I’m Scared
“I‘M VERY badly scared, not so much for myself — I’m a gray-haired man of sixty-six, after all — but for you and everyone else who has not yet lived out his life. For I believe that certain dangerous things have recently begun to happen in the world.”
So begins Jack Finney’s short story I’m Scared, first published in Colliers in September 1951 with the tagline:
. . . because a struggle against the barrier of time is already taking place; time is breaking down. I think it’s important that you should know about it.
I thought of this story after watching the scene in Brexit- The Uncivil War where Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Dominic Cummings adding a single word to the Brexit slogan. “Take control” became “Take back control.” And the rest was… (spoiler) history.
The media marketeers who sold us Donald Trump used the same playbook. They blended the American desire to “Make America Great” with a longing for a misremembered past by adding a single word. So “Make America Great Again” became the winning slogan for Donald Trump’s rise to power. Vladimir Putin also benefits from nostalgia. He brands himself as a man with a goal to return Russia to the gauzy glory days of his childhood when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union.
Setting a target in an idyllic past reminded ageing baby-boomers of a time when they were young. Clocks melt under the heat of their great numbers. Pages torn from the calendars of our children cannot escape the gravitational force of their grandparents.
It was too easy to ignore the child labor, racism and inequality. Roll back the clocks and ignore the pollution and hunger even when the U.S. had only 1/3rd the population and there were 5 billion fewer people in the world. Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away… Wealth and power seemed here to stay (for any white male.)
As T.V.’s Archie Bunker would put it, Those Were the Days. Didn’t need no welfare state, everybody pulled his weight… Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again. (The president who called upon Douglas MacArthur to force homeless World War I veterans out of Washington D.C.)
To understand Donald Trump’s appeal, simply watch a few episodes of All in the Family. Norman Lear never intended for Archie Bunker to become America’s “lovable bigot.” But the character grew so popular, there was a tongue-in-cheek Archie Bunker for President campaign during the 1972 election. Blue-color union workers often identified with democrats but a core always identified more strongly with racists so 2016 life imitated 1972 satire.
Donald Trump successfully blended populist xenophobia, patriotism, militarism and a longing for the past to win in 2016. All of the forces which made this possible will continue to haunt us as we approach November 2020.
I’m scared.
