Note: this is effectively a preabmble for a forthcoming series on the Eighty Year Crisis.
A while ago ago, professional internet troll Matt Yglesias touched off a bit of a public debate on that one emotion that only grows in power starting in our mid-20s or so, nostalgia. It’s what has everyone from politicians to songwriters insist that the period when the country was at its best just happens to coincide with their own youth. He makes the same observation that you may have noticed about how everyone’s musical tastes are cast in stone in their teens and early 20s: people are nostalgic for when they were at the happiest point in their lives.
This fuels quite a bit of art and media. Stranger Things, for instance, may garner a wide audience but it always has been aimed most squarely at people who grew up in the 1980s. Not people who just had lived through the ’80s, but specifically were young then. Not that ’90s kids are above such appeals either — lost in the noise about the original Captain Marvel movie and its lefty star (which is a very bad thing if it’s Brie Larson but somehow forgivable with the very much non-female Samuel Jackson Jr. and Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. and, of all people, Mark Ruffalo, but never mind) was its leaning hard on ’90s nostalgia and music. GenZ, too, can look forward to spending their declining years with shows set during the Biden administration. That’s just human nature.
Whether you most love grunge music or Death Row-era rap or ’00s EDM or circa 2010 prime-Gaga pop is most a function of when and where you were in high school or college. And when some politician starts riffing on how much better things were “back then,” they’re cynically exploiting that same part of your brain that likes to reminisce about the brief and matchless period between parental supervision and the daily grind of work, which also happens to coincide with our bodies’ physical peaks.
“But I know, deep down, that nostalgia is an illusion. There was a time in my life when I lived in a DC group house near U Street, and lots of my friends lived in other group houses near U Street, and there were enough of us around the neighborhood that other friends who lived in other places were drawn to the neighborhood by our gravitational pull. We would go out in big, amorphous groups to the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat and DC 9, or just drink beers and smoke cigarettes in our backyards, and in my heart it feels like the best era ever for the neighborhood. Remember the old Taco Bell at 14th and U? That was great.”
Of course the time of close friends, parties, and beach bonfires when you’re looking better than you ever will again rate a bit higher in your mind than the era of hour commutes each way to a job you dread, yet dread losing even more. Or, for that matter, rate higher than when you had curfews and acne. It doesn’t actually mean politics or society were actually any better in your early 20s, not unless you’re willing to overlook 9/11, Iraq, the 2008 recession, or whatever other calamities of your own youth such as Iran-Contra or stagflation.
(And on that note: to those born circa 1995-2002 or so, yeah, that’s a really crappy core memory to land during your prime.)
But all this gives me, I must boast, a bit of clarity on this subject compared to many. I don’t have any part of my brain stuck in the past because I don’t experience nostalgia whatsoever. This is because, as mentioned last post, I never had a happy point of peak socialization, a time filled with happy and loving friends — for it is the socialization of the high school and college period, when we have the most friends, that has most people forever longing for a certain kind of music.
It’s the only time we’re allowed to have a community these days.
It is the severing of all sense of community after our early 20s that tends to also preclude enjoyment of new music — instead, we yell at our kids to turn down that infernal racket.
We don’t have too many people to share music, or anything else, with. Immediate family, coworkers, maybe an actual friend or two if you’re lucky rather than just oomfs. That’s it.
This has also become an immense political problem.
The loss of community lends itself to the absolute weirdness of MAGA.
It’s also weird to look at someone quite clearly going through a substance abuse and mental health crisis and have as your only thought: how can I exploit this person for my latest scam?
He is her own son.
The death of community — and of family — is how you get Donald Trump.
The falling away of moral and ethical boundaries is one symptom of the death of community. You no longer have anyone to shame you for abandoning and then cruelly mocking your own daughter, or exploiting your own insane mother for some shitty-ass scam. You decide that the path of evil is awesome, actually — and who is there to tell you otherwise?
Another symptom is the loss of your grip on reality.
I don’t mean insanity. Most MAGA people are not literally insane like Roseanne clearly is, and neither are their (relatively powerless) lefty counterparts. But they have given over to the conspiratorial mindset to explain their world because they don’t have anyone to call them on their bullshit.
You know the bit if you’re ever online. Reality is irrelevant to them, so they invent their own (or, more likely, have their invented reality handed to them by someone like Charlie Kirk). Bill Gates’ chips in vaccines. Stolen election. Zelensky is somehow a Jewish Nazi. Everything’s a false flag.
Oh, and this:
The loss of community led to conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories fueled MAGA, and now MAGA has to somehow accept their 78-year-old God-King doing this:
Why not? There is no objective reality!
There are plenty of theories on why, exactly, our communities and extended, sometimes even nuclear, families have dissolved. Social media. Smartphones. Loss of third spaces. All of the above. Whatever. It’s why our country is about to fly apart like a Boeing airplane.
Not to excuse the malign actors. Having no community has been my own personal reality since I was a kid, as noted, and it wasn’t because of smartphones. But you didn’t see me at the Capitol on January 6.
Either way, this is not the first existential crisis faced by America. The last one was a bit over eighty years ago. And the one before that? Almost precisely eighty before. I talk about that a bit more in the next post in the series.
But here’s the difference. In 1941 and 1861, we had communities.
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