All posts by Matthew Callan

Pointless Nostalgia, Politics Schmolitics

Goebbels’ Babies

Nostalgia is a powerful drug and outside of a lobotomy there’s no option to kick it completely, but it is possible to maintain a safe nostalgia habit. As someone who has trucked heavily in nostalgia over the years, I try to ground my own appreciation of the past by visualizing nostalgia as a rapid that is 100 miles wide and one foot deep: powerful currents easy to get swept up in, but without much depth. Once the remembering is done, you’re left with little more than the interview questions from The Chris Farley Show. (“Remember when you…used to watch Nickelodeon?”)

Of course, it’s fun to play “remember when…” and sometimes the practice can be restorative—for instance, when I share some obscure thing I half-remember and discover that other people half-remember it too, which assures me, if for only one brief moment, that I am not insane. The danger of a trip down memory lane comes when the remembering fools you into thinking everything was much better Way Back When. Yes, most things are terrible at the current moment, but a cursory flip through the pages of history will inform you that most things have always been terrible. 

Nostalgia tends to pool around times when we were young and carefree—most typically childhood—and so what we often interpret as a “simpler time” was one in which the adults in our lives were dealing with the heavy stuff while we were too young to realize just how complicated and painful the world really was. (At least this is how I imagine many people see their pasts; my own childhood was fraught with all sorts of complication, but that’s a tale for another time.)

All this being said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with celebrating the relics of your youth, or even arguing that these things are superior to what culture offers us today, provided you don’t take such a debate too seriously. Some people do take that debate seriously, however. Very seriously. Like, trying to say “I heart the 90s” with 14 words seriously.

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Death In Queens

Maybe They’ll Win

We were talking about love, we being my family, at a funeral, which is where we congregate too often now, and my mother brought up the memories of people she has loved, in the family and out of it, and feeling their presence, or rather not feeling their presence, which she says she hasn’t felt since these people passed, and she wondered if they miss her wherever they are, if they are anywhere now, and if they missed her then where are they now, and what purpose does a love serve if that love just ends when the person ends. I don’t know how to answer these questions, I barely know how to think about them or if it’s wise or helpful to think about them in the first place. 

The facile answer is of course yes that love was meaningful, even a memory can sustain you in some way, what would a life without love be worth. It is equally facile to go full Epic Atheist and say no it’s not meaningful, people are just sacks of chemicals and impulses and love is no more mystical than the bonding of one atom with another, or a star collapsing into a black hole, at the end of the day we’re all just physics in action. 

If an answer exists at all that answer is ambiguous, which does my mother no good. Her mind is either/or, always has been, perhaps a product of a Catholic upbringing, though having long since given up that faith she sometimes says she’s a victim of such an upbringing, because it has no known antidote, if you got it there’s no way to un-get it. To my mom things are good or bad, right or wrong, this or that, she won’t even watch a movie if she knows it has an unclear ending, the ending doesn’t have to be happy, it just has to resolve to a decisive FIN. Gray offends her. And so does not knowing something, and knowing that it is impossible to know.

There better be an answer, she will say, meaning to the great question of life, the universe and everything, with the implication that such an answer will be revealed in the great beyond. There better be an answer, she will say, or I’m gonna be pissed. And I, who am not sure there is a question to be asked let alone an answer, will tell her, gently because I don’t want to argue over something I am just as likely to be wrong about, I will tell her, If there is no answer you won’t know. And she will respond, No, I’m gonna know, I’m gonna know.

Continue reading Maybe They’ll Win →
Boob Tubery

Amerika the P.U.-tiful

Once upon a time, great lumbering beasts roamed the media landscape, crushing everything in their path and scoring great returns during sweeps week. These beasts were known as miniseries, and in the 1980s they ruled television’s earth. Following the success of Roots in 1977, every network strove to catch lightning in a bottle again by spending a tremendous amount of money and programming time on televisual epics. These productions were typically aired on successive nights so that it was necessary for viewers to tune in to the same station for an entire week (or longer). Many miniseries were based on popular novels, or dramatized historical epochs (or both), and they were often touted as not only entertaining but Very Important.

In 1987, ABC took a gamble and broke from this formula, banking on a miniseries that was neither adapted nor historical, but instead set in a dystopian future. This had been successfully done before—V, a miniseries depicting an alien invasion of Earth, had been a huge hit for NBC years earlier—but ABC’s production opted for a nightmarish future that seemed a little more plausible. The miniseries was called Amerika. Its premise: What if the Soviet Union took over the USA?

This fear-mongering concept might seem a McCarthyite relic to the modern reader, but while US-Soviet relations had warmed somewhat by the time Amerika was in production (glasnost and perestroika had already entered the lexicon), a fear of communist subversion on our side of the Atlantic remained. In the wake of the leftist Sandinistas’ victory in Nicaragua in 1979, many right wingers insisted that nation could be used as HQ for fomenting communist revolutions throughout the hemisphere, or maybe even act as a beachhead for a future Russian invasion. Ronald Reagan made a nationally televised address in 1986 to warn his fellow Americans that Nicaragua was “only two hours’ flying time from our own borders” and that the Sandinistas would allow the Soviets to “become the dominant power in the crucial corridor between North and South America”, which is why the US needed to give the CIA-backed anti-communist Contra forces whatever aid they wanted. (And also why the US needed to fudge the question of who was the real threat to human rights in the region.)

Amerika generated immense controversy even before it aired. Liberal journals warned it would damage US-Soviet relations, and that appeared to be quite likely when Moscow threatened to retaliate by shutting down ABC’s Russian news bureau. The network aired a Nightline-style program addressing the uproar, hosted by Ted Koppel and featuring a live town hall forum. (The miniseries became so “serious” that of course David Letterman had to take multiple shots at its self importance.)

I was recently reminded of the existence of Amerika, and the memory brought back the fear young-me felt when it first aired. I did not watch the miniseries back then, but I did see commercials for it and was vaguely aware of the hubbub around it . The idea of Amerika scared me as a sub-10 year old because frightening the public was clearly the intent of its creators, as exemplified by this promo.

Having now watched Amerika, I can say there was nothing to fear from the miniseries apart from death by boredom—even minus commercials it runs an agonizing 12+ hours yet somehow feels twice as long. However, Amerika has certain perspectives on, for lack of a better word, Americans’ ideas of American-ness that may seem eerily familiar to the modern viewer.

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