America needs a new name for nostalgia

Sing a song of long ago When things were green and movin’ slow And people stopped to say hello Or they’d say hi to you

So begins Randy Newman’s song “Dayton, Ohio-1903,” which is either a lament for lost golden days of politesse or a subtle bit of mockery over the way people candy-coat the past.

Newman is not in the habit of explaining his songs, and on the rare occasions when he does, he is an unreliable narrator

In March 2020, as the reality of the pandemic set in, the actor Sam Neill picked up his ukulele, which he hadn’t played in years, and strummed and sang the song. Not well. No matter, he had 1 million views on Twitter almost instantly. A few days later, actor Zooey Deschanel sat at her piano and did the same. Presto. A million views.

In each instance, we were meant to be comforted by the song. Ten years after writing it Newman composed a less melodious and in fact intentionally ugly song named “Mikey,” in which his narrator laments that his neighborhood, “North Beach,” has been polluted by Black, Mexican and Chinese people (referenced in less acceptable language).

This is the knife’s edge of nostalgia, along which we run our thumbs: a porous tissue contrasting “Much has been lost that was good” with “Much has been lost that was mine.”

On Monday, as the House Jan. 6 committee closed out its work, Congresswoman Liz Cheney offered a speech awash in history, beginning with her great-great-grandfather, who joined the Union Army, and continuing on to 1981 when Ronald Reagan, the household god of modern Republicans, stood at the West Front of the U.S. Capitol and said, “The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”

Cheney’s point — that only one president has ever micturated on this civic miracle — was nostalgic, inviting us to consider a calmer past when such principles were not up for grabs.

Two days later, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to the United States in a manner that was, as interpreted by the conservative writer David Frum, nostalgic around the edges.

Zelensky, Frum wrote, “came to Washington to recall Americans to themselves. He came to say, My embattled people believe in you. Embedded in his words of trust was a challenge: If we believe in you, perhaps you can again believe in yourselves?”

Of course, Putin’s invasion itself is an exercise in national nostalgia and restoration of Russian might. There’s something very throwback about the invasion itself. Tanks, really? When there are cyberattacks, disinformation and kompromat? Tanks, but no tanks.

The Charlottesville march was explicitly nostalgic for a time when marginalized minorities knew their place — on the margins, of course — and gave way as whites moved to the head of the line.

Make America Great Again is nostalgic, although it conjures up a question also asked in song by my friend and frequent radio guest Jill Sobule: “When they say they want America back, what the (bleep) do they mean?”

The fine public radio show “On the Media” devoted a recent episode to the weaponization of nostalgia on which the writer Adam Serwer spoke about the “grievance industry” of people lamenting the addition of darker-skinned characters to new iterations of “Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars.”

“There is an element of nostalgia that you want to recapture that feeling of wonder you had when you were a child. If these people can convince you that the reason you can’t recapture it is that they decided to cast some black elves, and you get angry about that and decide to vote for some conservative candidate … that’s fine with them,” Serwer explained.

The show also played a clip of right-wing commentator Matt Walsh lamenting the arrival of a Black Disney mermaid by saying “from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make sense for someone who has darker skin to live deep in the ocean.” He was serious. America’s current poet laureate of nostalgia works, of course, in streaming television. Taylor Sheridan has built a network of interlocking series now commonly described as the Sheridanverse, whose centerpoint is “Yellowstone,” America’s most popular scripted show. In which Montana rancher John Dutton fights to preserve the present from the encroachments of tomorrow and his rival Chief Thomas Rainwater fights to reclaim the Native American past from the present.

All of Sheridan’s work is suffused with anxieties about loss of history. Some of his series have, as titles, the years in which they’re set. “1883.” “1923.”

But he’s too smart to be purely nostalgic. He includes characters — Monica on “Yellowstone” and Miriam on “Mayor of Kingstown” — who teach history courses and deliver powerful lessons about the abominations concealed in the golden haze of a longed-for past.

Which Randy Newman song is true? “Dayton” or “Mikey?” Both. But the job of modern consciousness is teasing apart the toxic illusions and the instructive examples.

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” These are the opening words of L.P. Hartley’s “The GoBetween.” But what sort of country? And should we overthrow it or reenact it?

Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Tuesday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.