A common obstacle to communication that can crop up between people with different outlooks and motives is the risk of talking past each other. This kind of miscommunication can arise on any subject. No topic of conversation is immune.
Take Dunkaroos, for example. One man might point out that they are saturated with high-fructose corn syrup and seed oils. Another may say he thinks they’re yummy. Neither is wrong, but no substantive exchange of information has taken place.
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One gets the sense of a similar perspective misalignment behind writer A.H. Lloyd’s response to my post on the 1990s. The whole point of my original piece was to remind those suffering from terminal nostalgia that we can’t go back to the 90s even if we want to—and we shouldn’t want to. Even those wearing the rosiest of rose-colored glasses must admit that the West was already far down the slippery slope by then. Even if we could by some miracle rewind to that slightly higher point, the laws of nature dictate that we would slide right back down again.
That’s where Dunkaroos come in again. Like the man whose sweet tooth for that popular 90s snack food distracts him from the reality of swallowing poison, Lloyd’s nostalgia acts as a set of blinders that narrow his retrovision of the era. He includes a major tell in the first sentence of his post, which labels my appraisal of the 90s “pessimistic’. That’s a dead giveaway of nostalgia poisoning. Because in common usage, people are said to be pessimistic about the outcome of some future event. Accusing someone of pessimism for the past not only stretches the phrase to the breaking point, it implies that the 90s could somehow be the future.
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That’s not to suggest that anyone has a secret time machine. It is to note that a troubling number of people restrict their frame of reference to the perceived apex of their preferred pastimes—almost always coinciding with childhood. for the Mall and Nintendo Generations, especially the latter, that frame was almost always shaped by pop culture IPs managed by international corporations.
We get hints of that corporate IP-defined identity in Lloyd’s paean to 90s geek culture. He credits the tech boom with elevating nerds’ public image from undesirable outcasts to objects of admiration. That section of his piece reads like he switched from talking past me to coming full circle and making my point for me. Complete with a reference to Pop Cult PR flick Revenge of the Nerds. Which, in case anybody needed a reminder, features an obnoxious geek raping an attractive blonde. So it’s as accurate a metaphor as any to describe what our nebbishy tech overlords are doing to America.
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Other authors like David Stewart and JD Cowan have spoken about how geek culture is societal inversion that accelerated Western culture’s demolition. Past eras cast good-looking, athletic, confident people as exemplars for the simple reason that it’s healthy. Turning that dynamic on its head to lionize repellent oddballs is so dyscivic that just writing it out shows how weird it is.
In other words, I fully agree that the 90s was the flashpoint of geek culture. And it’s a central reason why no one who’s socially well-adjusted should want to return there. Was there less Big Tech-administered censorship and in-your-face depravity? Yes, in the same way that stage three cancer is less advanced than stage four. And to invoke Devon Stack again, wanting to go back to the 90s is like being nostalgic for stage 3 cancer.
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That nostalgia leads Lloyd into some strange lines of argument, like objecting that everything wrong with the 1990s started in the 1970s, then claiming that the subsequent decline happened all at once on 9-11. Stage two cancer precedes stage three, so no disagreement there. But the idea that the good times suddenly stopped on September 11, 2001 is ahistorical nonsense.
Consider the Patriot Act. Such sweeping legislation does not materialize out of nowhere. Though finally passed in response to 9/11, it had a long gestation period going back to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Credit for that legislation was proudly claimed by Joe Biden, who proposed it in response to 1990s democides like the Waco massacre, which were perpetrated on Bill Clinton’s watch.
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Tagging in Devon one more time, the false dichotomy between Current Year and the Good Old Days™ disappears when you realize the same people have been in charge since the 90s. Not the same type of people—the exact same individuals.
He’s documented how official corruption took a murderous turn under the Clintons in this video series. WARNING: NSFW MATERIAL, NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
A serious look at Clown World and the path society took to get here reveals that there can be no going back. The great struggles we see in every area of life across the globe stem from the world trying to grow out of the twentieth century. Civilization will move past that disastrous chapter. What we need now are men of vision willing and able to help shape the coming replacements for last-century ways of thinking.
In that regard, Churchill’s imagery of the old world’s fair sunset is fitting. We cannot un-set the sun once it slips below the horizon. We can only steel ourselves for the coming night in the hope of seeing dawn break on the other side.
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