70 years of Mercedes SL-class cars in 60 seconds, and one of them is unlike the others, which is no doubt why it gets about two seconds of screen time.
Like Santa, I was once an optimist. I was pissed off about lots of stuff but I survived voting for McGovern. Life goes on. I mean, for a long time conditions weren’t necessarily great for an optimist, but then Jesse Jackson beat everybody’s ass except Dukakis’s in the 1988 primaries.
That includes Biden. Jackson beat Biden’s ass the first time Biden thought he was owed the presidency. (Actually he didn’t beat Biden’s ass, but he would have if Biden hadn’t gone down in flames before the first vote was cast.)
(Remember when Biden went all racist and said about Obama ‘‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Wanna guess to whom Biden was comparing him? Motherfucker is petty; for me it’s his defining characteristic.)
Jackson showing out in the primary even in Indiana, where I had gone door-knocking for him, gave my optimism gland a boost which had been fading ever since and finally vanished altogether. His platform, the substance of his campaign generally, was so good.
When Democrats got the presidency back they paid Jackson’s agenda lip service and then got busy undermining every principle he espoused.
I’m old enough to remember the John Birch Society’s “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards in Indiana. The Birchers never really went away. They got waxed in the Goldwater debacle, but 1964 marked the nadir of their influence. In 1980 they got their very own U.S. president, albeit a more avuncular one than might have been expected.
They’ve been the dominant strain of conservatism since then, and now they openly advocate killing people they don’t like, and then bitch when they get kicked off Facebook or Twitter for it.
I’ve never been especially optimistic about my personal life. Bleakness was the dominant strain of my experience. For a while I had a modestly successful career as a writer/sometime producer of corporate videos (some of which I now regret) interrupted by occasional emotional collapse, the final one of which involved destroying all my masters and copies.
That put an end to that, not that I was anyway functional enough to work.
But for the past 15 years or so, even after Clinton, even after Bush fils, even after Obama, even after (or during, more accurately I guess) Trump, and thanks to two transformative women (one woman and one woman-to-be who now is), I’d maintained some measure of optimism about futures other than my own—generic, global futures and more personal ones too.
I thought we’d wise up about global warming—and most people have, I think, just not the ones who in our present system matter.
I thought we’d wise up about health care and safety nets—and most people have, I think, with the same caveat.
I didn’t think we’d wise up about wars, although many people do either before there is one or after it has failed, and I’ve not been disappointed.
It wasn’t the accursed election of 2016 that extinguished my optimism, or the four years of The Aristocrats in the White House. Shirley, I said, we will never again see a similarly appalling choice of candidates.
So no. What finally got me was Biden’s nomination. What kind of fucked-up dialectic was that? I thought he would win, and I thought he would be better than Trump, and I knew he would by nature be wholly inadequate to the challenges at hand.
Some of them he doesn’t even recognize as challenges.
So I’m not optimistic. I’m just hoping the young people in my life are able to insulate themselves somewhat from idiots and calamities, and that I’ll be able to do something to help them along. I wish I was, though, optimistic.
What you think?
(I have a copy of the February 2022 New York Review in the Serious Reading Parlor, and in it is an essay by Darryl Pinckney, who was a year ahead of me in high school, on Joan Didion. Darryl was the only person I knew back then who saved copies of the letters he wrote and received on the assumption that one day they’d have literary value. He was probably right, maybe because he thought so.)
(Contributors to this post include the rest of the Soft Boys’ Under Moonlight; The Chills’ Scatterbrain; and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Music recommendations always welcome.)
I'm not optimistic. I'm about to retire, and after 42 years of voting for Democrats I've become accustomed to the fact that the best I can hope for from them is to hold off the GOP from totally destroying/privatizing everything, until a generation comes along (maybe my son's) that will actually give a fuck.
As bad as they've been since that McGovern loss, they have at least provided some occasional relief, half-assed as it's been. At times they've done it by being GOP-lite, and more recently they've shown signs of maybe getting that fact that people really fucking hate all the centrist handwringing over wokeness and calling a racist (GOP) a racist (GOP). I hated Biden getting the nomination in 2020, but so far he's exceeded my expectations in some areas, while being what I expected in others. If he decides not to run in '24 that will be fine, as long as whoever does get the nomination has a clue (and is able to cut through whatever triffid infestation the Republicans manage to spread in '22).
Maybe things will get better. Maybe they'll get worse. At least there's booze and drugs available.