of conventionality, but faces of such. It is not for everyone to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. Many people are happy in the shallow waters and would drown in the deep. It is easy to forgive Carolyn and Spencer this point, though. They are artists and are, therefore, more likely to think that everyone wrestles with the whys and ways of the world as much as they.

The second idea is that we have this great obligation to "be who we are" to the world at large. I think that this is one of the more selfish notions of recent years -- that everyone we meet must become burdened with the burdens under which we labor. Call me a throwback to Jane Austen's time, but I think that it is uncivilized merely to grouse to strangers and prostrate ourselves weeping in the presence of casual acquaintances. I have always been more sense than sensibility, I suppose. Nobody wanted to smack Marianne Dashwood more than I throughout that whole novel.

I need to remind myself that Carolyn is from Canada, and maybe in Canada people live these stifled lives of quiet desperation. If so, I might have to move up there, because they certainly do not here in America. Every little pecadillo, every dirty thought or sinful action, is not only brought out to the public in the harsh light of day, but often it is celebrated. I think of that former governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey, whose disgusting personal debaucheries are making the circuit of talk shows on his tour promoting the book wherein he lovingly detailed them. Or that vile Mark Foley who circumvented as best he could accepting responsibility for being a degenerate by revealing that he'd been, a) molested by a priest and b) was an alcoholic, anyway. Or those more than five thousand women who just had to let the world know in petition form that, heck yes, they murdered their babies in the womb, and heck yes, they sure were so proud of that fact that they had to shout it out. Here are nasty people who did nasty things either ducking responsibility by revealing intensely personal things to the world or celebrating their nastiness by reveling in the intensely personal things. They do not take the form of "confessions," which are good for the soul and necessary, I believe, but rather are shameless declarations of moral relativism that, frankly, make me wish to puke.

Civility is conscientious self-control, and self-control is the earmark of civilization. You simply cannot have a functioning society wherein people vomit their wretchedness upon the world at large. We have seen, here in America, our culture devolve into a cesspool wherein vice is treated as disease, i.e. without fault attached, and those things which ought to be hidden away deep within for the Holy Spirit to work on are flaunted as quirky eccentricities. Indeed, this country has been a place where people feel, unfortunately, very comfortable "just be[ing] who [they] are." And no one is shamed into suffering the ordeal of civility.

That is not to say that each person ought not to have a safe network of family and friends in which they can be who they are. Jane Austen confided everything to her older sister, Cassandra; and Cassandra prudently destroyed the more personal aspects of those letters upon Jane's death. Now, to scholars and fans of Miss Austen, this loss of the completely unreserved Jane is painful and frustrating; but, I cannot help but believe in my heart that Cassandra was justified in protecting the personal parts of Jane from the world, and, indeed, the world from the more personal side of Jane. It was, in a way, an act of grace, because, within grace, the unclean parts are made clean and wholeness is revealed where fractured shambles were formerly assembled. Jane was allowed wholeness in her relationship with Cassandra, and Cassandra made the Jane of history cleansed in return.

This grace cannot be found, though, in a defiant display of our sin to the greater world, because, instead of cleansing the sinner and restoring the good, it rips apart the moral fabric of society and draws the culture further into the murky morass of relativism and unaccountability. How much worse off American culture is today after generations of people who not only wore their hearts on wrinkled sleeves, but on filthy, shredded, bloodied sleeves! We are not only worse off, we are on the edge of decay.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the lyrics of "Just Pretending." It is, after all, merely a song -- a good song at that. My wish is that more people felt obligated to try a little harder. To live their lives in a more tidy and predictable fashion. To keep their lawns mowed and their bodies reasonably in shape (especially if they insist on wearing spandex). To save their deeper, darker secrets and desires for their best friends and their families, and not to unleash those burdens on the world at large. To feel more pressure to get their acts together and be better citizens and not make society and others pay the price for their bad decisions and hurtful actions. A little pretending is not a bad thing, it can keep a person doing what is right instead of what he feels. That is one of the cornerstones of a righteous society, and it is one that we need to reclaim.