Is Nostalgia the Devil You Wish You Knew?

She is a swimmer waiting to get on with the drowning. Joy Williams

Am I the only one who sees these tools as sperm swimming to meet the egg of their dreams?

Joan Didion, once wrote, “I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, lest we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” Hebrews 13:2

They say, ”Better the Devil you know ( than the Devil you don’t).” This proverb has kept folks in the padded prisons of their own minds for eons. But is there more going on here than risk aversion?

Some people take it even further. In this time of loss, is it better the Devil you remember?

How do you remember your Devil? Was he a handsome devil? Was she a She-Devil of your Dreams? Do you suffer from any of the following physical and emotional symptoms:

• Vertigo

• Much wit

• Headache

• Much waking

• Rumbling in the guts

• Troublesome dreams

• Heaviness of the heart

If so, you may want get your blood checked. Make sure they check for black bile, because you may have “nostalgia.”

Nostalgia is a public threat that is consuming America, even as you read this. It is estimated that almost 50% of Americans may be living with Nostalgia, in some cases incurable, and when listening to a drunk—tedious and insufferable.

From my vantage point in Canada, a diagnosis of Nostalgia is clearly indicated. If you are yearning for a mythical time that never existed, when America was “great”, you may even be contagious. So much of what goes for greatness these days, might just be code for rolling back the clock on various social rights and liberties, the rolling almost always for someone else, and never yourself. You remain safe, in the center of your self, mind on random play, spinning the old tunes from your teen years, your shiny idols spinning in their graves, as you misinterpreted their entire life.

After viewing the Fearless Leader roll out his global Tariffs, markets reacted worse than they had during the Pandemic. Economists were struggling to understand the logic, the numbers, what the goals of these tariffs could possibly be.

My self-centred command post registers a financial loss of 1/3 of my nest egg, all because the Orange troll from hell tries to roll back the clock to 1929, making America a New Great Depression. Am I bitter? Angry? Yes, but strangely at peace with this latest disaster.

For a short minute, I thought it was purely magical thinking. Surely someone would stop him. Surely there are some grownups left in the room. Nope. This season of The President’s Apprentice, he has assembled the perfect elephant, the echo chamber of his dreams.

Intrinsically, we know that “thinking”of any kind assumes that “thought” has occurred. Well, thinking in a room with no oxygen apparently impairs brain function.

And magic, well, magic is not as easy as it looks, kids. The Magician makes rabbits appear or disappear. Not by whim, but by using expert sleight of hand, techniques that depend on a diversion of attention. SQUIRREL!!!

There is much analysis to be read, written by much smarter folks than myself. People like Jeffrey Sachs. Jeffrey Sachs-noted economist

“Trump blames the rest of the world for America’s deficit, but that’s absurd. It is America that is spending more than it earns.”

The interview with Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff The Economics of a Dying Empire spell out the frightening reality.

But back to my discussion on Nostalgia:

Nostalgia reminds us not only of what has been lost, but who we have become as a result of those losses. I could not confirm who said those words, but my search lead me to the writing of Svetlana Boym, and her book “The Future of Nostalgia”, published in 2001.

Is it not ironic that we must go back to 2001 to understand the future from our 2025 vantage point?

“I realized the nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a longing for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.” S.Boym.

Hold the leeches! Svetlana is saying that Nostalgia is an act of rebellion. We are more than bugs drowning in amber.

My friend Mark Douglas and I get together on Fridays to make music, but often our music creation devolves into discussions of far more esoteric matters. The other day he was discussing the idea of how “places in a city are mapped onto our heart”.

Mark noted that “memories are rooted in place and time with approximately 20% of North American populations moving every year. As such, our memories are tied up in places that may no longer even exist. “ The places may be gone, but the memories remain.

This line of thinking reminds me of the short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, by Philip K. Dick, later made into the movie Total Recall. It involves the concept of false memories, implanted in our brains for what the protagonist assumes is nefarious reasons, but with greater distance of time and space, the false memories are revealed to be his real memories, while his real memories are false.

In our AI generated world, where fake news, misinformation, and disinformation all compete for our fractured attention spans, the only constant is that we are all in formation. LINE UP NOW! SIGN UP NOW! Enter Enterdetainment, land of fun, land of containment.

Though it’s only a small room

Let’s make it our ballroom

Let’s Dance

In the Make Believe Ballroom

Bobby Short sings the songs of Andy Razaf