Armageddon Anyone?

The Problem With Nostalgia

I've been thinking lately about nostalgia, the concept of existential collapse (basically, the moment when one's sense of identity falls apart) and America. Remember the movie Pleasantville where siblings played by Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire are transported from 1998 and their collapsing homelife into a black and white 1950s television show? Color in the literal sense stands in for nonconformity and racial difference as the film tackles the ills of prejudice and segregation but there is nary a BIPOC soul to be found. In the end, In the end, the world is saved but that world stays white. America is stuck in a loop, perpetually looking backward, never fully realizing the shift that strips [yes, I'm saying it, gird your loins, cis straight white male] Identity of the literal, emotional, linguistic, ideological and existential Center. Crisis looms, a George Floyd, a Covid, a genuine "who are we?" And instead of change, the moment of collapse arrives and the culture turns back on itself en masse in a wave if nostalgia. We get to the precipice, literalIy the end of the world, threatened with divorce (Pleasantville) or Armageddon (more often than not, Satan has something to do with it) and at the last minute, a sacrifice comes: Reese Witherspoon's character stays in the tranformed and not longer isolated town; Demi Moore dies in her child's stead at the end of The Seventh Sign; Arnold Schwarzenegger throws himself on the sword of  Archangel Michael in End Of Days. The Apocalypse is averted and it's back to our regularly scheduled primgramming. America perpetually longs for innocence, a simple past when life was like a Peppridge Farm commercial or Little House On the Prairie. Difference doesn't exist in this Eden, this wholly mythical Beforetime. Or if it does, it is inarticulate, helpless, essentialized, fetishized, or malignant. Because innocence costs. It requires erasure and forgetfulness. Innocence requires Difference to be out of sight and out of mind. (in the 90s it was "I don't see color," to which I still say, "Get thee to an ophthalmologist"). It requires separate entrances and drinking fountains; it requires Jim Crow and Sundown laws, glass ceilings, rape, gay bashing, poisined blankets, internment camps, and lynchings. It requires criminalizing queerness and policing certain bodies while certain others can get their hard-ons by mail (discreetly packaged, of course).The laundry, the railroad, the lettuce field, the orchard, the closet, all keep their secrets dead and buried. At best, it's annoying as fuck. At it's worst, it looks like Renee Good. It's not news that to watch the Orange Maniac and the Chest-Beater-In-Chief (I wonder how many times Hegseth has seen 300? He's giving major bug-eyed Gerard Butler), the project is now to drag us back to the past will we or no. In their America, Men were Men. Women stayed home and Sadie stayed in the kitchen, while Sam came in through the back door if he knew what was good for him. What's new is we've lost our innocence. Or all pretense of it anyway. We know too much, see too much. Instagram,  TikTok, AI.  We have an Epstein class now. Broligarchy. Nobody bothers with shame anymore--the walking cankle did away with that, too. You wonder if it was this bad when Rome burned. Cesar Chavez fell from grace over night--but that probably a reflex. He was also brown and his clients were poor workingclass folks.The sword really is double edged. So what will the new Old America be, then? DEI has fled underground and a military staffer can now say Our Lady Bonespurs wouldn't want to sit next to Black female Brass and it gets barely a shrug while he now just openly declarew that he has the right to force himself on Blue cities whether they want him or not. Pleasantville anyone?