Sheep may safely graze

Reality is in short supply these days, and nowhere is that more true than in Newport, a town that makes it’s living by celebrating - and selling - its own history. Or versions of it. From Queen Anne Square (a fiction from top to bottom) to the beautiful but unfortunately reproduction 4500 square foot “colonial” McMansions to the quaintly cobblestoned “wharf” areas (a Timberland store is in keeping with the historical record of the wharves? I think not), the lies are so deftly intertwined with the truths that it sometimes seems like I live in some kind of Truman Show of the collective mind. What’s real? What isn’t? Even us townies can’t always tell.

Take for example Queen Anne Square, that bucolic & totally quintessential New England town green. There’s the perfect whitewashed steepled church…there’s the grassy commons…there’s the ring of centuries old houses and shops surrounding it. Can’t you just see the flock of sheep crossing it, bells sonorously a-twinkle? It’s all so perfect. So post-cardish. So exactly what you’d expect to find. And so totally fake.

Historically, Newport never had a commons or a town green – in fact, that was pretty much the whole point of the place. Towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had town greens featuring a church at one end because they were theocracies in which every facet of life was dictated by or organized around the Congregational Church. In contrast, Newport – and the rest of Rhode Island – was founded by renegades & exiles from that Puritan society, dissenters who opposed those autocratic beliefs with their very lives, who hacked their way down here through an Indian-filled wilderness all the way from Boston in order to institute their very radical, very utopian, “lively experiment”. Their goal was to found a community that was NOT organized around a single church, but in which worshippers of ALL faiths were welcome. Puritans. Jews. Quakers. Baptists. It’s the one single moment in this state’s history of which we can all feel unreservedly proud. No single church would be allowed to dominate in Rhode Island. The point of Newport was that there wasn’t a town green.

Except of course now there is. Queen Anne’s Square appeared about 40 years ago under the aegis of an urban redevelopment plan. The area in front of Trinity Church was bulldozed of dozens of old buildings, buildings consisting of exactly the kind of real “historical reality” that we’re all so sanctimonious about these days, and in its place, voila! An insta-green was created. And as if that weren’t enough to confuse everybody, this Disneyesque stage set was ringed with authentic 18th century buildings, a reinforcing of the false by means of exploiting the true, and then the whole illusion was cemented into place – rather brilliantly, actually - by branding the result of these efforts “Queen Anne’s Square”, a name of which effectively conjures up misty, vaguely Shakesperean images, of simple English folk wearing big white ruffs, wimples, leather helmets, big-buckled shoes. Sheep on the green.

But let’s not get too down on the enterprise. The entire construction reveals a lot more about the values of the 20th century than it does about the 18th. So I say, let’s keep it around. We’ve actually managed to create an artifact of ourselves for future generations, if they can only manage to sort through all the conflicting messages and layers of meaning - and if we can only manage to resist the temptation to tweak the truth just a little more.