In the golden age of television drama, Mad Men may be the best of them all, Donald Draper the greatest anti-hero ever created. One of the series’ best scenes is Don’s demonstration of why he is Madison Avenue’s most sought after advertising talent during a pitch for Kodak’s business.
The company’s marketing department is stuck on how to sell its new invention, a wheel that shows slides of their film’s pictures. Introducing the new technology to the market place in a fresh and inviting way could carve out a niche they will enjoy a monopoly over. Whatever ad agency can convince them their campaign will achieve that objective gets their business, a four star account to be sure. Enter Don Draper.
New is good, Don concedes as he begins his presentation. Generate an “itch” that something’s new and “you can simply slide your product underneath.” But there is a more powerful force to garner, Draper continues…. nostalgia. Take people back to a time and place they wish never passed and you can have your way with them. The slide projector Kodak invented isn’t a wheel, it’s a carousel, capable of going back to when all was right with a world that eventually went wrong. Throughout his oratory Don is clicking the projector forward, its slides showcasing his beautiful family – which happens to be in full descent at that very moment – putting on a storybook face. As the lights come back on the Kodak people are speechless, their search for an agency over. Another Draper triumph.
Countless political campaigns have at least intuitively understood the power of nostalgia’s siren song to the masses. Reagan/Bush ‘84 was masterful blending such sensibilities into its “morning in America” tag line. The result was the most lopsided victory in US history. Walter Mondale won his home state and DC; Reagan was projected the winner before polls closed out West. All that said, nobody has ridden the coattails of a voting bloc’s desire to live in the past like Donald Trump. Anyone who doubts the titanic potential our memories possess to eclipse our present deliberations and future planning need only consider MAGA’s incessant vitality; its constant demand to be deluded by “back when” at the expense of its essential interests now.
Our current situation reflects in direct proportion the answer to one question: what degree of national carnage is worth the euphoria of nostalgia Trumpism affords its wretched core? What consequence will be bad enough to slap them from their mirage? Or has that ship left the harbor for good? We’re running out of options, even as they only get worse. Separating families at our southern border was not even a gnat on their skin; abasement on the international stage was celebrated; impeachment was reconstituted as deep state injustice, party-line acquittal blessed vindication and an indictment of Trump’s entire enemies list; a pandemic and its accompanying economic calamity is fully ignored; and civil unrest caused by documentation impossible to spin and repackage merely enhances calls for order. Nothing has been enough. We can all now reasonably doubt it will ever be.
History makes clear the level of atrocity and national harm a nation beguiled by demagoguery will accept is a sliding scale with no real bottom. Before the Holocaust, had somebody promised one million European Jews would perish, most all would have gasped at the unfathomable horror of it; now, we look back and wish if only the total had been so relatively modest. Decades later, even after extensive confirmation, many still can’t process how many human beings Pol Pot’s maniacs destroyed in Cambodia. Had you worried in 1975 a few hundred thousand were at risk, most would have pegged you an alarmist. Two million was simply not considerable.
As outraged as many may want to become at the comparison of Trump’s reign during the crisis his seditious incompetence facilitated and the world’s worst pogroms, it doesn’t render the similarities less compelling. Most notable is the willingness of his backers, like those who zealously enabled history’s nadirs, to trade in their own basic interests, even lives, for the deliverance of nostalgia, the stupor of yesterday’s return, a time and place before their futures were stolen by the usual suspects.
In the Coronavirus age the term “superspreader event” speaks for itself; and that’s what hundreds of Oklahoma doctors and nurses are calling the Trump rally scheduled to take place in Tulsa Saturday evening. GT Bynum, the city’s Mayor, could use emergency powers to stop what every medical professional understands will create a health crisis that will kill plenty. But he doesn’t quite have the stomach to become enemy du jour on Trump’s Twitter feed or face the onslaught of MAGA locals, who he knows don’t forgive apostasy. Even so, Bynum did have the good sense to bow out of attending with the claim he wants to be at the police command center in case there is trouble. After all, why can’t political cowardice and self-preservation go hand-in-hand? Stay spineless and safe, why should he be different from every other GOP pol in America?
Meanwhile, most of those who will spend the day in lines, sans masks, to assure prime seating for the return of Bunker Boy unleashed and unhinged, believe Covid-19 is, if not a hoax, at least overblown by fake news to damage their champion. That’s not acceptable because he provides the nostalgia fix their veins require to carry on. Without him, life foists accountability on the wrong people… them.
Yet and still, some percentage of attendees have to appreciate how off-kilter the whole thing is, the recklessness of it, the gratuitous indifference to civic decency it reflects. Which brings us back to the principle question: what will they sanction for the piece of mind MAGA’s retro reality provides? What will they sacrifice to bask in the springs of past entitlement? The answer is everything, and that’s bad enough. Worse is we’re letting them, fooling ourselves they’ll produce their own comeuppance. That’s a lie; they are going to victimize our best…. EMTs, nurses, doctors and everybody else who will have to treat those suffering the worst of the infections caused for nothing more than a couple hours of their grievance empath’s sewage. Our slide continues apace. The civic wreckage of ruin. BC
6200. Epic fail
Bill, I got most of the way through a reply to this excellent post of yours, then life got in the way and it ended up on the inadvertently-deleting room floor. I commented on the highly effective approach used by the conservative local ER doc who wrote a guest commentary in the Tulsa newspaper in advance of the event urging people not to attend Trump’s Juneteenth rally. Her approach, establishing strong political and fundamentalist Christian connections with her audience, was brilliant, and brilliantly realized. I’ll bet that more than a few of the many thousands who chose not to fill those blue chairs.