Chapter 14

MANUFACTURING NOSTALGIA

I. APPEAL TO YOUTH

When one is constructing a group’s identity, one might first study the example of the Beatles, as they are quite possibly unparalleled in influence. To the world, the Beatles epitomized boyishness. Their myth was that of eternal youth. And, indeed, their goal was to appeal to the young.

But how did they do so? By pretending to be young? No. They understood that young people don’t like children. The young are like dogs on the street or American tourists in foreign lands. Just as the dog growls at its canine cousin and the Yankee traveler eschews establishments frequented by his countrymen, the child is solipsistic in the extreme. It despises its own ilk. When confronted by someone or something that threatens his or her imagined singularity, the child reacts with growling or crying. Similarly, the very young person doesn’t identify with the child star of a film designed for them, but with the heroic adult, whether it be Billy Jack, Han Solo, or Willy Wonka.

The Beatles’ strategy, therefore, wasn’t an attempt to look young. Instead, they behaved in a manner young people could relate to—naturally and instinctively—without either the overt sexual posturing of the Stones or the neutered pandering of Freddie and the Dreamers. But most important of all, the Beatles knew to act “smart.” Children are obsessed with showing how “smart” they are, and they respect those they think are also “smart.” In their televised interviews, the Beatles took on the role of class clown, answering inquiries with wiseacre cheek and dismissing authority figures as clueless dullards.

With this approach, the mop tops won over the preadolescents. Simultaneously, their anarchic and kinetic personal presentation, inspired by group leader John Lennon, bewildered adults. This was read as “youthful,” since such behavior seemed free from the constraints of adulthood, with its attendant fears, financial concerns, and decorum. For the young, the Beatles became the “home team.” (Alternately, adults—in a contest to “unlearn” and to surpass historical benchmarks of stupidity—prefer the Stones, whose blasé and glazed image is seen to be sexy.)

Ultimately, the Beatles are responsible for the compulsory enforcement of youthfulness in modern society, which causes so much angst as humanity tries to stop time itself with face creams, health food, and expensive self-mutilation in the form of plastic surgery. The Fab Four were unspeakably cruel to saddle us with such a paradigm, especially as they did so knowingly and for the purpose of establishing dictatorial omnipotence for themselves.

While the early Beatles works were conventional rock ’n’ roll love songs for preteen girls (“She Loves You”), they later set their sights on an even younger age bracket. “Octopus’s Garden,” “Magical Mystery Tour,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Hey, Bulldog,” and “Strawberry Fields,” with their absurdist and gothic-horror sensibilities, are songs designed for tots (children are particularly fascinated by horror, a Beatles specialty). Much is made of the invention of the teenager and their newly robust buying power in the post-war years, but theirs never trumped the buying power of the parents themselves—the adults who buy for the very young.

Yet capital wasn’t the only concern, or even the primary one. If one appeals to the sensibilities of the very young, one avoids the critical acumen and the cynical posturing of the teenage and adult years. The very young are accepting, “wide-eyed.” Later, when the young attain some agedness, their favorite group from their youth is a nostalgic memory, central to their identity, and considered with a kind of irrational devotion, like Catholicism to a Catholic.

 

II. THE USE OF NOSTALGIA

Nostalgia is thought of as cute and slightly pathetic—simple “wistfulness.” But it is actually the most intransigent, the most irrational, and therefore the most potent of all emotions.

Humanity’s fervent inclination is to maintain the way things are, the “status quo.” This is due not only to the fear of the unknown, but also to the sense of comfort found in familiar forms. When something new is introduced, it’s met with condescending derision by a population resistant to change (e.g., the Eiffel Tower, the cell phone, the Segway™). However, the dark system of capitalism insists on shocking, cataclysmic, even traumatic change on a constant basis. Indeed, nearly every day another delightful candy wrapper with fond associations from one’s childhood is transformed by its manufacturers into something garish, cretinous, and embarrassing to look at. Memory eradicated. Associations erased. Your preference? Who cares. Your desires? Apparently irrelevant.

Beautiful buildings with poignant history and craftsmanship unequalled by modern construction techniques are walloped by wrecking balls, gutted, and smashed into dust just to be replaced by ever more flimsy, hideous structures—“live/work lofts” and “luxury-urban dwellings” made by incompetent architects out of Tyvek™ and toilet paper. Were you consulted? The answer isn’t “no,” but rather “NO!” You were most expressly not consulted.

And it’s not just buildings or packages. Nothing is sacred. Most of these incessant transmogrifications are designed expressly to confuse the population and keep them off balance. Cars keep the same names, but are radically redesigned each year. The logos of sports teams are changed—mutilated, really—for no apparent reason, since sports fans are the most conservative audience in the world, who love “Ye Olde Tymes” the best. Many sports (most notably baseball) are based entirely on nostalgia, akin to a “renaissance fair” with the athletic contest at stake being utterly irrelevant to the viewer.

