The morning of January 20, 1961 was cold but clear in Washington, D.C.. The temperature began in the teens and never rose much higher. There is something telling in the fact that the United States installs its head of state not in the bloom of spring or the harvest of fall, but in the dead of winter—when nature sleeps and the world lies still. Power, it seems, begins in hibernation.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States. The youngest person ever elected President. The first and only President awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat. The first combat-wounded veteran to become Commander in Chief since Rutherford B. Hayes left office in 1881, and also the last. Kennedy’s legacy would become complex as history ground on, but on that day, a shimmering, optimistic moment. We were entering Avalon.
From the East Portico of the Capitol, Kennedy issued a commandment. A litmus test for progressive politics, delivered in the clipped cadences of American scripture:
“…ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country…ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man…ask of us here, the same high standard of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”
Not a promise. Not patronizing. A challenge. Be bigger than yourself. Civic duty, Kennedy reminded us, is not about you. It is not about power or wealth. It is not about the freedom to do as you please nor liberty from consequences. It is about what you can contribute to the progress of society towards its own ideals.
This is not belief. It is definition. You do these things, and your duty is fulfilled, or you don’t, and your duty is shirked. We are all food for worms, but before that, we are the sum of our acts towards one another. There is no higher calling than that.
The evening of November 9, 1989 the weather was cool in Berlin. The Zeitgeist was electric. People gathered at the icon of oppression, the concrete and steel snake that cut their city in half for a generation, and tore it down. The systems of oppression that had kept it in place for twenty-eight years hiccuped long enough to fall apart. The Cold War ended. Not with a battle, with a shrug.
The boot too firmly pushed on the back of too many necks lifted because greed and fear require the compliance of the oppressed to function over time. Minimal, malicious compliance accretes entropy, slowly filling the reservoir of incompetence until it becomes more than the system can bear. Collapse is merely the return to equilibrium. The opposite of democracy is autocracy. The opposite of free is oppressed. Binary.
There is no left or right. No progressive or conservative. No democrat or republican. You believe in the boot, and you oppress, or you do not, and you grow.
Politics is about manufacturing maximum, benevolent compliance. The engine of democracy is the infinite growth of civil belief, pride, participation. The evidence of progress is not the undoing of past wrongs, but the changed minds and freed voices that demand their undoing.
You believe in the boot. Or you do not.
Equilibrium, not Justice. Justice at the end of the club is oppression by another name. The entropy still accretes. But now, when the the system breaks? We don’t get liberty. We get open contempt for progress.
“…what you can do for your country” becomes the punchline for grifters.
“…the freedom of man” becomes the freedom of the market, the shareholder, the algorithm.
“…the same high standard…” becomes the fawning loyalty to whomever tells us what we want to hear.
Today, the Cold War is thirty-eight years in the past. There’s a new war. A Quiet War.
It’s fought in movie trailers, in school curriculum, in lo-fi playlists, in campaign slogans, and in Instagram filters. It is fought by those who want to control society so they can amass power, so they can control society, so they can amass power…
Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.
The weapon is memory. Nostalgia pushed like a drug. The target is you.
And it works. It works because reality is volatile, and uncertain, and chaotic, and ambiguous. Not because this is the natural state of the world. Because an oppressor farms volatility, composes uncertainty, breeds chaos, and crafts ambiguity so that you’ll want what they’ve got. Oppressors manufacture the market for the cure they are selling.
The thing we’re hooked on isn’t the past.
It’s the idea that the past was ever stable, or certain, or simple, or clear.
Norman Rockwell isn’t a journalist or a historian. He’s an artist. The idealized vision of America he paints is just that – Idealized. Boy Scouts and tomboys and families together in church or city hall or the dinner table. It’s comforting and comfortable. Familiar. Evocative. But like all myths, it makes excluding those not in the picture feel natural. This isn’t un-real, but it also isn’t real. It lives. But only in our imaginations.
