Paul Theroux's America

January 3, 2007 7:26 AM

Paul Theroux's writing is, at it's best, a long, dreamy meditation on a place, it's people, and the time he spent among them. His latest piece, an op-ed in the New York Times about America in 2007, is no exception.
posted by nevercalm (99 comments total)

Poor Paul has been duffiled by the train of American progress.

/too obscure for non-Theroux readers?
posted by Turtles all the way down at 7:44 AM on January 3, 2007

the population of the u s was half what is now, when i was born

and yes, i've noticed many of the differences he has, even in the small-city midwest
posted by pyramid termite at 7:50 AM on January 3, 2007

It is interesting how nobody worries about really population growth anymore. But for global warming etc, it's still the elephant in the corner. If there were half as many of us, we'd have a whole lot less to worry about than we do now. (Yeah, yeah, I know it would be really bad for pensions too).
posted by rhymer at 7:53 AM on January 3, 2007

I appreciate the elegiac tone of the piece, but it's difficult to avoid the impression that there's no difference between it and any other kind of longing for the spaces of childhood.

In other words, get off my damn lawn, etc.
posted by jokeefe at 7:57 AM on January 3, 2007

He's talking about metafilter.
posted by srboisvert at 7:59 AM on January 3, 2007

Rhymer--it is widely thought that the world population will peak around 2050, at around 10 billion. Whether this is a sustainable number or not is an important question, but one that may get short shrift because many wealthy countries are more concerned about their national populations declining. Italy and Japan are declining fastest; the USA would barely be holding steady if it weren't for immigration. Declining populations—birthrates below the replacement level of 2.1 per woman—have all kinds of consequences that we've just never had to deal with before.
posted by adamrice at 8:14 AM on January 3, 2007

Declining populations—birthrates below the replacement level of 2.1 per woman—have all kinds of consequences that we've just never had to deal with before.

Very true. Including the fact that many social systems are little more than state-controlled pyramid schemes. And pyramid schemes don't hold up well when the pyramid gets inverted.
posted by pardonyou? at 8:33 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Theroux. Always my favorite writer about places and people. He doesn't seem to write about America much (at least not in his non-fiction. I read his short disturbing novel Chicago Loop yesterday.)

He is aware that he is being old-fogeyish, but that happens to all of us. There were frogs in the creek that ran by my childhood Missouri home...mo more. On our vacation island in Maine there used to be starfish, sea anenomes, and sea urchins in the tidal pools. Gone.

Of course, Theroux is also focusing on politeness, courtesy...has that faded away too? I don't know.
posted by kozad at 8:43 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Meh. It's the latest in an infinite series of "the world was better when I was younger" thumbsuckers. Theroux writes well, but I can't believe he takes his own nostalgia seriously enough to write this; tossing in sentences like "Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem" doesn't make it better, it just shoves the cliche in your face. Doesn't it occur to him that Gosse recalled "the richness and beauty of the English shores of his youth" a century ago, and fifty years later old men were recalling the richness and beauty of the English shores at the very time Gosse was lamenting their disappearance, and now old men are recalling their richness and beauty fifty years ago, and fifty years from now... well, you get the idea. The world was always better when we were young; it's one thing to grow up without having read Gosse or much of anything else and to naively believe that your feelings of loss reflect the actual world, but to have read all that, to know that what you're feeling is an unavoidable consequence of aging and that the expression of it is a pathetic cliche, and to go ahead and express it anyway... well, I guess writers have to write, and if people are willing to pay them for it, good for them, but this didn't impress me.