Polaroid film is discontinued. Why? Because it’s delightful. Motion picture film is switched to video, which is changed to “hi-def” video, despite each change being a radical degradation of quality. Classic, beloved films are remade—usually by Tim Burton—as either tedious filth or unintelligible drivel, forcing us to have to clumsily distinguish, “No, not the new one, the original version . . .” These remakes serve no purpose other than to heighten generational differences and social alienation.

Even the young people feel nostalgic in America, hoarding their childhood memories almost immediately as they sense the technological incinerator of their present reality galloping relentlessly toward them. Nostalgia is instantaneous now, with digital party memories being exhumed in the immediate aftermath of an event. “Why can’t things be like they were last week/yesterday/one minute ago?” the pictures lament.

The mass audience, seeing the incessant worsening of the collective quality of our lives, twists in horror and winces in despair each and every day, but always under their breath. They feel isolated in their longing for familiarity. They feel wrong. “This must be the way everyone else wants things,” they sigh. Resigned to their alienation, ashamed of being old and old fashioned, they nobly step aside for the new generation, which supposedly prefers cheaply made things, poor design, hideous architecture, garish computer graphics, and so on. “I am alone in my nightmare,” everybody imagines.

And yet there is no actual demand for this world of sewage. Furthermore, the commissioners of the new gum wrappers/condominiums/automobiles don’t believe they are improving things. They understand very well the shock and horror they inflict on the public. They design this horror purposefully, in fact, with the express intent of manufacturing nostalgia. Nostalgia for a bygone era and a lost sensibility. But to invoke such longing, they must first exterminate the prevailing sensibility—suddenly, violently, and in cold blood.

Why? Because nostalgia—the longing for the familiar—is the most potent of all emotions. As such, it is an invaluable asset to be manipulated by the ruling clique for social control. But our natural nostalgia—for dead relatives, one’s own youth, social circumstances which inevitably change—is too personal to be of use to the elites. In order to manipulate nostalgia, the ruling class needs to control what it is, and therefore they manufacture it out of commodities, the availability and appearance of which they determine via their capital and ownership of the means of production.

Through detritus such as the changing designs on candy wrappers, the ruling class manipulate falsely nostalgic paradigms such as an honest, hardworking “white America,” which never quite existed; values and morality, which were never actually typical; and a patriotism/nationalistic feeling that is completely out of place in a country that began as a capitalist experiment in personal selfishness, the initial power and wealth of which came from slave labor and concentration camps. Nostalgia is also now a central front in marginalizing dissent, with protest firmly nostalgized as a “1960s” throwback, for example.

 

 

Why is nostalgia such a powerful emotion? Why does it hold sway over us? Because humanity has a difficult relationship with time—both with understanding it and with accepting it. The friction between the acceptance of time passing and the struggle to stop change from occurring is the basis of much political struggle. By nurturing a sense of loss around candy wrappers and old buildings, the elites create a wounded populace which is ready to identify with other absurd notions of the way things are “supposed to be.”

The flag waving and army worship which are fixtures of the modern landscape are really an enactment of some fairy tale told by Fascists about how people belonging to the “Greatest Generation” were all jingoistic, self-sacrificing patriots. But, in fact, the so-called Greatest Generation was better read and therefore more politically radical, cynical, and diverse than today’s USA, which resembles a drugged-up, sci-fi, mind-controlled, mass-hypnosis nightmare. Unlike that bygone time, there is no longer any Communist Party, CND, Esperanto, or actual political diversity of any kind. Unions are powerless and normal intelligence is considered a malignancy, hopelessly nebbishy, and a fatal impediment to one’s sex life.

Despite their relative literacy and idealism, though, the Greatest Generation were a segregationist lot who unleashed the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and the rape of Nanking—to name a few of their greatest hits. Just imagine what today’s illiterate degeneration is capable of.

The immediate post-war period in the UK was a time of profound change, with the loss of empire, the switch from industrialization to a welfare state, and a comprehensive invasion and occupation by US culture. This was the time in which the Beatles grew up, and therefore they understood the use of nostalgia—perhaps intuitively. This allowed them to utilize it effectively. They understood that what one sees when one is very young is, for each person, the way things should be forever—the way things are meant to be.

When one sees what one considers to be “beauty” in film, art, music, or life, one is actually feeling nostalgia for some glanced-at ideal from one’s vaguely recalled formative years. Whatever one sees when one is very young, one desperately attempts to perpetuate via repetition throughout one’s life. The Beatles, by attacking the sensibilities of the very young and aggressively occupying their consciousness, ensured that generations of groups would imitate them, cite them as the “ur-group,” and swear undying fealty to them and their model.

Their dominance was cinched perhaps through to the end of the group era, whenever that might be. Theirs is absolute potency on a tribal, political, and religious level.