Because the reality is that if you matched up with Rockwell’s idealized visions, you were in the minority. And you lead the charge to dismantle the American dream because, having got yours, you decided that the world was a zero-sum game and anyone else winning would mean you losing. Unfair? Maybe. Untrue? Not according to the facts. Someone voted for Nixon. And that someone probably looked more like they belonged in a Norman Rockwell painting than at a Black Panther breakfast program.
The same can be said about who voted for Reagan, for Bush, for Gingrich. One long arc through the euphoric haze of nostalgia. Not principle. We don’t live in a world that is stable, or certain, or simple, or clear. But nostalgia is always that. Conservativism is escapist fantasy. And we love to escape reality when we’re the villain.
Somewhere between 1991 and 2001, the narrative engine broke.
The Cold War ended, 9/11 began, and in the space between, we lost the thread. We were “King of the World”, not by might or merit but by accident. We were free from the fear of nuclear annihilation but lost in ennui; in a purgatory of choices manufactured for a world that no longer existed, “beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men”. The unfashioned malaise of decompression. Of flannel and feedback. Of guns, gangs, and more guns. Nostalgia wasn’t safe, reality wasn’t real. And then we got on-line.
What followed wasn’t chaos exactly—it was something flatter.
More like drift. Paper maps replaced by blue dots. Anchors replaced by search bars.
You could still go looking for meaning.
But meaning was now user-generated.
Searchable. Commented. Indexed.
The kind of thing that flickers out of sight if you scroll too fast.
We had seized the means of production. We neither knew what to do nor what we wanted to become.
We built. We built shopping carts and blogs and flying toasters and dancing babies. We built jokes. The four years between Windows 95 and the bubble burst were “irrationally exuberant” not just in the markets, but in the studio, in the club, in the atelier. And then it was over. The bubble burst. The planes crashed. The world got small and scary and loud. The machine was fixed. And the spice flowed. We had evil for our myths again.
We sent our operators to Afghanistan and CNN to Iraq. Nostalgia. Now remastered in HD.
Tyranny to defeat. Democracy to install. W has brush to cut. Cheney has a war with Saddam to finish. Rockwell’s archetypes. But the haze was thicker; we needed a bigger dose to believe the lies.
Ask not what together we can do for the freedom of man, but what you will do for America
Seven years. Seven years of milking all the blood from all the rocks. Of drinking up the ambrosial delights of empathy and sympathy and belching out license. We were owed. Vengeance.
Non-stop. Unrequited. Half-assed. Out-sourced. Vengeance. Mission Accomplished.
And profits. For those who want to control society so they can amass power, so they can control society, so they can amass power, so they can control society…
Yet the entropy accreted. Fast. The smartest guys in the room proved again they can’t be trusted. Especially when they are too clever by half.
Collapse.
Crisis.
Contagion.
They are too big to fail. Bailout. We are too small to matter. Downsize.
Everywhere suffered. Some more than others. But when the dust cleared, two things were clear:
- Power to control society works.
- Going forward, the Web is for maximizing share holder value. Just like everything else. The Nerds are Defeated. Revenge of the Jocks.
And nothing maximizes shareholder value like keeping you scared shitless, doped up on nostalgia, and shirking your civic duty.
So instead of facing forward, we turned around.
Not to study. To simulate.
Mid-century fonts. Cottagecore wallpaper. Vinyl crackle overlays. Dad’s old watch, reissued at 4x the price. T-shirts with fake varsity logos from schools that never existed. Clothes that look like what’s in pictures, but cheaper, flimsier. Disposable. Single-serving… everything. It’s not memory. It’s set design. Disney-goes-to-war levels of opportunistic propaganda, imagineering, and world building. What we’re addicted to isn’t the past. It’s the illusion of structure. Of boundaries. Of knowing what comes next. And it’s being lifted straight out of the cautionary tales that tried to warn us by bros who don’t understand how much they’ve misread them.
The contempt for progress.
The contempt for experience.
Getting hot and heavy in the closet for their seven minutes in heaven.
The beta test was over. It was time to ship.
