Against nostalgia
Thoughts on the Supreme Court, aging societies and the hope in hiccups
Selfie in white supremacist’s home, 2016
Recently, I wrote a short essay for the Atlantic about a Japanese reality show that starred older adults (between 35-65). My argument was that the focus on age was a refreshing one, but also a natural one; Japan, after all, has long been in the trenches of what we call an aging society, where a third of the population is older than 65 and birth rates drop such that there aren’t enough new, young people in the country to balance the presence of the elderly. It made sense that culture and television should shift to reflect its audience.
Usually, these pieces I write about Japan are curiosity pieces. They work in a comparative mode, asking Americans to peer at another nation’s predicament with astonishment. I have my reservations about writing these, qualms that war with my desire to write about things that I’m actually enthusiastic about, which are generally non-American in nature. This dilemma presents itself especially when writing about aging societies because the truth is that this is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Most ‘developed’ democracies are facing this predicament in one form or another; Japan just happens to be slightly ahead of the curve. The United States is no different. I write primarily about Japan’s aging because it is what I know best, but also because I get the feeling that it is more acceptable to talk about Japan’s aging than the aging of Western European nations which have yet to fully accept this identity.
Then, last week happened. With the Supreme Court’s decisions to strike down affirmative action and student loan forgiveness (paltry as it was), a year after the loss of Roe v. Wade, I have started to wonder about the uniquely American way an aging society will make itself known. I don’t mean the way a society of elders will make itself known, but what the affect, the feeling, the spirit, of an aging militaristic capitalist giant like the USA might be. The actions of the Supreme Court strike me as a hint of what an aging U.S. might be like because of the direction of their actions. Their place in the U.S. power structure seems to be that of a glorified crossing guard, saying stop or go to laws as they try to pass the cross walk of society. The last few years have signaled a retroactive turn, a denial of progress, an enforcement of setbacks, a constant drumming toward an “olden days’ where things were “as they should be.” The more I mull it over, the more I find myself curling my nose. If these actions are foreshadowing of the aging U.S., then an aging America stinks of curdled nostalgia---that retrospective, golden-hued way of yearning for an often-false past.
Back in 2016, when I was working as a TV news producer for a Japanese network, I interviewed a white supremacist. The white supremacist was what’s called an ‘arm chair racist,’ which is someone who uses academic lingo and his well-heeled pedigree (a Yale law degree, multilingual fluency) to make and sustain racist arguments. I make this distinction because he was not what many northern neoliberals imagine when they think of white supremacists; southern, poor, lower class. The white supremacist I interviewed was someone who would fit naturally sipping a cocktail discussing French literature at the Harvard club, or vacationing on Nantucket. He had every trapping of wealth, privilege and access afforded to him.
The white supremacist lived in a multi-story house in a cul-de-sac with a manicured yard, about an hour outside of D.C. His home was decorated like so many other homes I’d been inside of---lots of hardwood, upholstery, art that spoke to historicity and what some might brand as a ‘classical’ taste. Again, I impress his décor upon you to ask you to imagine your grandparent’s home, or the home of a genteel church lady. I ask you to imagine these spaces and wonder at the way aesthetics telegraph acceptability, and what such acceptability forgives. I also realize now I have such a vivid memory of the way this man’s home looked because I was dissociating throughout the interview, trying to focus on anything that wasn’t what was coming out of his mouth.
My memory lingers on the window, the time of day, the fog that would later turn to spitting rain. But of course, there are things he said I will never forget. I keep thinking back to a claim he made that American society was made for whites from its inception---that the Founding Fathers didn’t envision non-white people’s livelihoods when they set up this nation. He’s right about this, of course. The Founding Fathers thought only of the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of those who looked like them, even at the expense of Black and Native people. (I don’t think they could even imagine immigration from other continents.) This half-rightness, I observed, was part of his armchair racism. He would begin a sentence by saying something totally irrefutable. (“The Founding Fathers thought only of whites”) It masked the second part of his sentences, which landed in evil places. (“and so society ought to be only for whites.”) I imagine there are many people who thought he was “not that bad,” or “misguided,” who would cling to the first half of his sentences to ignore the second.
