GEE, OUR OLD LaSALLE RAN GREAT

Trader Joe’s sells a beer called Simpler Times.  It’s kind of meh.  But it’s cheap, and it’s obviously branded to appeal to buyers who have at least one eye fixed on life’s rear view mirror.  I can empathize with the sentiment.  Sometimes I think it would be great to be a kid again, reading comic books, discovering rock & roll, and watching Maverick on Sunday nights.  I was blissfully ignorant of the political crises, social injustice, and economic stresses of the 1950s.  Whatever worries my parents had, and there must have been some, they kept to themselves. 

The essence of nostalgia is a yearning for a time when you had more certainties, fewer responsibilities, and you were still discovering cool new stuff.  Of course, not everyone was lucky enough to enjoy a life like that.  Nostalgia probably doesn’t have much appeal for people who grew up in a culture of abuse, dire poverty, or racial oppression.

When I was growing up back in the ‘50s, the social hierarchy was clear.  White people were on top.  We were normal, and non-whites were outliers.  Likewise with gender roles – it was a man’s world, and a woman’s place was in the home, or possibly in a service profession like teaching or nursing.  That was normal, and other choices were apt to carry a stigma.  Heterosexual was normal, and if you were gay or lesbian, you didn’t talk about it.  Christianity was normal, Jews were tolerated (for the most part), and unless you lived in a coastal metropolis, you weren’t likely to run into a member of any other religion.  

If you were white, and especially if you were a straight white Christian male, you had a head start on everyone else.  That’s what privilege is.  And as the saying goes, once you become accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression. 

These ruminations were sparked by a recent Ana Marie Cox podcast, “With Friends Like These” (the May 9 episode, entitled “More of a Fetish Than a Mission”).  She notes that there’s a non-trivial segment of Trump voters who heard Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and instinctively thought of their own childhoods.  Of course, those folks are white, and although they’re not racist in the classic sense, they’ve been the beneficiaries of white privilege so pervasive that it’s like water to a fish.  The social changes of the 21st century have left them flopping around and gasping for air.

Most of them think of themselves as nice, everyday people who’d just like to turn back the clock to a time when things were better for folks like them.  Most are probably unaware, at least on a conscious level, that the simpler times they yearn for were pretty awful for a non-trivial segment of the American population.  And as Ms. Cox notes, that makes them a little less nice than they think they are.  

The podcast “With Friends Like These” is part of the Crooked Media empire, and it’s available as a free download on iTunes, or you can find it on various web platforms via Google.