Real memory is jagged. It smells like lawnmowers and mildew. It includes the times we lied, or stayed quiet, or laughed at things we shouldn’t have. Artificial nostalgia has no friction. It floats like morphine in the bloodstream. It’s safe. It’s smooth. It never asks what happened to the people not in the picture. This isn’t just culture. It’s a channel. A signal. A syntax. A medium. Not for communication but for indoctrination.
Triumph.
Tragedy.
Myth.
Moral Panic.
Each one scheduled, framed, and looped. Each one used to build, comfort, terrify, and rally the base. Not a political base. A mythological one.
Believers in an America that never existed. Where going to work is a sacred act. Where buying things is patriotic. Where following the rules, staying quiet, and fitting in is your moral obligation. Where doing your commercial duty is honor. And honor is American.
Honor in landscapes manufactured by John Ford, for cowboys carved from legend, for lone rangers, lawmen, and sunsets shot to sell a story. The story that the West was white. That the gun was law. That just one man could set it right. Never mind the railroads carved through stolen land. Never mind they were built by Chinese workers. Never mind the treaties broken, the languages lost, the rivers poisoned. Never mind the range wars, the lynchings, the massacres, the mines. They don’t fit in the picture.
What mattered was the frame. The silhouette. The righteous man on the ridge, backlit by a myth. Smoking a cigarette.
It wasn’t history.
It was branding.
Every prepper, survivalist, or militia member dressing up in tacticool, cosplaying as Delta Force and getting off on their right to bear arms, is doped up on the nostalgia of the Old West. Deluded by the myth of the lone man setting things right with a gun and a horse. A myth created for profit to sell tickets to movies and cancer to everyone. Repurposed to sell the base on an America that never existed.
We’re all deluded by branding. Branding that told us:
- Iwo Jima proved we were willing to die for each other.
- The moon landing proved we were gods.
- The Challenger explosion proved we were brave.
- The Berlin Wall falling proved we were right.
- Pathfinder proved we can move to a new planet when this one is used up.
Over time our iconic moments became less about collective triumph and more about tragedy, celebrity, and commercial identity.
Scared shitless. Send in the Clowns. Consumer duty.
Less, “we did it”. More, “look at that”. Less action. More advertisement.
Passive. Compliant. Obedient.
They said Watergate was when we lost our innocence. As if Haymarket, Ludlow, Homestead, Tulsa, Everett, COINTELPRO, Watts, My Lai, and Attica hadn’t already happened. As if strangefruit didn’t flourish in the Confederacy and hang from trees like a national offering to an angry god. As if we didn’t all know, deep down, that if you stepped out of line, you’d get killed, or bought off, or disappeared.
Our innocence wasn’t lost. It was signed to a four-album deal and then locked out of the studio so no one else could have it.
Silenced.
Repackaged.
Sold back to us in the church book store as the performative purity of the American Christian.
Not holiness. Branding.
Bracelets that say “What Would Jesus Do,” while the nation builds bombs. Promises signed at church altars before children know what desire even means. Camps where kids are taught to fear their own bodies. Contracts sealed in shame, then broken in silence.
Not to protect virtue but to police conformity. Purity isn’t about truth. It’s about obedience. A clean surface hiding rot. A closed mouth mistaken for peace.
And all the while the powerful cavort in sin behind closed doors, their shenanigans only checked when one of their own is caught. Leviticus is no better than 2 Corinthians when 2 Corinthians will do.1
Golden calf in the hay-ouse!
When we shoot up on nostalgia, we can be shameless that greed is a virtue, not a vice. That Christians worship money-changers, adulterers, and blasphemers, just as long as they promise to hate who we hate. Where megachurches sell forgiveness by the square foot. Where the poor are told their suffering is a test, not a failure of justice. Where sex is dirty, but love is fake. Where intimacy is scandal, but branding is sacred. Where desire is repressed… unless it’s marketable. Where purity is performative, and loyalty means never asking questions. Where the highest commandment is: Don’t make us uncomfortable.
What would Jesus say?
We don’t care. The real Jesus isn’t in our picture.
And we don’t need him to be. We have our own American saviors. Our own American adversaries. Our own American myths.
Vader. Evil with a backstory. Redemption as merchandise. Fire Insurance through the impersonal, non-judgmental Force.
