The good old days weren't always good, tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems
The joys and limits of nostalgia, and why making predictions is a waste of time. Then I make some predictions.
Billy Joel was on to something in his most underappreciated song, “Keeping The Faith.”1 In our younger days we didn’t appreciate how good we had it, but as we get older we kind of overcompensate and look back on them as being even better than they actually were. We remember the best parts and push aside the bad stuff.
Last week I finally got around to watching Threads, the 1984 BBC nuclear war movie that makes The Day After look like Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, and it made me remember what I was worried about during a time period about which I now fondly reminisce. Stranger Things gets a lot of details about the period correct, but the all-pervasive fear of seemingly inevitable nuclear conflict is absent.2
The seventies were a famously malaise-ridden era of stagflation, high gas prices and truly hideous clothes, which Ricky Cobb somehow makes look like a non-stop party. Even the nineties - the truly glorious, peaceful, prosperous nineties - certainly didn’t feel like the glorious, peaceful, prosperous nineties when they were going on.
We weren’t listening to grunge music and gangsta rap because we were content with how things were going. To take a random nineties year: 1995 had the OKC bombing, civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, Russia in total chaos, the OJ trial and accompanying racial tensions, a newly energized hard-right GOP taking control of Congress, Quebec coming thisclose to voting for secession from Canada, and the Macarena.3
That’s not to say the nineties were a bad time. There are some years and time periods which were unusually tumultuous in retrospect - the thirties and early forties, 1968, 1979, 2020 - and the nineties never reached these depths, at least in North America. But the decade certainly had its problems, some of which anticipated the troubles we’re wrangling with today.
And people who lived through these “bad” years still look back on them fondly. Admit it: there are some things you miss about quarantine, especially not having to wear suits and ties for work because you’re in the home office.
Things are worse than they’ve ever been, and they always will be.
It’s Canada’s own Dan Gardner who got me thinking about this, with two recent posts at his Substack page. One about the good ol’ days having serious problems that threatened to tear society apart:
…and one about the inevitable conquest of America by a rising Asian economic and political superpower. No, not that rising Asian economic and political superpower. I mean the Godzilla/Hello Kitty one that Lee Iacocca warned was going to dominate the world because people falsely believed Hondas were better than the warmed-over K-cars his own company was building at the time.
Paranoia about Japan is one of those things I remember dominating the conversation in the late eighties and early nineties, only for it to be completely forgotten by the time Y2K rolled around. It turned out that Japan had its own internal problems we didn’t realize, and its economy hit the skids before the Rising Sun flag could fly over 1600 Okinawa (formerly Pennsylvania) Avenue.4
China is not Japan. It’s a much larger, more populous country much more inclined to throw its military might around. (Even at Japan’s peak, its armed forces remained relatively small, a consequence of being on the losing end in 1945.) But it’s amazing how much of the rhetoric about the rise of China is literally exactly the same as what was once said about Japan. And China faces serious challenges we’re too blinded by the high-speed trains and glittering city skylines to notice.
All of which is to say, confidently making predictions about the future is a fool’s game. That goes for the mid-term elections, too. Republicans unfortunately have the momentum, but look at these polling averages:
Some of these are a done deal (what the Hell, Ohio?) but a few thousand votes either way in select states could make the difference between a GOP tsunami and Democrats actually gaining in the Senate.
I am resigned to Republicans having a great night, though. My over-under is 52.5 Senate seats for the GOP. I see Walker winning Georgia (though it could go to a run-off), Laxalt winning Nevada, and at least one of the freak threesome of Master, Bolduc and Oz pulling out a tight win.
But I wouldn’t be that surprised if the GOP wins 55 seats. Or, when the dust settles, Democrats having 51. Nobody knows anything.
If it’s a red tsunami, obviously Joe Biden is absolutely doomed and has no chance of re-election. Just like how Bill Clinton never recovered from 1994, and Barack Obama was resigned to his fate as a one-termer after the 2010 blowout.
Oh, right. That’s not what happened. After rough starts to both Presidencies, having an opposition-controlled Congress as a foil actually made Clinton and Obama better politicians, and the GOP’s bozo eruptions and self-inflicted wounds helped both get easily re-elected.
2022 could be different. Maybe a GOP midterm wave will be an actual re-alignment that ushers in decades of Republican dominance. Maybe it is literally the end of democracy and Michael Beschloss is right that we’re all literally gonna die. (We’ll see how seriously he believes this if, after the elections, he flees the country and/or takes up arms.)
But the end of American democracy is imminent only if you accept that it’s imminent. Be concerned and stay informed, but don’t give up.
The same man who wrote the worst ever boomer anthem, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” also gave us the best boomer anthem. People are complicated.
Admittedly, the main characters had other things to worry about, like a portal to another dimension full of monsters. But even the supporting characters are never shown dooming about war.
It wouldn’t become a hit in the United States until the following year. And since Canada is always marinating in American pop culture, that means we had to go through it twice.
And years later I would rush to buy it as a Fortnite emote. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If anything, people now underestimate what a force Japan still is. It seems like China and South Korea have stolen its thunder, but the country still punches way above its weight in the global economy. We just take it completely for granted.
More importantly, Japan seems to be much more of a cultural powerhouse than it was back in the eighties and nineties. I defy anyone to find a franchise more potent in 2022 than Pokemon. Anime films and shows are wildly popular in cinemas and on streaming services. Japanese cars, once dismissed as competent, reliable appliances with no personality, have become what American muscle cars were to the sixties.
My confident prediction on the future of democracy:
It aint over 'till it's over. And by the time it's over, if and when that day comes, nobody will actually notice for quite a while.