“Method Acting” – Mr. Matheson’s Arithme-TIPS for November 6, 2024
I thought this was going to be a happy post. If you live in the US like me, you know what happened last night. Since I phrased it like that, you probably know how I feel about it. I hope you enjoy the first official appearance of Cornerstone Theater, a... ahem... cornerstone of the Everly Heights artistic community. I'll be seeing Senator Smith's visit through to the end of the week, but this whole election thing got me thinking about a topic that is pretty important to Everly Heights.
Nostalgia.
While I am nostalgic, I see nostalgia as a negative trait. Much like Lot's wife in that super disturbing Old Testament story, I think looking back holds you back. While it's important to learn from what's happened before, it's also just as important to let it go. It breaks my heart that my fellow citizens could live through everything that happened from 2016-2020 and decide to go back. I'm not going to put rose-colored glasses on. Things haven't been super easy for me since Joe Biden nabbed the big seat during the pandemic. But I've also paid attention to what's happened in Washington... All the good things he tried to do, and all the members of the other major party who stood in the way. While the economy has been better, Joe and his crew had great intentions and I put most of that on economic pandemic hangover and corporate greed. I was excited to vote for him again, until Biden's unexpected decision to step aside this summer..
Everly Heights is based on the town/area I grew up in: Wheeling, West Virginia. While we were visiting family in the Wheeling/Ohio Valley area, I heard Biden's announcement that he was stepping aside. In those late night chats with family on the back porch, I was hesitant to embrace Kamala Harris. That first debate was a little rough, but not as rough as anybody on the news said it was. I also knew incumbent presidents generally get reelected, unless they do something supremely dumb like tell the public that a pandemic wasn't real and kill off a chunk of their base. Lastly, I kinda liked Biden in the same way I'd eventually come to kinda like Tim Waltz, friendly old dudes with a decent sense of what's right and what's wrong. America's not-weird uncles.
As the election ramped up, I learned more about Harris, listened to her stump speech and variations thereof about a million times, and grew to love her as a candidate. 2020 was the kind of year where I didn't pay much attention to the primaries. I'd just come out of working in TV news and just couldn't... When I heard Biden picked Harris as his running mate, I though "Joe knows best" and didn't think another thing of it. It wasn't like I was voting for other other guy, certainly not after he got so many people killed by not taking COVID-19 seriously because it was an election year and he didn't want to hurt his chances. Besides, it would be nice to get badass Joe Biden back in the spotlight. In the Obama years he'd practically become a meme with his sunglasses and his posing for the cameras. Once Biden won and I unclenched, I got busy moving to Los Angeles and working on Everly Heights, which was a pretty new project at the time. There was a lot of stuff Biden tried to do that I loved, and a few things he did do that made me sigh in frustration.
Biden was the safe, nostalgic choice for anybody with half a heart to steer us out of the skid caused by Trump and his selfish approach to the pandemic. But now, I fear, we've become a country addicted to nostalgia. Make American Great... Again. Trump understands nostalgia, and I think he convinced people to feel nostalgic for their lives pre-pandemic, when our biggest problem was the reality TV star who had smirked his way into the Oval Office. He peddles in what I call "toxic nostalgia," where the past is pristine and perfect, a place that's impossible to return to and therefore impossible to view objectively. The past sure is appealing though, with all the rough edges sanded down by time.
I don't think we should live in the past, and I hope I communicate that in my stories. There is value in your favorite 90s pop culture and your school play and your first kiss. Namely, the value of learning from your successes, mistakes, missteps, and misfortunes so your don't repeat them. Nostalgia can lead you to a better future, and in that sense it's positive. But holding everybody back because you refuse to move forward isn't fair to anyone, including yourself.