Nostalgia is a form of depression both for a society and an individual.
-Abbie Hoffman
When the winter rains come pourin' down On that new home of mine Will you think of me and wonder if I'm fine?
Now I'm goin' back to Canada
On a journey through the past
And I won't be back 'til February comes
-Neil Young
I start the day with the most ubiquitous sound in upstate New York between the tail end of October and maybe April: the leaf/snow blower.
This is going on behind me right now, and judging by the volume of leaves still attached to the branches above both of us I think it's a fair surmise that I'll be hearing a lot of that dull roar for the next several weeks. None of these people up here rake leaves, or create big leaf piles for their kids to dive into, giggling. Instead, they all have leaf blowers, and every . . . single . . . day this time of year the neighborhood is awash in the sound of the damned things. Then when the leaves are gone and the snow starts the bastards are out there again, blowing snow off the sidewalks instead of dealing with it the old fashioned way--my way--by dumping salt all over the concrete. Hard on the grass, to be sure, but easier on my peace of mind than this incessant sound of an army of reverse vacuum cleaners blowing all over the hill.
Interesting piece this morning in the WSJ about the power of reconnecting with old friends, and the rise of nostalgia in this moment of our shared history as a country.
It appears this link is behind a firewall, but I'm thinking more about the general observation that we're back in an age of nostalgia than the narratives about folks seeking out friends from their formative years as they hit the age at which I find myself now.
Why would that be? At a personal level, these days leading up to Thanksgiving have always been a time heavy with memories. My childhood sort of ended right about now, in the fall of 1978, with Dad's departure from the household, the rest of us moving to smaller, leaner digs in Plano, and me quitting sports and getting a job to help support the three of us until my folks decided I needed to go live with my grandparents to stop my unraveling. I won't pretend the nuclear family days weren't scary and painful at times, but they represented a more innocent season of life than everything that followed.
And those days were laden with nostalgia, as well. We all watched Happy Days every week, at some level longing as a country for a more innocent time when we lived safely under the roof of a stolid Tom Bosley in 1950-something. We were contending with a lot of difficult challenges then: runaway inflation, military humiliation, spiking gas prices, and a national crisis of faith in our institutions that our president famously called a national "malaise" in an ill-advised speech on national TV (remember "national TV"?).
Maybe there's a clue here. We find ourselves in a pandemic that now seems a permanent fixture in our lives, as we learn the hard way that vaccine immunity wanes over time and the waves of mutated virus variants germinating among the unvaccinated will leave us in an endless war of attrition with this thing. Military provocations from our old nemeses Russia and China seem to have us teetering again on the cusp of global annihilation we haven't risked since the same two bad actors sparred with us during the Cold War.
Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, including the U.S., and there's a sense that maybe Western liberal (small "L") democracies are too weak to confront the threat. Here at home, one political party has shown itself perfectly willing to subvert democratic principles and the rule of law when they stand in the way of that party's exercise of power while wrapped in the false mantel of liberty and freedom. And our voters seem unwilling to hold them to account, instead blaming the current party in power for skyrocketing gas prices and a seeming inability to respond to the moment's challenges.
It would be inaccurate to say we're reliving the '70s, and historical analogies are notoriously vulnerable to careful review. At the same time, the parallels are so uncanny that one can't help but notice them. As Mark Twain once famously observed, "History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
In a lot of ways, this moment is a lot worse than anything we endured in the age of rust-orange shag carpet and leisure suits. In 1978 there wasn't much understanding that our V-8 T-bird and coal -fired power plant would one day cause Miami and a lot of other places to disappear under the waves. And there's the pandemic, of course. The internet was just a twinkle in a few defense industry engineers' eyes; now it provides the means of spreading mass disinformation and letting us get to know each other well enough to realize we really don't much like our neighbors (this blog being an exhibit in support of that argument, I suppose, if anyone reads it).
And society has gotten angrier and more crass. For instance, this just happened at a concert in Daytona Beach over the weekend.
You can find the video if you're interested. Until this morning I maintained a blissful ignorance of what it looks like when a woman goes Number One. Now that bit of innocence is gone.
What in the hell is wrong with us? The music itself is unbearably obnoxious, which I guess lends itself to these sorts of excesses. Could you imagine the Bee Gees pulling a stunt like that? Or Donna Summer?
I was never a fan of either, but part of me would love to have pieces of that world back. Which I suppose is what happens to individuals and societies in moments of crisis, a grasping for an airbrushed time in the past, and for how we felt back then. No wonder nostalgia is making a comeback.
Telescoping back down from the macro to the personal, I can't help wondering if the epilogue to the national funk of 1979 offers a clue to what's to come. The party that engaged in a criminal conspiracy during the 1972 election roared back to power in 1980 behind a failed actor who may have been an empty shirt, but made us feel good about ourselves as a country. I cast my first vote in an election for him four years later. The Dems' jaunty mixture of dissension and incompetence seemed a bad risk with all the threats at our door.
This morning's political landscape suggests another red tide is on the way, with the only real difference from forty years ago being the fact that once in power this generation of Rs seems driven to destroy the democratic processes and traditions that might allow for their removal in a free and fair election.
Hence the tug for P and me to start assembling a life in a free state in the event the red South implodes into authoritarianism and political retribution against dissenters. This just seems prudent.
As for my own nostalgia, I can't say there's any urge to go back to some bygone era. I remember for decades picturing an afterlife that leapt backward to a time when I was maybe 8 or 9, and could spend my days playing in the woods and basking in an eternity that never experienced the travails of adulthood. I remember the thought, but have to admit I can't feel it anymore. Heaven now would be this time, in this place, with Peg. My life is transformed, and is so good at home that I'm having trouble trusting the moment, and regretting only that it arrived so late that its finitude stares the two of us in the face everyday.
To quote Carly Simon, I think I'll stay right here, because these are the good old days.
So no, I wouldn't go back, even though that country felt a lot more comfortable than the one we occupy now. Instead I'll just go back to saying the Serenity Prayer, fix the things that are in my power to fix, and look forward to relaxing with P when she gets home from work later today.
Plenty of free and liberal countries to move to if if Republicans destroy this 200+ year old American Experiment. Luckily this isn't the past and no one is chained to a single country.