Simba held aloft. A monarchy reborn with a soundtrack. Anointed by acclaim, not by the divine.
Hannibal Lecter. Cruelty made elegant. Not the body of Christ, the body of man.
Kate and Leo on the Titanic. Class war re-cut as a kiss in the wind. Magdalene the Aristocrat.
All propaganda.
Not truth.
Just narrative fast-food; tasty but lacking nutrition. Blocked. Framed. Scripted. Scheduled. Comfortable. Iconic. Training films for emotional obedience.
Made to be Nostalgic from day one.
Blasphemy is just another way to say “I love me”.
The nostalgia epidemic, like the murder epidemic and the opioid epidemic, is a manufactured crisis; a symptom of our cultural infantilism. We romanticize the past. Then we act it out like a script. And when it goes wrong, when it collapses or kills, we cry foul and demand that reality adjust itself to our delusion. We demand to be lied to. And we punish anyone who refuses. As time went on, we lowered the bar for leadership. Not out of cynicism but because honesty became disqualifying.
We don’t want a leader. We want a mirror that flatters. A parent who says we’re special, even when the house is on fire.
Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…
…lie, lie, lie to us all.
And that’s what it takes now: To rise, you must promise not to name the wound. To rule, you must agree that we are never the problem.
Because we yearn for a world that never was, we tolerate carnage in our classrooms. Because we bathe in mythos that can never fulfill, we drown in chemicals that can never deliver. The dream was always hollow, but the ritual of believing it feels holy.
So we pray to gods who never speak, salute flags that never saved us, and swallow poisons just to stay numb enough to keep nodding along.
The drugs and guns our politicians blame for all our ills are just the symptoms. Symptoms of decades of lies.
We didn’t lose our way.
We pawned it and used the cash to pave reality. With slogans, bullets, and pharmaceuticals.
Ask of us here, the same non-standard of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you
This second opiate epidemic isn’t killing the body.
It’s numbing the civic nerve.
Why rebuild public trust when you can sell a filtered photograph of Main Street, USA?
Why teach nuance when you can gesture vaguely at “better values”?
Why face the hard present when you can loop old Super Bowl commercials on YouTube and call it patriotism?
The drug works because the pain is real.
Because the future is hard to picture.
Because nobody gave us a replacement myth that holds together.
So we simulate the one we think we lost…because admitting we pawned it is too much to bear.
This is the vice holding America hostage: the slow strangulation by two orders of nostalgia, passed between two generations like a babe swaddled in gold foil headed to the moon.
The Boomers: Gripping their second-order nostalgia for golden-era suburbia, sanitized and silent. No race. No class. No pressure. Just lawns, casseroles, and postwar ease. What lies beneath: a first-order nostalgia for sex, protest, freedom. For the era of radical triumph; rebellion underwritten by the very institutions they now resent. Institutions that pay their pensions. Fund their Medicare. Protect their myths. And yet, they rage when reality interrupts the dream.
The Millennials: Their first-order nostalgia is still fresh. 9/11. Tumblr. Coffee shops. The Great Recession. Collapse-flavored memes. COVID. Not quite trauma. Not quite pride. Just the feeling of being there. Vibes-as-identity. A politics of playlists. A history made of screenshots. But their second-order nostalgia is crystal clear: The post–Cold War, pre-dot-com lull. Soccer leagues. Lunchables. Nickelodeon. Helicopter parents. Every virtue branded. Every fear moralized. They were raised in a world that marketed fear and sold it as care. A world that massified morality through media, and piped it through everything: television, snack food, youth group, recess. Clutched Pearls defined their childhood.
Just Say No
Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics
Be Like Mike
Stranger Danger
WWJD
Toys R Us
So here we are – two generations staring backward, projecting shadow plays onto a wall they refuse to admit is crumbling.
The vice of myth locks us into frame. Strapped down, eyes forced open. No respite. No escape. Attended to by those who want to control society so they can amass power, so they can control society, so they can amass power, so they can control society…
The technocrats who believe data is destiny, that code is law, and that equilibrium is found in numbers, not as the outcome of Justice.
