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     The Nantucket landscape was fashioned not by the Quaker
religion but by ananke, by the constraints of necessity,
primarily the consequence of its isolation, of its barrenness,
and the difficulty of access.  (As a matter of fact, doesn't
ananke account for everything?)  The characteristic of Nantucket
was not a certain type of decoration, or roof pitch, but the
desolation of the moors the vastness of the ocean and its sky,
and the helplessness of the human beings huddled together in
seaside villages.  This situation reflected not aesthetic
preferences of the poor fishermen and shepherds but the
constraints of nature.  The populace clustered as if in shelter
from the vastness in the oppressive but protective confines of
the town, the society which shielded them from nature and from
each other.  The season emblematic of Nantucket was not Advent or
Lent, not Yom Kippur or Ramadan; Nantuckets season was, and to
some extent still is: February: which we call hate month, when
the island is most isolated and the islanders are most lonely and
most frustrated: when we sometimes organize hate month parties to
cheer ourselves up.

     What changed Nantucket was not new methods of house
construction; it was the steamship, the diesel ferry, the jet
airplane, the telephone, the internet.  To keep these at bay
there arose a new scourge of the island, the spirit of February
institutionalized, the HDC, which, if it is to preserve the
"historic aspects of Nantucket island" must inflict hardships
effectively equivalent to those of nature which had been
overcome.  I interpret the HDC as existing in a deterministic
universe.  As a natural process protesting and striving to
prevent modernization, seeking to maintain the esthetic and
spiritual equilibrium of the island, the HDC evolved, resorting
not to physical violence as had earlier settlers, but to legal
violence in the effort to maintain the status quo, or perhaps the
status quo ante.  And not only architecturally, not only with
respect to the appearance of buildings and streets, but
culturally and socially, to govern Nantucket autocratically, as
it might have been governed when there was no first, no fifth, no
fourteenth amendment.

     Such is the real historic significance of the HDC.  In
respect to that large segment of the population that cannot
afford to pay 2 million dollars for a house, the HDC has had
monumental success.  It has eliminated Nantucket as a haven for
the persecuted and oppressed; It has severely stratified the
society, made the existence of human beings impossible except as
masters and slaves.

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