Fall back

Clock with perpetual calendar, by Jean Antoine Lépine (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

         It's Sunday, Nov. 2. Did you remember to set your clocks back?

        Just an hour. Though we live in an era where some people seem stuck on pushing time even further backward, to some mythic time in their distant past. They're never very specific as to exactly when. Vague glory days, perhaps immediately after World War II, though that recedes past memory for most. Once I pressed a reader — what year are you talking about when things were better? Pick one? She replied 1952, and I wrote a blog post on just how grim that year actually was — polio rampant, the Korean War raging, Jim Crow deforming the South, McCarthyism creating a pall of fear.

     I actually don't think it is a specific era that MAGA is trying to regain — when American was "great" — but a social order where the people they don't think should count today indeed didn't count for much. Votes were suppressed — a future they're striding for. The national narrative was scrubbed of Blacks and gays and women. White folks were top dog, by definition. The world was their oyster. In theory. In memory.

    There is a useful word for this hunger: revanchism. A policy of trying to claw back what has been lost, to retaliate against those who have taken it, in your estimation. We see this everywhere. Vladimir Putin decides that Ukraine belongs to Russia because of something that happens in the 10th century. Encouraging diversity undermines merit — merit being what white folks display when they collect the cream. A world where we were top dog, and called the shots. We said "Jump!" and the world responded, "How high?" 

     At least in our memory. In the memories of some. Or, rather, their fancies, since they don't actually remember such a time. Because it never really existed.

    We do fall backward an hour every autumn. And just that one change throws people. The truth is, there is no going back, only forward. I grew up in a time when, with an eye on the 21st century, there was a lot of talk about the future, speculation about what things would be like. Now, not so much. Now our potential futures seem grim, from the authoritarian state being imposed by Donald Trump, to the violent storms caused by global warming, to the menace of artificial intelligence (though why people should fret over the hazy possibilities AI, and not the climate change ravaging the world right now, right before our eyes, is a mystery. Or maybe not such a mystery — it's always easier to consider esoteric danger than true threat. That's why we obsess over shark attacks, but not heart attacks).

      The future is coming whether we consider it or not. It could hold for us a decent society, where people are free to speak, write, think, vote. Where health care is a right for all, not a privilege for a few. Where education mattered. Or it might not. We seem headed for a very different future, a crude patchwork cobbled out of impressions of the past. Do we really want to go back there? Falling back an hour is hard enough. We can't fall back years and years, and shouldn't try.