I asked the white supremacist what he envisioned for American society now, then. Despite whatever the Founding Fathers wished, the reality of the American public was ethnically diverse. Soon, white people would be in the minority. In response, the white supremacist painted a picture in his oily voice of a return to origins, of a society where white people and their convenience and supremacy were at the center of everything. Outside of that white supremacist nucleus, we non-whites would be permitted to live with varying degrees of access, based on how much we cooperated with the white hierarchy. I could see it as he sketched it out, the United States an Eden for white folks, the rest of us scrabbling for scraps in the desert outside.
Nostalgia everywhere. Nostalgia in the crimped lamp shade, nostalgia in his teacup and saucer. Nostalgia in the book he was translating for fun, from the original French. Nostalgia teaching for Harvard Summer School. Nostalgia in his tailored pants and collared shirt, a subtle print. Nostalgia in his haircut. Nostalgia in his neighborhood. Nostalgia in the biblical allusion. Nostalgia in the SUV, two of them, parked proudly in the driveway. Nostalgia in the society he yearned for, the way it already exists in so many places and the way it is continuing to exist, old-born in new iterations.
Nostalgia in the Asian Americans who allied themselves to whiteness, who think they can partake in a backward vision they are not part of. Nostalgia in the bounding bodies of women, in the forced pregnancy, in the vessels. Nostalgia in the military exemption, the continued siphoning of Black and Brown bodies to break against shores. Nostalgia in gates and boundaries and borders.
Nostalgia at the breakfast table. Nostalgia in the downward frown of your mouth; the way your eyes narrow when offered compassion or conviction on platters. Nostalgia stuck in my teeth for days after. Nostalgia in the heart burn, in the backwash of my mind. Nostalgia everywhere, sticking and globbing and clogging and clinging and:
As I write to you my daughter hiccups between my hips. I am 34 weeks, going on 35 weeks pregnant. The hiccupping is charming at first, but lately she wakes me in the pale hours of the night, my stomach jumping. She goes on for five minutes, sometimes even ten. I lie there, waiting for her to finish, by which point I am awake and fretting about the climate, social security, this world I will birth her into. One groggy morning, trying to find some logic for her incessant hiccups, I read online that some think infants hiccupping in the womb is a function of their practicing breath. Her esophagus, her mouth, her small lungs I imagine like pink lobes of grapefruit; my daughter is practicing how to breathe. Soon it will be automatic, her body bellowing oxygen and carbon dioxide like it never curled in the warm dark of my uterus, rehearsing in secret.
The hope of this motion, the naïve, reaching for a future like an automatic reflex, makes me want to weep. (Okay, let’s be real, I am nearly nine months pregnant, I am weeping.) I know it is cliched to talk to you about the baby I am having as an antidote to nostalgia’s poisoning of our society, and I do not think that we ought to all have babies to combat the affective impact of an aging populace. If people are having less children or opting not to have children at all, it is, in my mind, an entirely reasonable reaction to the increasingly unlivable society that contemporary capitalism and militarism has wrought. Having children at all seems a fool’s errand. Even for me, the decision to go off of birth control felt tinged by delusion, like something ill-advised and ill-earned.
What I am trying to say to you is even as I have dwelled on the nostalgic miasma that crowds us, even as my mind turns it over obsessively, worrying and raging, all the while, something else is happening in my body that I have no control over, that seems indicative of some kind of lesson, a path forward. I think that lesson is about foolish hopefulness, about the need for a speculative vision. In the hiccupping of my soon-to-be-born daughter, I see that the only thing I can do in the face of this retroinfected government is to crane my neck in the other direction. I can only squint at the horizon, can only say, even if with a faltering, half-unconvinced voice, I still will remain invested in the future. In progress. In a world that looks wholly different from the one conjured up from a doctored past.
I don’t know what that looks like yet. Maybe it is in the writing and reading of speculative fiction; maybe it’s unpacking boxes and feeding people, generously, lavishly, abundantly at my table; maybe it is in attending marches and writing to my alderperson and paying more taxes and cleaning the beach and eating less meat and telling my friends, my loved ones, my students, my babies, myself, that it is their future I am invested in, their wellness and happiness and joy and thriving; maybe it’s having that same conversation over and over again---tell me why you think things are going wrong and tell me why you think the only solution is to go backward, and then, in the discomfort, let’s try to turn and move to something else, something that hasn’t ever happened yet, here take my hand, let’s reach together--