And all the stuff about overpopulation and the decline of civility is just more cliches of aging. Does he really think you can no longer hear a bumblebee or a cicada in America, that the "open road" no longer exists, that you can't go "driving down the soft tunnel of a dark highway at night" any more? Just because you've gotten used to living in the city and taking jets everywhere doesn't mean those quieter experiences are no longer available. Get back to me when the world has actually turned into a hellhole where we're all standing on each other's shoulders and there is literally no greenery on the entire planet, and then maybe I'll take your laments seriously.
posted by languagehat at 8:44 AM on January 3, 2007 [4 favorites]

Thanks for sparing me the trouble of reading Theroux's essay, Languagehat.
posted by Mister_A at 8:53 AM on January 3, 2007

Just because you've gotten used to living in the city and taking jets everywhere doesn't mean those quieter experiences are no longer available.

Yeah, I think that's it. What he really misses is his own youth, not the world he was young in. He is a good writer though. I'm also going to agree with him that rudeness and selfishness seem to be at an all time high, it makes city living pretty hard sometimes. Then I pass through the suburbs and see that it's ten times worse there. I'll take anywhere urban or rural over the sprawling, big box suburbs with no sidewalks. I know that sentiment in itself is a trite cliche, but there it is.
posted by Divine_Wino at 8:54 AM on January 3, 2007

And all the stuff about overpopulation and the decline of civility is just more cliches of aging.

yep, overpopulation has nothing to do with peak oil, global warming, 3rd world political instability and resource shortages ... it's all about old fogeys murmuring "rosebud" on their deathbeds

got it
posted by pyramid termite at 9:08 AM on January 3, 2007

Another curmudgeonly takedown from languagehat, MeFi's own AntiPangloss.

That nostalgia is a universal emotion does not mean that there is not a solid kernel of truth in what Theroux writes. Every "pathetic cliche" is rooted in truth, or it wouldn't be one.

The population of Florida--where I hang my own hat--increases by over 300,000 people each year. Almost all of the beaches are now lined with condos and roads everywhere are gridlocked. One reflects daily on the decline of civility when the soccer mom with an SUV full of children flips one the digitus impudicus for some real or imagined slight on the highway. Our society exists in a hectic welter that is objectively worse than the days of recent history. The atomization of modern American society continues--and it's not pretty.
posted by rdone at 9:19 AM on January 3, 2007

Nicely said, rdone.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 9:26 AM on January 3, 2007

What he really misses is his own youth, not the world he was young in.

I think this nails it. It's an easy trap to look back and romanticize about "the good 'ole days of rural America." I grew up in rural America, but I guess I'm still young enough that the fog of time hasn't clouded my sense of how miserable it was. I would have given my right thumb to have a decent bookstore or record store within a 3-hour drive. I would have liked to have had a conversation with someone about something other than pro wrestling. It's very easy to forget that in the days before cable TV and the Internet, rural areas were not only physically isolated, they were culturally isolated. That may suit the "I don't even own a TV crowd," but it's pure hell on a culturally-starved teen who just got a Sex Pistols 8-track in the mail. I really could have given two shits about chirping cicadas.

(OK, so maybe I'm a little bitter. And I generally like Theroux.)
posted by Otis at 9:29 AM on January 3, 2007 [3 favorites]

Why is it, by the way, that world population is doubling every five years, or whatever it's doing?

I agree with languagehat about some of Theroux's nostalagia. I grew up about 15 miles west of Medford, in the 1980s and 90s, and I can lament the changes there, too, but I can't complain that there's no empty spaces left in my town, much less our state or country.

But his point about Malawi is troubling. The number of people who go hungry, and the widening division between rich and poor, are due in some part to this unprecedented population explosion.

As to civility, the fact is that many of us drive and walk on roads designed for populations a quarter of today's size. I don't see how this could fail to diminish civility.
posted by ibmcginty at 9:30 AM on January 3, 2007

adamrice - yup, understand all that. Nonetheless, it still seems valid to ask why, with all our problems which are as much a factor of numbers as wealth, everyone is so casual about another 4 billion people. That's quite a lot.
posted by rhymer at 9:33 AM on January 3, 2007

I don't think disagreeing with the sentiment that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and was better "when we were young", makes one an anti-Pangloss. Pangloss continually insisted that he was living in the best of all possible worlds, despite evidence to the contrary. Thus, languagehat's assertion that perhaps things are not as dire as suggested by Theroux ought to be regarded as Panglossian, not anti-Panglossian, by those who disagree.

