It’s day 23, and ironically my childhood was marked in many ways by the 23s I wore on pretty much everything. I was a huge Michael Jordan fan. In fact if you were one of the people streaming it, I wore throwback Air Jordans at my wedding.
Nostalgia has never been far from human thought, but lately two things from markedly different places have made markedly different statements about it. Bear in mind I work in a place where students who weren’t alive then bliss out to a 90’s night every week at the student bar. I was doing stuff that was retro before people said “retro” all the time. So… Nostalgia is an old friend.
But here are the two things I am referring to.
Exhibit A:
I call it the hate hat.
But Trump’s campaign slogan is the essence of nostalgia boiled down and presented to a starving public. The question that many critical thinkers asked, the question unanswered, was “to when?” When was America great in the mind of DJT, the President? Was it the Reagan era? The Jackson era? The Lincoln era? The Judas era? The Cain era?
That’s part of the magic spell that nostalgia can cast. We all remember a time when things seemed better. For me, it was back when my mother was able to frolic and play with me, and everything I became interested in was new. Back before I realized how tough it would be to survive in the world. Back when I could read comic books and watch cartoons and play with my toys and just tell stories in my head. A part of me legitimately longs for those days. It’s why I collect toys. It’s why I still read comics. That was when my life was great.
Not that my life is bad. That’s part of what I don’t think people realized with Trump’s slogan. America was never really “great.” Not for everyone. But America, at the end of the Obama administration, wasn’t bad. It was better than it had been during the previous Presidency, and better than it had been during Obama’s first term. At least if you care about things you can measure, like employment, gas prices, Cubs World Series championships, Nationwide commercials where Peyton Manning sings a jingle, and widespread access to iPhones.
America has gotten less great in the last month or so. We have a questionably racist AG. The secretary of education doesn’t seem to HAVE an education. One of our generals might have done awful things with Russia. Meanwhile our President is tweeting about how wronged his daughter was to be dropped from Nordstroms.
It made one of my favorite comics, Aziz Ansari, talk about how he was suddenly nostalgic for President Bush.
See how we got back there?
Here’s exhibit B:
I’ve already ranted a bit about the NES Classic before. It’s basically a wad of nostalgia that sold like hotcakes. I still haven’t found one for my wife, nearly five months after the thing was released. No surprise, though. Nintendo is the master of nostalgia. I talked to my class about how Nintendo leverages nostalgia last week. I used as an example the pantheon of characters that dominate their first party games: Mario (and company), Link (and the Zelda crew), Samus, and Pokemon.
An amazing thing happened. I posed a question I’ve posed before. I asked “people will buy a NES Classic to play Super Mario Bros again, but would you buy a game with the exact same mechanics that wasn’t Mario? If we reskinned it, made it look nicer?”
And one student disagreed with me that Mario is a nostalgic figure. That part doesn’t surprise me, nor is it unusual. Students disagree with teachers all the time. But what was interesting about it is that the student disagreeing with me launched into a heartfelt, loud, fairly complete summary of why Super Mario Brothers is amazing. The student was defining the nostalgia of the game, right there in a moment where there was a claim of refutation.
Nostalgia is a white mammoth (forget elephants– this thing is hairy). It dominates so many aspects of our lives. We tell stories the way we tell stories to make sure that people feel good, and most of that feeling good comes from the comforts of our past. It’s why some people wanted to follow someone who said he’d make America great again, even if everything he was saying seemed to point not to that nostalgia at all but instead to an incongruent future we now face. It’s why people would pay $500 for a $70 miniature NES with an emulator inside of it when they could easily emulate more games on a better system (like their computer).
Because we miss the “good old” days. Even that band 21 Pilots talks about it, and I think I have clothes older than them in my closet. Nostalgia reaches all of us, on every level.
I’m not certain it’s a bad thing, but I think a number of people take it that way. We learn from the past. It’s okay to celebrate it. Let’s just not let our desire to celebrate the past cloud our eyes.