You Can't Make Anything Great Again - Issue #10
Nostalgia is great, but it's easy to slip from daydream to delusion.
This morning, I was feeling nostalgic.
Each day, after my family leaves for school, I pop in my headphones and take my dog, Sgt. Pepper (see picture below), for a walk. I always walk about a block before I decide what I’ll listen to. The only rule is, music only; no news. The morning walk is for thinking. Some days, there’s a new album that I’ve added to my library but haven’t yet digested, so the walk is a good opportunity to give it a spin. Other days I find myself digging back into my old favorites, looking for something I know I love to serve as background music to my thoughts. On these days, I’m often feeling a specific feeling…one I recognize, but can’t quite place, and it’s the choice of music that helps me sort it out.
So, this morning, I listened to Damien Jurado’s 2000 album, Ghost of David. This album, for me, is very much a nostalgia piece. It brings me back to a time when I was awakening to new music, new ideas in politics and religion and culture, and, ultimately, to a new me. In short, it brings me back to college. I was feeling nostalgic for college.
Nostalgia literally means homesickness. The root, nostos refers to a return or homecoming and algia comes from the Greek algos, for pain. Today we think of the word often in light of its more contemporary definition, “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations,” with the emphasis being on the “sentimental” part. Since at least the early 20th century, the word “sentimental” bears negative connotations, and nostalgia, too, has had to contend with a bad rep. For centuries, nostalgia was thought to be a mental disorder, according to Clay Routledge, an Associate Professor of Psychology at North Dakota State University. While that misperception has faded, nostalgia never really shook its maligned status.
Last week, on Twitter, I got into a spirited discussion that began when my friend and former grad school colleague Jim McGrath mused that he’d love to read about the reception history of Ready Player One, the 2011 Ernest Cline novel. In response to Jim, another friend and former grad school professor, Ryan Cordell, replied, “I think there’s a segment of GenX/Millennial dudes that felt very gratified to imagine the geek culture of their childhoods was the best & would ‘win’—that book is a shrine to one narrow conception of geek culture—pure toxic nostalgia.” It was that final phrase, “toxic nostalgia,” that piqued my interest. Ryan attributed the phrase to John Hodgman’s podcast, and this quote from Hodgman’s book Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches summarizes the view:
...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory—in Appalachia in particular—of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again.
While I get where Hodgman is coming from, I think his definition is flawed; I don’t think he’s actually talking about nostalgia. Being nostalgic doesn’t mean that one believes the past was better, just that it was good. Nor does it imply that one wants to recapture that bygone time. That said, Hodgman is not wrong in that nostalgia can lead to the creation and patronage of bad art (how else can I explain having watched all of the Transformers movies). Even more pertinent, however, is the connection that Hodgman draws between what he’s calling nostalgia and extremist politics.
Four words make this connection clear: Make America Great Again.
I have no doubt that Trump’s slogan, and its even more painfully artless reincarnation, Make America Great Again Again, appeals to a kind of collective nostalgia that resonates with his almost entirely white base. In one sense it is genuine nostalgia; that is, it is yearning or homesickness for a bygone era. But then in another sense, it goes beyond nostalgia to delusion: more than just remembering, MAGA seeks to recreate that bygone era, today. Another trick of the slogan is that the bygone era it refers to is never really defined, thus it can mean different things to different people.
For some, no doubt, making America great again means going back to a time when a larger percentage of the US population was white, and when a white person could go throughout his day without encountering anyone who didn’t look like himself. It harkens back to a time when patriarchy was firmly entrenched, and seldom challenged. But, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that others might have a more amorphous sense of when America was great; their bygone era may simply mean when they were younger, when perhaps life seemed simpler. Of course, their sense of a simpler time is likely not shared by people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ community for whom the America of this bygone era was a hostile place. And then there are others, particularly Trump’s younger followers, for whom it isn’t even really nostalgia at all, but an appeal to a fictional narrative about the way things used to be.
People are entitled to their nostalgia, but where MAGA crosses the line from nostalgia to delusion is in the notion that that time (real or imagined) can be recaptured. Clearly, this delusion can be a powerful tool in politics, and it is necessarily manipulative. It appeals to people on an emotional level and gives them hope that they can relive what they perceive to be their glory days. But, again, this is not nostalgia; it is delusion.
