It is not unusual to see people wearing vintage outfits on the streets of New York. In some neighborhoods you’d think it’s practically mandatory. Take for granted that on any given block one can spot a seventies hippie outfit walking next to a gothic Victorian nightgown with thirties makeup and that the sight is not unusual.
It is rare, however, to see a whole crowd of costumes all together (outside of Halloween) as I did last week. While I was walking home after a day’s work, I noticed an increasing number of perfectly coiffed people dressed exactly like 1950’s men and women. As I got closer to my building, I noticed how the usual SUVs and taxis that are parked on the street had been replaced by beautiful wing-tipped chrome land yachts that were stereotypical of Technicolor postwar Americana. Turns out they were shooting a movie right outside my apartment, and had converted the entire street into a 1950s boardwalk overnight. This was some big-budget production value: every storefront had been changed into a 50s Main Street store, the street lamps had been replaced, the garbage cans retrofitted, the sidewalk cleaned up (thank God) and any sign of the modern era completely obliterated by fake trees or false walls. It was such a surreal sight to see this just under my apartment window that I stayed outside and watched for a while, happy to be transported to another decade for free.
Many have argued that the 'make America great again' mantra amounts to a return to the White America of the 1950s
Why did you assume that after years of baiting religious conservatism and promoting xenophobic national exceptionalism, you would not arrive irrevocably, inevitably to this?
The whole scene was so perfectly styled that I almost mistook it for reality, as if a Narnia-type secret portal had just opened up out of thin air, and I was allowed to examine it as documentary evidence. It was telling: the storefronts all had fictitious names that underscored mom-and-pop-corner-shop family values, there was no apparent poverty, no ethnic minorities, no people of color, and the color scheme of the whole set looked like it was from a Disney cartoon. Right then it occurred to me that this, right here, is what politicians evoke when they wax on about “Making American Great Again” i.e. the heyday of White America.
It’s been a year since I began living in the States again, and other than a few mentions I have restrained myself from talking about the all-consuming reality TV travesty that is the American Presidential Election. Some of my American friends have asked for my opinion and are surprised when I say that Trump’s appearance on the political landscape is somewhat of a relief to me. A relief because he’s articulating so much of the vitriol and flat-out hatred that I often suspected the rightwing in America feels but rarely articulates in public. I lived through the two Bush terms, and often felt frustrated at the value systems of the American Republicans that kept sloping so precariously towards divisionary contempt. Trump is what happens when you take their dangerous path to an absurd but logical conclusion; an old, corrupt, racist, misogynistic white man baiting voters with fear-mongering and exclusionary politics. The only difference between him and the worst of the Republican Party at large is that he doesn’t weaponise “Christian values” and that he actually says what most of them think but don’t want to admit.
He is (and this is widely acknowledged since the whole “Grab her by the p****y” debacle) an unstable and wildly delusional man incapable of being the head of a family or business, let alone the most powerful (and potentially destructive) country on earth. The fact that he is angling for that spot is not an anomaly to the political workings of America, but rather a very direct consequence of it. So it is with some frustration that I look at some of my American friends who express shock and outrage at his candidacy.
The one thing I have noticed afresh since my return is the vast depth of American hubris. Where did he come from, some of them ask. How did this happen, they wonder. How did you not see this coming, I want to retort, when so much of the world did.
Why did you assume that after years of baiting religious conservatism and promoting xenophobic national exceptionalism, you would not arrive irrevocably, inevitably to this? How could you be so arrogant as to think that your leaders could mask bigotry as religious freedom and racism as national concern and that it would not affect your voting population? In short, how can you be surprised by what the world saw in your leadership years before you?
All my non-American friends, literally all of them, are as unsurprised as I am that someone like Trump is on the US ticket. It is, as I say, somewhat of a relief that this tumor has appeared on the body politic here because at the very least it may inspire some kind of reformation in the Republican Party, one that is very much overdue.
So when the Americans go to vote in their leader in a few short weeks, I wont be nervous really. There is no point. In the likely event that they will elect Hillary, it’ll be because there are not other options (though I do believe her to be very well qualified) and if they elect Trump, they would have pressed a bright red self-destruct button, and we will all suffer the consequences.
Either way, the differences in the politics of this place are so vastly extreme that to even compare them seems to me an exercise in futility.
Just like the promises of most of the politicians here (and around the world), the goal of a return to innocence is a fantasy. There are no factories here to reopen; they have all gone to China. The mom and pop stores have either closed down or turned into Walmart. Minorities are no longer content to be invisible, and are insisting that their lives matter, as do their relationships. The place that the rightwing politicians here say the “average American” wants to go back to is like that mirage of the 50s on my street: it doesn’t exist. And thank God for that.
