Only 5 years old in 1952, I was unaware that Britain had a new queen — the dazzling Elizabeth II — because we had no TV set in our middle-class house and few of our neighbors did, either.
Homes could be purchased for less than $8,000, there were no freeways, and Los Angeles residents were legally burning their trash in backyard incinerators. Refrigerators had only become widespread by the 1940s, and fully one-fourth of homes still utilized outdoor toilets in the early ’50s.
In those days, coal was a common home heating source — it certainly was in my early Illinois house — and I recall the sound of the coal truck dumping the piles of anthracite right onto our driveway and my father laboriously shoveling it down a chute into the basement (where the furnace was located).
Self-reported cigarette smoking hit 45% of all American adults in 1954, and late in the decade after the McCaslin family migrated to Los Angeles, I do recall TV ads celebrating smoking as an aid to pulmonary health.
All this and more still resides in the active memories of the growing cadre of elderly Americans today. Yet, at the same time, we were enjoying “small town” virtues of general sociability and easy conversations with neighbors and occasionally with strangers.
We’ve been having a national conversation about “talking to strangers” and what David Brooks has called the “undersociality” crisis in the United States.
I remember filching a nickel from my mother’s purse in the hall —carelessly left open — and dashing to a nearby momma-poppa store to buy my own Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup or Snickers bar with the shiny coin.
When I purchased my first car in 1964, I shelled out $200 of money I’d earned mowing lawns, and during the Los Angeles “gas wars” around that time the indispensable fuel dropped as low as 19 cents a gallon.
That world is long gone and resides only in aging Americans’ “mystic chords of memory,” to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase. And while there’s much to celebrate about our new digitally driven postmodern era of the Anthropocene, there’s also much to mourn.
I firmly believe that the disappearance of these comforting verities and “old-time ways” has created much of the vibrant right-wing populism in the United States today.
When we factor in the isolationism due to required cocooning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing class consciousness (and intensifying awareness of inequalities), and the decline in effective public education … we are on the path to understanding this Fracturing of America everyone has witnessed.
From all across the West we inescapably observe the destructive rise of right-wing populism and consequent adoration of dictatorial leaders. Think of the slavish adoration of former President Donald Trump and his embrace of QAnon racist fantasies; think of those wishing for a “strongman” leader like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or Xi Jinping in China.
There are even Republicans who grovel before Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who is himself the object lesson in why autocratic leaders rarely turn out well in the long run.
Many Americans are lonely in their souls but cannot admit it to themselves or have been so ensorcelled by social media they can no longer contact their “soul.”
Significant factors enlivening racist/nationalist populism in the Anthropocene also include a broken civic culture and a failing educational system that has become incapable of teaching the essential critical thinking skills voters must have to elect effective democratic leaders.
Today most of us employ a variety of negative social filters that block out the chance to learn from strangers, to learn from “the Other.” At one time when we had an overarching national narrative, we teachers could cobble together a comprehensive world view and then teach it to our students.
Of course, this unified narrative immediately comes under fire, and I’ve criticized it myself frequently. I can dispense with Robert E. Lee and Dixiecrats, but will not surrender Thomas Jefferson or Lincoln or Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)!
We have a crisis of communication in America today based largely on finding ourselves locked into undersociality and our unwillingness to learn through open dialogue, i.e. this unwillingness to talk to strangers (entertain alternate points of view).
In my own poor thinking, I’d become irate just a couple of years ago with those Americans who outright refused to vaccinate against COVID-19 —and O.M.G. those folks blasted back with a full panoply of documentation, detail and disgust (with Big Pharma and big capitalism).
All this sound and fury went for naught since people did whatever they wanted anyway.
We cannot return to a pre-Elizabethan Age since this Anthropocene will not recede without huge changes in human lifestyles and numbers. Uneasy lies the symbolic head of patriarchal leadership in the West with the ascension of King Charles III: he would best remember the horrid fate of his original namesake, Charles I (executed by the Scots in 1642).
And I won’t be helping my dad shovel coal down the dusty chute anymore, and cannot return to Illinois or Los Angeles in the 1950s with my two sisters.
Can we see how our absurd anti-social veils and filters do prevent us from conversation and unified problem-solving? We all do know quite well that in the Anthropocene the planet’s health problems are our own problems, too, and our apex species has also been the main cause of the climate change, the warming, the pollution and the debilitating hopelessness.
Thus, we run to authoritarian leaders like British Prime Minister Liz Truss with her ridiculous solutions, to QAnon and Trump’s endless whining and complaints, and lastly we are both the cause and potential savior for this unholy global cauldron. Today’s elders bear a special responsibility to their grandchildren and all humans to mitigate this mess.
I want to return to 19 cent a gallon gasoline and total libertarian “freedom” promised to individuals by foaming-mouthed populists, but I realize with Thomas Wolfe that You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). I want to be 8 years old and playing outside with my two older sisters.
But this is dreaming and easily lurches into falling for defiant demagogues, staying inside at home and descending into impotent undersociality.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