Nostalgia is something more benign. It is also universal. Nearly everyone can harken back to a happy time in their past, and most of us enjoy reminiscing. For many of us, during these pandemic months, we feel nostalgic for those days, not so long ago, before masks and social distancing. And indeed, in times like these, Dr. Routledge’s research indicates, nostalgia can actually be good for us. He writes, “nostalgia increases positive mood, self-esteem, feelings of social connectedness, and perceptions of meaning in life.” Nostalgia causes us to think back and reflect on important experiences in our lives, particularly experiences involving other people, and reflecting on these times can “make people feel meaningful, valued, loved and happy,” according to Dr. Routledge.
As I was walking and feeling nostalgic listening to Damien Jurado, I was thinking about how universal nostalgia is, and, particularly, how common it is in music; it truly cuts across genres and thus cultures. I thought first about hip-hop because decades spent listening exclusively to rap means that I carry around a virtual dictionary of rap lyrics (from a very specific time period) in my head.
Think of Ahmad’s “Back in the Day,” or Will Smith’s “Summertime,” or Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It Be All So Simple,” or Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” or “They Reminisce Over You” by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth.
Think of all the songs with dates in their titles: “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams, or “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins, for example.
How about: “I remember, when we used to sit in the government yard in Trenchtown…” in Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” and “We were as one, Babe, for a moment in time…” as sung by Mariah Carey in “Always Be My Baby.”
My all-time favorite song, “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine, is built around nostalgia: “Please, remember me, happily, by the rosebush laughing…”
There’s the schoolboy nostalgia of The White Stripes “We’re Going to Be Friends” and, just in time for the holidays, there’s nostalgia baked into nearly every Christmas song—“Once again as in olden days, happy golden days, of yore…”
These are just the examples from lyrics stored in my memory, and, honestly, I could go on. The point is, nostalgia isn’t inherently bad. It’s not toxic. It’s a universal longing for something that feels comfortable, something that feels like home. Sure, it can lead to daydreaming and bad art and endless movie franchises that were only ever made to sell toys in the first place. And, most dangerously, it can be mishandled and misshaped into the delusion that we can and should resurrect an imagined past and thrust it into the present. But, paradoxically, revisiting the past can also be how we move forward. Nostalgia can be a “transitional object”, according to Valentina Stoycheva. It can “help people transitioning from one stage of life to the next.” W. B. Yeats famously conceived of time as a spiral rather than a line—“Turning and turning in the widening gyre.” In this light, we see that cycling back through the past actually enables us to move forward.
I mentioned several weeks ago that I was reading We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry. Every review of the novel notes that it takes place in 1989 and is filled “with plenty of ‘80s references.” It is, but it doesn’t just employ ‘80s nostalgia for fun, it also brings to light issues that were kept in the dark in the ‘80s: Barry’s novel prominently features gay and trans characters, characters questioning their religion, and others dealing with overt racism. The ‘80s were fun, Barry’s novel seems to say, but just like today it was not all fun or fun for everyone. Nostalgia doesn’t preclude this kind of critical look; in fact, in the case of We Ride Upon Sticks, nostalgia clears the way for it. And this brings me back to Ready Player One and its brand of 1980s nostalgia. I don’t think it’s wrong to want to reminisce about those golden days of early video games, but it can be said that Ernest Cline missed an opportunity to criticize some of the darker inclinations of contemporary gamers who brandish the knowledge of a particular type of geek culture as a means to exclude others, as Ryan pointed out to me.
I don’t want to shame anyone’s nostalgia, whether it’s for the 1980s, or the 1950s, or 1979, or the summer of ’69. Nostalgia is not toxic, but deluding ourselves is incredibly dangerous. We can’t go back, and we shouldn’t want to. Rather, we can remember what was—fondly, sentimentally even—as we work to make what is, and what can be, better.
The views expressed in the above essay are solely those of the author.
What We’re Listening To:
Fitz: Well, Damien Jurado, obviously. But also this new album by harpist (yes, harpist) Mary Lattimore, which was produced by Neil Halstead, one of my all-time favorite singer/songwriters. This record has been my go-to writing music lately…
Jason: I’m a sucker for plaintive songwriters from Texas who sing stripped-down, almost parodically-depressing, storytelling songs. Townes Van Zandt is the king of this genre, obviously, but, most recently, the almighty algorithm suggested this guy Blaze Foley, and I’ve been spinning this “Clay Pigeons” track almost endlessly.
What We’re Reading:
Fitz: I’m diving into Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Calvin University professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez. I’ve been skimming around the book for weeks, but with the semester coming to an end, I’m ready to give it a close read and (hopefully) write about it.
Jason: I just started Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Barbara and Karen Fields, and it is a really startling and effective contemporary discussion of race and racism. It was published in 2012, but practically anticipates the eight years that followed.
Thank you, as always, for reading.