The World According to Carp: Nantucket read

By Benjamin Carp

In the age of political correctness, it is no longer permissible to make fun of anything about people, even if their deficiencies are irrespective of birth, race, religion, sexual identity or gender. However, I have always believed that places are fair game for satire. As a Long Islander in the Buttafuoco Age, I have deservedly received my share of placism. Anyone from the South, the Midwest, New Jersey, the Bay Area, or Delaware certainly knows what I'm talking about.

So this week I've decided to turn my sights on Nantucket, Massachusetts, which I visited for the very first time this past summer (Yes, my topic this week, banally enough, is "How I spent my summer vacation." Once in a while everyone has to spit in the face of originality).

Nantucket is, at least partially, famous for the following limerick:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
His daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man--
And, as for the bucket, Nantucket.

I'm not sure if anyone would admit to having watched "Wings" enough to know anything about Nantucket, but the island is famous for more than just the lewd limerick. Thousands of tourists and summer residents arrive by ferry, airplane, hydrofoil or private boat to enjoy beautiful beaches, remarkable historic preservation, and a hopping bar scene.

Nantucket is a somewhat weird little place. The island has its own color, "Nantucket Reds," and people actually have pants of this color (Nantucket Reds are to red what melon is to orange, more or less). One of my hosts even became nostalgic about the island's dump. "It used to be a great place," she said wistfully. "Carrion birds used to fly around, and you used to be able to just toss your garbage onto teaming heaps of trash. Now it's all gentrified."

Nantucket is also the only place I have ever seen a man wear a sport jacket, tie, and khaki shorts...on the beach. This is because Nantucket can become, during the summer, the most disgusting hive of yuppies I have ever witnessed. The prices charged at restaurants qualify as felonies in most states. Gas costs about 60% more than it does in the real world. People relax on luxurious private yachts, ride around on mopeds, sip their shrimp cocktails and complain about the service, all the while pouring money into this tiny island which, a little over a hundred years ago, was just a nice place for whalers to drink beer. We also can't forget that the Cape Cod & Islands region is still a place where interracial couples elicit stares in the streets. Nantucket has its own color all right, but "white" is what a discerning sociologist would have in mind.

If Cambridge were beautiful, a certain prominent college campus might be a lot like Nantucket--pompous, inflated, snobby, declining, and the local color is an ugly shade of red. If we could only kick out the annoying seasonal visitors, the world might be a better place. But would the "man from fair harvard" inspire any poetry? Not from what I hear.

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