But to the point: Aging members of every generation lament the perceived decline in civilization from its apogee, a mythical golden age they enjoyed in their youth. But that golden age IS youth, whenever in history that youth occurs. There are problems now that seem insurmountable, and there have always been such problems, and there will always be.
posted by Mister_A at 9:36 AM on January 3, 2007

languagehat, sorry, but I think you're missing the boat here.

Theroux's piece, to me, very much resembles one of the only emotionally resonant scenes in a film that is otherwise (deservedly) a byword for purest cheese: I'm thinking of the scene in Soylent Green when heartbroken police "book" Sol Roth goes, willingly, to meet his euthanized end, and is lullabied into the world to come by a show of simple, profoundly gorgeous images of the world that has gone and been taken away.

It strikes me that what Theroux is doing here isn't so much cranky remember-whenning as offering us glimpses of a saner, more proportionate world as it was well within living memory, for a people slowly becoming inured to a world that looks a little more like Children of Men with every passing day. If, yeah, his paean at the end to the soft technologies of Confucian social control strikes a discordant note, we shouldn't let that distract us from the beauties passing so swiftly across the screen.

The summer sounding of cicadas, the sprawl of the starry night sky - these are purely and simply goods. I can't see how evoking the experience of them for people who might never otherwise have known them is, necessarily, embittered crankery.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:39 AM on January 3, 2007

America is, and remains, an incredibly empty place, especially in the West.

And Theroux's grumpy-old-man quality has always ruined all his writing for me.
posted by drjimmy11 at 9:46 AM on January 3, 2007

America is, and remains, an incredibly empty place, especially in the West.

Yes. If Theroux had been a child in Nigeria, and had witnessed the forests of his youth become flaming oil refineries, I'd be listening. But those who have experienced such genuine degradation and loss, and watched their country despoiled for offshore profits generally don't get Op-Ed space in the NY Times.

You all know that declining birth rates are directly related to female education and economic independence, as well as public health measures (including freely available contraception), right? Anyone who is concerned about population growth needs to look at those things. [/stating the obvious]
posted by jokeefe at 9:55 AM on January 3, 2007

nonsense. sheer nonsense.

everyone experiences the world as a childhood that fades and is corrupted by progress, but it's always the same childhood, over and over again.

i remember when i was a boy, keepin' it real in compton. it ain't like it is now... whatever. "thumbsuckers" called it.

i can't really get the nostalgia... I'm caught the failure of his argument.
posted by ewkpates at 9:57 AM on January 3, 2007

Theroux touched on the disappearing world in the Misquito Coast also. Thanks adamgreenfield.
posted by nofundy at 9:57 AM on January 3, 2007

Growth, growth, growth. That's the real-estate-agent-chamber-of-commerce-GNP model of the world, where no one is content to simply do as well as they have in the past, they must grow. You can't own a hardware store that serves a town of 1,000 and make a living, even though you have in the past--no, you must serve 1,050 next year and 1,100 the year after or you're on your way out!

Three kids, five kids, eight kids, who cares? Your position in one of the eight layers of management at a large multinational corporation which provides consulting services to other multinationals that provide consulting services will provide!

The cool thing about nature is that it eventually wins. We're one good crop failure away from our own "dinosaur killer." The panic and the "it was them" (fill in your enemy of choice) "logic" will ensure that as we starve we'll take a lot of the rest with us.

There are only so many farms we can pave to provide new split level "estates" out in the "country." We are the "old growth" loggers: idiots who would cut down the last few trees to make a bit of money for shiney mud-flaps and a Wii this year and then...what? It's gone, and you're screwed.

