Nostalgia for what?
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey NOSTALGIA FOR WHAT? TAKING AMERICA BACK FROM WHOM? People speak of having had a happy childhood, and some (they are another kind of human being, not my sort) even...
...in some ways the world was like that...
...It may encourage Democrats to see Bush unpopular...
...Much of the world I had grown up in was benign and pleasant...
...I listened to radio dramas—"The Shadow," "Sky King," "The FBI in Peace and War," "Suspense"—and read magazines like Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, which had short stories, some of them pretty good, and good cartoons...
...It is the idea that a profit margin matters more than a relationship with a merchant that makes buying and selling the inhuman, and inhumane, process it is...
...I do remember moments of intense joy, and other moments of intense sadness...
...And of course as consumers we will always choose the way that saves us money, especially as times get tough...
...When I grew older and began to read the fiction and criticism that were produced by adults during the time that I remembered as golden, as a cozy world like the world inside the little glass Christmas globe you shook to see the snow fall on a little church or reindeer, I saw that my memory was in fact the memory of a child: accurate, vivid, and intense—but within rather narrow limits, and in an adult those limits are inexcusable...
...They see an obvious degeneration of common life, and they are not at all off the mark...
...I don't remember my childhood as having been particularly happy or unhappy...
...That would seem a minimum agreement for any kind of getting on, and we don't have it...
...It is precisely the idea of profit as a value to be cherished above all that destroys sabbaths, and makes a common quiet impossible...
...So are the signs I saw in some local restaurants: "We reserve the right to seat our customers...
...There is no serious liberal alternative...
...There was a common culture, a common moral capital, that could be drawn on socially, and it depended on a belief in a more or less homogeneous culture, one which accepted a roughly common set of standards: there are some things one does, and does not, do...
...That culture might not have existed in fact, but there was a common illusion that it did, and that may matter as much to a social fabric...
...The present moment had a vividness I would sometimes like to use now, like a drug, if I could get my hands on it...
...but this is a little like saying that Laurel and Hardy are more serious than the Three Stooges—it may have a shade of truth, but so what...
...It might be a beginning...
...Commonweal 27 March 1992: 7 this part certainly wasn't...
...But what conservatives do not see is the damage presented precisely by a capitalist, free-market approach to life and to the values they claim to love most...
...There was something consoling and pleasant in all of the unexamined assumptions that governed my view of the world...
...But I say "the rest of us," and mean the people who were the children of that time...
...The values of the small community, the local market, are the first to be destroyed by the much more efficient mass-buyer, the Waldenbooks or the Grand Union or the K-Mart...
...On Sundays our town was quiet: only one grocery store, run by a Jewish family, was open...
...There has yet to be a real idea, new or otherwise, floated by any candidate...
...I read them all...
...The assumption of unanimity was true in one way (the black families in town also participated in the sabbath quiet) and not in another—the same black families were cut out of almost anything else the rest of us assumed, placidly, to be the case...
...A lot of adults found the time complicated and strange, full of unresolved and often tragic conflict, about race and other things...
...They are suspicious of this sort of thinking, and they are right...
...People speak of having had a happy childhood, and some (they are another kind of human being, not my sort) even speak of having had a happy adolescence...
...They see liberal thinkers for whom forms of violence, indifference to sexual morality, and the degeneration of common life are, variously, forms of protest against the existing unjust order, rebellion against puritanism, and an assertion of cultural pluralism...
...The front page of the Metro section of the New York Times recently featured the photo of the front door of a New York school in which two children had been murdered by a third, a door bearing a sign which informed students (presuming they could read) that weapons could not be carried inside, that on some days all would be searched, on all days some might be searched, and that, if weapons were found or a search refused, the students might not be allowed to enter...
...At Christmas time the pictures of little New England towns with snow falling and brightly lit churches seemed right to me...
...This really is the end of a lot of what most people assume to be civilization...
...Several people have floated the idea that the ballot should contain a "none of the above" choice...
...At the same time, a false nostalgia—the sort of thing Reagan appealed to, and Bush tries to—ignores too much...
...Given the mechanisms of the market it is hard to see how this could be avoided...
...Democracy offers a better, or at least more accessible, language for rights than for obligations...
...That seemed like such a good world in so many ways, and it is gone now forever...
...Perhaps these qualities are there so powerfully in childhood because children have relatively few of the attachments to past or future, real or imagined, that drag you away from the present moment...
...if it got the greatest number of votes, no candidate on the ballot could run in the next election...
...Because they have talked a little about the economy, Democratic political candidates have been praised for being "more serious" this year than those in the last couple of presidential races...
...Pluralism has not answered in any adequate way the question of how we can live as a common society without common values, a society which, if it does not agree on what does matter, at least is able to agree on what does not...
...but the polls also show that the voters don't see a real alternative in any of the candidates...
...When I wanted to read the gory EC horror comics, I went down the street to the house of a friend whose mother, more permissive than mine, let him buy them...
...That cherished relationship between the customer and the small merchant is destroyed by an obviously more efficient (and more impersonal) mechanism...
...It is the deification of those mechanisms, the belief that no one has any right to object to them, or to their effect, that has given us a culture driven by desire...
...This meant that black people weren't welcome there...
...We are offered variations on old themes by members of both parties, and voters, sensing that no real help is forthcoming from anyone, are unhappy with all of their choices...
...Intensity, energy, and clarity are the qualities I remember most...
...And that is a profound danger now, because we have come to the end of something...
...The newsstands were full of pulp magazines with titles like Astounding, Amazing, Fantastic, Worlds of If, Galaxy, Fantastic Universe, and the more sedately named Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction...
...It is a reaction to this kind of horror that makes some people conservatives...
...They remember, or at least can imagine (and some mistake the imagination for real memory), something better...
...Some of the things I remember most vividly are now gone forever...
...A false nostalgia rules the American conservative's worldview, and it can get ugly, as in Pat Buchanan's call to "take America back" (from whom...
...I remember my friend's father for his wrists: he had chains tattoed around them...
...q 8: 27 March 1992 Commonweal...
...Individual rights matter to us, not the obligations that have been the cement of most social organizations...
...I think a world in which there is some measure of agreement on moral values, on common life, on a sabbath—a time when, at the very least, we will agree that what we spend most of our time on does not really matter as much as something else, as time spent with family and friends or time spent in silence on a day when commerce stops—is a better world...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 6
