1. I revisited Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd this week. It’s a very short read, and a fine, less-prominent example of the author’s particular touch. Poe, so it seems to me, excels most at manifesting human darkness; the twisted nature of mankind taking form in his figures and incidents. In this case, a wizened, mysterious old man who prowls the crowds of London, unable to ever be alone. It’s never explained just who or what he is, or what he represents, save for the enigmatic statement “the type and genius of deep crime.” There’s something striking about this man, about the idea of one who must seek crowds and walk incessantly and unrecognized among his fellow men, too twisted to bear being alone. It hangs in the air of the imagination for the reader to grapple with.
2. I had cause to think of 80s and 90s Nostalgia recently. There are many reasons why we would look back on those as the ‘good’ times (even though, objectively speaking, the rot was well established by then), but I think one of them is simply that those were the last decades in which we had to live in reality. We had to write with pens, store paper files, drive to the store or the temple of consumption mall, talk to people in person or at least over the phone with real voices, read actual books, and so on. Afterwards, more and more of our lives consist of making inputs into calculation devices to do all that for us.
3. Past decades often strike me as having character of their own, in contrast to the past couple, which have largely been an amorphous, pre-packaged blob growing increasingly putrid the longer it sits out. The 80s had character, or at least appears to have, looking back; denim jackets and feathered hair, tape-decks and arcades, skateboards and boxy cars, synth music and slasher flicks, men in expensive suits driving huge, but not yet monstrous corporations, and so on. There’s a taste and flavor of that decade, as there is of the 70s, 60s, 50s, and 90s. The 2000s onward are mostly flavorless by comparison.
4. I still sometimes have to remind myself that the 90s are 30 years back at this point. That was when I grew up, and there remains a sense that, somehow, that’s the ‘normal’ time.
5. Another reason, of course, is just that; a lot of us grew up in the 80s and 90s, and we look back on it as the time before we made the painful discovery that the adult world was not what we’d been promised or prepared for. That’s how things were, we think, back when we didn’t have so much anxiety, debt, frustration, and despair.
6. But for me, I think it comes back to that flavor issue. I like things that have a strong individual taste, and the 80s had that (the 90s less so). The 70s did as well, but with few exceptions it’s a less appealing flavor to my mind; too self-important in its poor taste. For my sensibilities, the 80s and the 50s are the most appealing decades of the post-war America, with the best and strongest aesthetics and character.
7. I’m wondering when we’ll ever break out of this grey blob of self-devouring emptiness and show some cultural flare again. It might be we never will, and America’s cultural influence will fade to be replaced by others with more confidence. That’s always possible. But we’ll see.
Serpent's Den 
“I still sometimes have to remind myself that the 90s are 30 years back at this point. That was when I grew up, and there remains a sense that, somehow, that’s the ‘normal’ time.”
Not at all unusual, I don’t think. Happens to me a lot. Just a slight timing difference–my “normal time” was 60 years ago, not 30. You’ll be amazed how quickly that seems to happen.
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A lot of the rot we face now was brewing in the nineties, but hadn’t come to the surface yet so it was invisible outside of, say, Dilbert strips and the environment they made fun of. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/10/the-fateful-nineties
At the time though, the nineties felt like a kid-friendly, suburbanized version of the eighties. Videogames moved from being a thing at the arcade to a thing people had at home, but were still pretty oldschool. Computers, which were sci fi meeting the real world in the eighties, were still cool (as were screensavers). We ran around the neighborhood and cassette taped our favorite music straight off the TV (and played it back in odd ways, which explains some of the vaporwave/lofi now). The Sexual Revolution Mk II hadn’t started yet, at least in 90% of the country.
Speaking of computers and videogames, this is… technically from the end of the seventies, but it’s very eighties: https://youtu.be/gsHYSs_qgmU (There’s a funny story behind where I ran across it, but, eh, some other time.)
The eighties… I’m not sure. Most people wouldn’t call it reactionary, but I feel like the rebellious attitude was at least as blatant as the previous couple decades – the edgy haircuts and brooding moody faces of the movie stars, etc. – except that things that were demonized before and would be demonized after like strength and masculinity were pushing back somewhat (tough guys were in, rock was macho rather than hippie, etc). Not quite rebellion into normalcy though. I’m not really sure what to make of it.
The seventies… mostly I think of LSD and really questionable fashion and disco balls. Admittedly I didn’t actually live through the time.
The sixties, like the nineties, a lot of the following decade’s junk was brewing but not as much had come to the surface; when I think of the sixties, or the cultural memory thereof anyway, I think of the nice boys from the fifties going through a rebellious teenage phase and growing their hair out, starting bands in the garage, pretending that “surfer” is a career, that sort of thing. Of course, somewhere in there the Sexual Revolution (Mk I) happened… the cultural memory has a weird way of minimizing that, however.
(Aside: while everyone who does remember the Revolution thinks back on sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, the bigger long-term impact was no-fault and contraception… no-fault in particular has maybe the largest immediate and lasting social impact but somehow gets accepted as just normal to this day. And here I will return to my impressions on decades rather than the obscenity-laden rant that that topic deserves.)
The fifties was the last gasp of past culture as folks recovering from two World Wars actually wanted things to go back to normal. As such, to those who fear and hate past culture, it’s remembered only for being comparatively repressive relative to the Revolutions that came afterwards, but for the rest of us, it’s mostly an era when there was a developed, distinctly American version of good old fashioned propriety and good taste. Sure, now that the post-nineties Economic Revolution that hardly anyone talks about (in which competitive capitalism was replaced by financier shenanigans and privatised central planning) has gutted the American Dream, people love to say that the whole thing was just a lie about the pursuability of white picket fences or something (white picket fences loom inexplicably large in the imagination of the critics) but mostly it was the last time we actually collectively believed in social norms, which are the backbone of real culture.
The forties, well, WWII and its immediate aftermath.
The thirties, Great Depression.
The twenties were a premature attempt at Cultural Revolution that would be cut short by the subsequent economic crash and the following War To End All Wars Again Because The First One Didn’t.
Before that, American cultural memory fades out – there was that first World War the rest of the world remembers, right? And before that there was Abraham Lincoln. And there cultural memory ends and history begins. (History ends with the Founding Fathers in 1776, as Ron Swanson notes. He might’ve said “began” but we’re working backwards from cultural memory here.)
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