It's like we're controlled by people who don't care about the future because they are assured the world is going to end in their lifetimes anyway.
posted by maxwelton at 10:03 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Aging members of every generation lament the perceived decline in civilization from its apogee, a mythical golden age they enjoyed in their youth.

i've been thinking about this ... and although my parents might have thought that people were more civil when they were growing up, i don't believe i ever heard them say that the world was better back then

of course, they grew up during the great depression and world war 2 and it would have been real hard for them to say that

not every generation thinks theirs was a golden age
posted by pyramid termite at 10:08 AM on January 3, 2007

That nostalgia is a universal emotion does not mean that there is not a solid kernel of truth in what Theroux writes. Every "pathetic cliche" is rooted in truth, or it wouldn't be one.

Absolutely. Here are some more timeless truths for you: People can be mean, but they can also be amazingly warmhearted. Smiling faces sometimes tell lies. That old woman who looks so stooped and careworn was once a vibrant young girl, and she still thinks of herself that way until she looks in the mirror. Pets are great companions. Babies are annoying unless they're your babies, in which case they're the most wonderful creatures in the world! I can go on, or if you like any one of them particularly, let me know and I can whip up a few hundred words about it, complete with anecdotes and literary references.

It strikes me that what Theroux is doing here isn't so much cranky remember-whenning as offering us glimpses of a saner, more proportionate world as it was well within living memory...

But that's the same bullshit Theroux is handing out: that the world was saner and more proportionate when he was young, when you were young, when I was young. The world (the human world) has always been a nasty, difficult place where people are mostly indifferent to each other at best and incredibly cruel at worst, redeemed (if we're lucky) by running into people who love us or at least treat us well. It's never been a sane or "proportionate" (whatever that means) place. When we're young (if we're lucky), we're spared a lot of the bad stuff because our parents ward it off and deal with it on our behalf; when we grow up we have to deal with it ourselves, and guess what? We prefer the world we knew when we were kids!

The summer sounding of cicadas, the sprawl of the starry night sky - these are purely and simply goods.

Yup, they sure are. And they're still there.
posted by languagehat at 10:08 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Forgot to say that I love "AntiPangloss." If I ever get a sockpuppet...
posted by languagehat at 10:10 AM on January 3, 2007

Can't we at least agree there's too many rude Americans in the world?
posted by stinkycheese at 10:16 AM on January 3, 2007

Here are some more timeless truths for you:

no matter what you say, someone on the internet will argue with it

complacent people are usually right ... until they're wrong

cynicism and ennui work hand in hand

the civic religion of progress, progress, progress is a cult

frogs will not stay in a gradually heated pot until it boils, in spite of what you may have heard ... humans will not only metaphorically stay in that pot, they will do so and tell you that boiling is a timeless truth, a mindless cliche, and something old people talk about to tire the ears of the young

frogs can be wiser than humans
posted by pyramid termite at 10:20 AM on January 3, 2007

It's very easy to forget that in the days before cable TV and the Internet, rural areas were not only physically isolated, they were culturally isolated.

I grew up in Missoula Montana in the 60's and 70's. Though not rural, I too experienced that same sense of crushing mental isolation. For night time fun in the summer, my mother and I would drive to the University of Montana campus security office and watch the bug zapper.

I kid you not.
posted by Tube at 10:24 AM on January 3, 2007

Did anyone besides me read (and get distubed by) Theroux's essay in last month's Smithsonian? I've always liked Theroux, despite or maybe because of, his cranky old man persona, but that article, which I read as essentially a wholesale attack on E.B. White, seemed unnecessary and even cruel. Which is all a long winded way of saying that based on these two articles, he seems to be getting way, possibly too, deep into that crabby old man thing. Yeah, the world was better than and the people were better too! Also, there were less of them and the goldarned crickets were louder!

