The Great Barrington Declaration

Knee-jerk NIMBYism rears its ugly, shortsighted head in tony western Massachusetts

Sorry, this is a bait-and-switch. It’s not at all about lambasting draconian responses to New World Order plandemics, which, as evil as they might be, are getting more than enough “resistance” ink here on Substack and elsewhere, and frankly starting to wear me the fuck out.

No, this piece is in fact referencing an actual local dust-up in the beautiful western Massachusetts town of Great Barrington, a hotbed of classic liberal Democratic strength and values, and a bastion of gentle, slightly aging (and mostly toothless) resistance to the galling overreaches of the coarse, rural-fascist MAGA disease infecting less sophisticated minds dotting the surrounding New England hill country, as well as much of the nation’s more sparsely settled land area. Great Barrington evinces a self-consciously charming and genteel environment that tends to attract resident intelligentsia along the lines of WAMC’s beloved regional superpundit Alan Chartock, who can often be seen munching on a delicious pizza at Baba Louie’s Pizza on Main Street … oh wait, you can’t. Baba Louie’s just closed a month ago, forever, after 25 years in business, probably due to COVID or tariffs or supply chain disruptions or ICE coming around in unmarked black Humvees to round up the kitchen staff and send them to Guantanamo. RIP Baba Louie. We’ll miss you.

But that’s not what this piece is about either, although I guess it’s somewhat related. Because somewhere in the comfortably elitist, Puritan-influenced western Massachusetts mindset resides a flinty unfriendliness toward out-of-the-box thinking or any deviation from the stern British religio-colonial vibe of the place. One such “controversy” involves the strangely mixed community response to Paul Joffe’s iconoclastic “Flying Church” project on the northern stretch of Main Street, which to this nonconformist serial appreciator of cognitive dissonance is a refreshing rebuke to all the stuffy New England propriety that seeks to edit things like this out of its cozy storybook existence.

Here’s a fairly typical exchange on Facebook, the customary “public square” utilized around the globe for just such picayune carping. It starts with a standard-issue plug by Joffe trying to drum up interest in his venue:

The project actually is completed, and looks like this now:

Not too shabby, right?

Wrong, apparently... The trolling thread begins, innocently enough:

Then things quickly take a turn for the worse:

And so on.

As a concerned non-resident who has no actual dog in the fight and doesn’t really care about what happens in Great Barrington, I felt compelled in this instance to defend the embattled developer, seeing as he had once graciously afforded me the opportunity to dispose of some unwanted rocks that had been threatening to be launched into my picture window by my careless lawn-mowing dude (a 100% All-American heavily tattooed Trump voter, not someone you sketchy ICE rent-a-agents might be looking for, so stay the fuck away from my yard). So here is what I wrote on the offensive thread. I stand by it … and by my constitutional right to blurt out shit like this on Facebook and Substack:

“Gerald Elias What are you talking about? This is a masterfully done piece of work that transformed a squat, dumpy, ugly little church that nobody even noticed was there into a centerpiece of beauty, art and mystery that’s enhancing what was once the forgotten end of town. Add to that the little yellow coffee shop, the psychedelic bit of faux Illuminati imagery atop the once moribund, meaningless spire, the festive Evil Santa that appears every holiday season to enchant passersby, and the stunning Great Barrington Rock Sanctuary beneath the combination old bridge/wheelchair access ramp, and you have a veritable landmark property that will someday soon host a thriving restaurant/entertainment venue, as soon as America actually becomes great again when we get past all the cretins running things into a ditch over and over.”

Then I appended the above screed with proof of my status as an interested party in the fate of the greater Flying Church initiative. Let’s hope this settles things: