A few Sundays ago my wife and I hooked up with our friends Allen and Pauline, who were doing time at the Jersey shore. Their place of resort was Ocean Grove, one of the more curious recreational havens on the Eastern seaboard. Let me tell you a little about it. 

Ocean Grove was founded as a Methodist revival camp not long after the Civil War. Its summer inhabitants apparently liked to mix religion and ocean-bathing in equal measure. Even in my youth, several decades after Lee surrendered to Grant, the town was famed for its quaint practice of banishing cars from the streets on Sunday. The Methodist elders would tolerate no ungodly influences in their midst on the Lord’s day, and motor vehicles apparently ranked right up there with lust and hard liquor. No loud and garish concessions ever disturbed the tranquility of the Ocean Grove boardwalk. No unwholesome bars and motels ever sprouted on the streets. Ocean Grove slumbered for a century while America partied. 

Meanwhile, just over the town boundary to the north, Asbury Park glittered with arcades and amusements and noise and light. When I was a boy, not even Manhattan could beat the vitality of Asbury Park on a summer weekend. To stroll the half-mile or so between the Convention Hall and the Casino, surrounded by burgeoning families of every available ethnicity, was to thrust yourself into the throbbing recreational heart of postwar America. Countless thousands of dimes and quarters changed hands every hour as indulgent parents coughed up the loot for salt-water taffy, frozen custard, postcards and kiddie rides. In those days the Asbury Park boardwalk cheerfully assaulted your senses -- and your father’s wallet -- every step of the way from the Planters Peanut store (what warm and immortal aromas wafted from that place!) to the fantastic hippodrome of Palace Amusements, where the Ferris wheel lifted you out of the building and into the night sky. From the top of the wheel you could catch a godlike glimpse of the shimmering lights below and the dark ocean beyond. You were at the apex of creation, and you relished every second of it. Asbury Park rippled with joy. By comparison, Ocean Grove was a Victorian funeral home, old and lethargic and terminally dowdy. The place suffered from tired blood.

Today Ocean Grove thrives, and its very stodginess proved to be its salvation. My fellow Baby Boomers, smitten with the local abundance of Victorian gingerbread architecture, helped transform the old Methodist colony into a haven for bed-and-breakfast aficionados. Mind you, the Methodists still gather in tent-bungalows around their century-old tinderbox of an auditorium, but they’re vastly outnumbered by worldly yuppies and suburban families relaxing on painted-lady porches. Our friend Pauline, a merry Catholic from Ireland, asserts that you can tell the Methodists by their perpetual scowls. 

The Sunday we visited Allen and Pauline was a glorious one, bright and temperate. After we poked around the Victorian streets of Ocean Grove and had lunch, I suggested a stroll into Asbury Park. I knew the town had been down on its luck, but I longed to see the old boardwalk again. 

The four of us approached the grand Casino that marks the boundary between the two towns. Still imposing with its ornate copper-green and glass facade, it appeared, on closer inspection, to be dangerously dilapidated, its hulking auditorium open to the elements. A few of the fanciful sea-creatures that adorned the roofline above the central promenade had tumbled down. To the left of the Casino, the old carousel building stood vacant, its irreplaceable contents probably hauled off by auctioneers. Palace Amusements, home of that soaring Ferris wheel, still occupied its site alongside Lake Wesley, where swan boats had ferried passengers on long-ago summer afternoons. But the building was abandoned, its once-lively facade crumbling and faded, the Ferris wheel missing and presumed lost. 

A half mile of deserted boardwalk lay ahead of us. On any given Sunday forty years ago we would have been jostling crowds of burly men, plump women and exuberant kids trailing clouds of cotton candy. Today the boardwalk at Asbury Park looked like the windswept ruins of Troy. Nearly every shop, every concession, had been boarded up. I couldn’t locate Kohr’s custard stand or the Planters Peanut emporium; in death, all the buildings looked pale and interchangeable.

I had seen Asbury Park in decline, but I wasn’t prepared for this. How sad and ancient it makes one feel to gaze upon a familiar place in ruins! You’d think the boardwalk had been abandoned a thousand years ago -- that no American town could possibly acquire such an air of Pompeiian desolation. After all, we’ve been cavorting around this continent for just a few hundred years. They called it the NEW World, remember? Compared to Rome and Babylon, our cities are mere saplings. But now I’ve seen what America might look like to future generations of tourists who arrive in busloads to gawk at our past glories. (I’m hoping that those tourists won’t be fundamentalist Muslims.) Like every other empire in history, our grand republic will eventually fall from grace. Our land will someday be populated by more unassuming folk who hawk souvenirs and lemonade at the ruins.

I’ve heard rumors that Asbury Park is about to rebound from dilapidation, that its real estate values have lately been soaring like the old Ferris wheel. Seems like a favorable omen. But the new Asbury Park won’t be the same place I loved as a kid, just as modern Italy is no longer a nation of gladiators and togas. 

Over the past thirty-odd years I’ve watched most of my boyhood world come to ruin in one way or another: the lovable old virtues muddied and rejected, the lovable old celebrities dead or wheezing in their wheelchairs. In their place sprouted a culture I professed to disdain -- a world of pretentious cuisine, mass-produced mansions, overprivileged MBAs, drop-dead irony, pierced body parts and pop stars with more attitude than talent. It was a culture I loved to lambaste. Satire flourishes in prosperous times, because easy wealth drives the human animal to marvelous extremes of silliness. 

Now I wonder if the world has grown too dark and uncongenial for my gentle brand of cynicism. Political correctness and fruited meat entrees might provoke a cynical snicker, but terrorism and corporate evil demand a more potent response.  The good and the civilized are everywhere under siege; can we cynics afford to sit around any longer while our world is reduced to heartbreaking ruins like Asbury Park? Can we do nothing but rant and smirk?

Maybe that's our lot: one could do worse than rant at evil and smirk at folly. The key is to respond, to keep your sense of injustice alive and acute. I believe that goodness and evil, pettiness and folly will last as long as our species continues to inhabit this festive globe. There will always be a place for those of us who observe the world with a rueful mixture of amusement and distress. We’ll watch the show, have our say, and move on. And if anybody notices our efforts, so much the better.

Cynic's Pick of the Week

A reputed Russian mafioso has been arrested in connection with the notorious figure-skating fix at the last Winter Olympics. The suspect is outraged that he's being linked to the crime. According to his lawyer, he insists that he's not even a fan of figure skating.