The theocrats who bless the bombs and ban books, who preach love and practice hate, who covet minds and bodies for themselves, and launder Empire through scripture, taking a percentage for their effort.
The kleptocrats who steal in broad daylight and call it innovation, pushing experts and geniuses aside as deftly as an old lady on a New York subway who turns that sliver of seat into her personal domain, and who hoard the commons and their riches with the grace of a dragon.
The kagkeocrat who gate-keep access…to anything and everything…the park, the mall, the parking spot, to virtue and victim-hood, to rights, to opportunity, to joy, to air.2
The kagkiskenocrats curate shame like set designers, managing the storyboards of guilt, silence, and exposure with surgical cruelty.3
The kakistocrats whose legendary incompetence, cruelty, and pride is rivaled only by the glee with which they practice them.4
And finally, the kakkacrat.5
The kakkacrat doesn’t rule in spite of the filth. He rules through it. He shits on the altar and dares you to call it divine. He smears the myth in sewage and calls it authenticity. He wipes his ass with the flag and calls you, “traitor”. He doesn’t pray, doesn’t promise, doesn’t pretend. Just pollutes. Just humiliates. Just grins. He governs by vomit and volume, turns policy into punchlines, and legitimacy into sludge. He’s not the glitch. He’s the final feature. This is not the fall of empire. It’s the flush. The ultimate collapse from the totality of entropy.
In the kakkaocracy, bullshit is currency and assholes are aristocrats. We don’t just accept the filth with resignation. We applaud it. We bathe in it. We elect it. We call it freedom.
Our golden calf is a golden toilet.
This is where nostalgia leads. Inextricably. Inevitably. Invariably.
But maybe it doesn’t matter. Because what we remember is always a lie. Memory is the story we tell ourselves to survive. History is the story the winners publish to stay in power. Both are theater. Both are edited. Until the archaeologists, the archivists, the whistle-blowers scrape away the paint and say, “Here. This. This is what was buried.”
Facts are not memories.
They are not lit. They are not scored. They are not scripted. They are not framed.
They do not have branding.
They do not care how we feel.
They are.
Whether we like it or not.
Whether we deserve them or not.
And in a world of facts, there is no comfort in the rear-view.
There is only forward.
Only what is next.
“…ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country…ask not what America will do for your, but what together we can do for the freedom of man…ask of us here, the same high standard of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”
Be bigger than yourself. Contribute to the progress of society towards its own ideals. You do these things, and your duty is fulfilled, or you don’t, and your duty is shirked.
We are the sum of our acts towards one another.
That is what cures the addiction.
What un-builds the empire of nostalgia.
Not forgetting.
Not forgiving.
But facing.
- Paraphrasing C. S. Lewis from The Screwtape Letters, pg. 79, “Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Leviticus is the book in the Old Testament that lays out the most ritualistic, legalistic, moralistic practices in the Bible. Standards that no one lives up to. 2 Corinthians is the foundational argument for a Pauline interpretation of the New Testament, an interpretation that puts ritualistic, legalistic, moralistic practices ahead of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount or Greatest Commandment. The version of Christianity that is easily bent to justify slavery, misogyny, and bigotry. The version of Christianity that justifies Prosperity Theology. The version of Christianity that American Evangelicals prefer. ↩︎
- From kagkelion, ancient Greek for railing or gate, a kagkeocrat is one who rules by controlling access—not with policy, but with thresholds. If the technocrat governs through code, the kagkeocrat governs through velvet ropes. ↩︎
- From kagkelion, a gate or barrier, and skene, the stage or scene in ancient Greek theatre): One who governs by controlling both access and narrative, blending surveillance and spectacle. Where the kagkeocrat controls the doors, the kagkiskenocrat controls the spotlight. ↩︎
- From kakistos, ancient Greek, “the worst”. Kakistocracy is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people. ↩︎
- From kakka, ancient Greek, “to defecate”. Kakkaocracy is government through filth or by people who are unafraid to bathe in excrement, figuratively or literally, as a tool for control. ↩︎