Still, a nostalgic romp through the simpler and better world of the past is one thing (one perfectly targeted thing aimed at the NYT Magazine & Smithsonian demographic, at that) and the population issue is another and deserves serious concern. Rhymer is right; it is the elephant in the corner.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:30 AM on January 3, 2007

Dude, you derived pleasure from watching the deaths of Arthro-Americans?
posted by Mister_A at 10:30 AM on January 3, 2007

I remember a few years back, on an east-to-west-coast road trip, pulling the car over on the highway shoulder in North Dakota to look out at the sky. What amazed me was that there was no visible light anywhere, so the starry sky I saw that night was something that I had not experienced in my lifetime. And I grew up in the midwest.

When I go outside at night in Chicago, it looks no different than daylight. Cars don't even need headlights. Fuck that noise. I always try to think of that night sky in North Dakota. But it never drowns out the sickly-orange glow of the city at night.
posted by ninjew at 10:35 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

In India a few months ago, as I was leaving my hotel in Chennai, I noticed a hotel employee shadowing me. He warned me that the sidewalks were so packed with people I would be swallowed up and stifled.

FWIW, this too reeks of nostalgic overstatement. I was in Chennai last February; the traffic and the smog are awful, but the sidewalks are not significantly more crowded than the bazaars in a rural Indian burgh, and they've got nothing on Madison Avenue at lunchtime. "Swallowed up and stifled"? Maybe if you're an old man stepping out of a four-star hotel and looking lost and overwhelmed, they'll tell you that. It's not them, Mr. Theroux, it's you.
posted by gompa at 10:39 AM on January 3, 2007

I should mention also that the India of 50 years ago he's presumably nostalgic for might've had its empty spaces and quiet, but it was also a place where people starved to death by the hundreds of thousands with clockwork regularity. The Faustian bargain of the Green Revolution enabled India to feed itself, though it also fed its cities the excess population Theroux laments and has created other ecological problems that are just now starting to emerge.

Which leads me to believe that history's neither a straight progressive line upward nor a straight regressive line downward but something more like a mad scribble in a thousand directions at once.
posted by gompa at 10:47 AM on January 3, 2007

Quite a bit of whistling in the dark here imo, as if sneering at the complaints of old men *isn't* itself tired cliche?

But Mightn't it be that the old men (and women) remembering lost things have often been correct? I think so.

I live here in central Illinois, where there's plenty of "open space," all of it plowed into vast squares full of genetically modified soy. But if I'd come here in the 1830's I'd have seen huge expanses of tall and short grasses, interspersed with small creeks and groves of trees, inhabited by Potowatamie Indians and a few white settlers, as well as buffalo, elk, and bears. That's all gone now, and never coming back. I'm sure that some of the really old timers felt some sadness surveying central Illinois about 1900 or so, and guess what? They were right.

There's nothing contemptible about regretting what's been lost, especially as part of a consideration of future development. What's worse, and more cruel, is the dismissal of the observations of older people merely because they're old.
posted by washburn at 11:00 AM on January 3, 2007

planet earth is a cage being fouled by over six billion rats on two legs. quality of life equals available resources divided by the number of rats competing for them. the results can be modeled mathematically; the rats have some altruistic properties - until they're crowded too close together, when they will rip each others' throats out. a few boss rats will emerge at the top of the pyramid, supported by a multitude of subordinate rats. the notion of "middle class" rats was a quaint anomaly in the evolution of the model and is now disappearing. the smarter rats gravitate toward the most pleasant parts of the cage, out of the way of the unpleasantness (rat hell) to come, where there are still starry nights and chirping cicadas, taking some small comfort in the fact that they are not immortal, and also that the cage itself has a collective invisible sentience (if you like, "gaia") which will ultimately rebalance instabilities.

greetings, my fellow rats! i wish you a day full of cheese and full of sex with other rats of the gender appropriate to your orientations!
posted by bruce at 11:08 AM on January 3, 2007

