that post is really, really good. there's a lot of genuine sentiment and i think it gets right to the heart of feelings i've had for a long time and always been grappling to articulate.
i would like to say:
i don't think it's entirely correct to say that our nostalgia -- or, our past -- is somehow less real, or for something solely tentative, than the nostalgia of older people. i mean, even most of the people that are into british culture like... like that, aren't even a) british, at all, or embedded in its culture in some way, b) genuinely interested in british culture, they're interested in a very narrow subset of boring, imaginationless british media designed to appeal to the whitest fucking white people.
and that's what that nostalgia is for. it's for things that are so idyllic that they never existed, things where they can cushion themselves from any real feeling or sentiment or anything that might be sensibility-offensive whatsoever. a white padded room of culture. chief among the cultural idealization i find so horrifying and disingenuous is this... and i've mentioned it on twitter, this like, idealization of this 1950s suburban america, white picket fences, that howdy doody and the honeymooners bullshit. when america wasn't just the sole superpower, but a superpower by contrast: the world's heroes compared to the dirty soviets, the victors in the second world war, and to the victor goes the spoils! a time when men were men (ie. cleancut, short haired, misogynistic, bland), women were women (ie. quiet, complacent, sperm receptacles, hot broads), our children's names were timmy and sally, and everybody was white. sprinkle in some jingoism, and there you go! the post-world war superpower america. what a fucking utopia.
it was an entirely manufactured time, and an entirely manufactured nostalgia created by simply shoving america's ugliness under the rug as far as it would go and silencing anyone who would dare to say we should address it (sometimes through violent means). absolutely none of it was real to anyone except for a very narrow subset of people, and i even then doubt it was real to most of them. we, relatively, hardly about the stories of the disenfranchised, the struggling, the poor and the people trying to carve out spaces from those times, and the generally weird. it's only when they got organized enough to even make a dent in "popular" consciousness that we paid attention (see mlk jr), and we honored those organizers in the most superficial possible ways in hopes of getting the people nagging us to listen to finally shut the hell up (see mlk jr being canonized as this weird non-specific figure of "peace" rather than one of the loudest proponents of social justice at the time).
meanwhile, the times and spaces we carved out for ourselves -- disconnected from the american monoculture machine, the gentrifier & homogenizer -- were every bit as real to us as they could have been... we learned from them, grew from them, found ourselves in them, ourselves and each other untethered to any popular cultural expectations. we built an idea of empathy based not on what the person appeared as but who they were and how they felt, where corporate meddling could only accomplish so much with what was, at the time, a scattershot and decentralized method of organization, where there were no major ruling forces -- you know, anarchy*.
we live in an era where technology is hailed as a universal panacea with no downsides ever, particularly now that all rich white men have taken for themselves the keys -- but at the time technology really did give us amazing potential. for a time, the balance of power really was leveled such that those who were disenfranchised in some way, those whose voices deep down we might never have heard whether due to self-censorship (trans people, all over!) or a lack of access, were able to speak and create and participate in a broader culture. it was genuinely a wonderful thing, and we -- and so many generations ahead of us -- are worse off for it having been gutted the way it has been.
* eric schmidt was, if you ask me, not wrong when he said: "The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had." he must have realized, like the old monarchical-to-capitalist prey of these past millennia, upon witnessing a truly non-hierarchical system, that there were opportunities for him. of course the gentry got tired of stealing in the real world -- when you've completely taken everything from the "real world", there's nowhere to go but somewhere that's not that.
i'm tired and running out of steam and really ought to sleep. so, the most important point i would make, i guess, is:
it is, i think, not unhealthy to look at the past when it is looked at properly. something for us to look forward to, to work towards, to understand and process. it's okay to feel a bittersweetness at the way things were, and it is okay to explore those feelings and want to know what they mean -- that bittersweet feeling is there for a reason. it is there to point us to the way things ought to be, to the things we know we need.
____________________