Just reminded of that Life in Hell cartoon-- My Father Said/I Say-- where he compares a number of statements, including this one (more or less): "When I was a kid, this was all fields and woods here, not these ugly buildings" and "When I was a kid, this was all a bunch of neat buildings, not these strip malls." Plus ca change, and all that.
posted by jokeefe at 11:13 AM on January 3, 2007

the smarter rats gravitate toward the most pleasant parts of the cage, out of the way of the unpleasantness (rat hell) to come

"Smarter" here doesn't necessarily follow... maybe just "luckier" or "more determined" or "actually found a smuggler who got them over the border as promised instead of abandoning them in the desert". Or something.
posted by jokeefe at 11:15 AM on January 3, 2007

It's interesting how nostalgia has become something to sneer at. It's not simply that the past is envied it's that those who envy the past are believed to be weak and quickly dismissed. One could never make a full frontal attack on the past, this would betray the sense of inevitability that must be encouraged, but one could mark those who talk too highly or too often of the past. This would achieve the same effect and is probably cheaper.
posted by nixerman at 11:16 AM on January 3, 2007

Rats on two legs? Decaying in a cesspool of pride?
posted by ibmcginty at 11:16 AM on January 3, 2007

What kozad said. Anyone who doesn't think the environment as a whole is getting worse - tiny improvements here and there notwithstanding - is not living on the same planet as the rest of us.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:39 AM on January 3, 2007

There's room for a billion people in this country.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 11:45 AM on January 3, 2007

and they've got nothing on Madison Avenue at lunchtime.

...which, in turn, has nothing on Shinjuku Station at 10.15 on yer average Wednesday morning. (It can be a hard thing for a lot of New Yorkers to accept - that theirs is, comparatively, a low-density and not terribly dynamic place.)

Point being, sure we can cherry-pick examples to suit whatever thesis we've ginned up. For myself, the piece resonates not so much for Theroux's findings [sic] regarding the quality of life in Chennai, but because here in the States my experiences sure have been that:

- people have gotten steadily ruder, more narcissistic, self-important and self-absorbed;
- importantly, and as a separate but related issue, contempt seems to have become a whole lotta folks' default position with regard to the others around them;
- anything resembling a time or a space of stillness (for contemplation, for intimacy, for doing nothing) is harder and harder to find, and generally must be purchased.

These may not be your experiences. They're mine. From where I sit, Theroux here manages to strike more than one true note. It may well be that this stance or something very much like it has been the fallback position for aging cranks since time immemorial. It may also be that he's right.
posted by adamgreenfield at 11:47 AM on January 3, 2007

(And on that note, I saw a graffito this year which has haunted me since the moment I laid eyes on it: "There's no such thing as utopia on a planet of six billion." Truer every day.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 11:48 AM on January 3, 2007

- people have gotten steadily ruder, more narcissistic, self-important and self-absorbed

Hey watch it! I'm the person of the year!
posted by washburn at 11:51 AM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

jokeefe: You all know that declining birth rates are directly related to female education and economic independence, as well as public health measures (including freely available contraception), right? Anyone who is concerned about population growth needs to look at those things. [/stating the obvious]

So gender equality is an evolutionary disadvantage?
posted by kid ichorous at 11:52 AM on January 3, 2007

By the way, anyone in search of peace, quiet and tranquility should visit Iceland. Once you get out of Reykjavík, which itself is an amazingly quiet city of 190,000, there are no people, very few animals (a few sheep wandering around, mostly) and, if you find a spot out of the wind, absolutely no sound (let alone noise) of any kind.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:58 AM on January 3, 2007

Reading Theroux's essay reminds me why I've always loved ESSAYS -- the form allows for such intense compression and expansion all within one 10 minute reading. This one is a beautifully formed piece of work.

Now, as to whether this is old man nostalgia? Well, duh. Of course it is. That's what old guys do. Doesn't change the fact that he brushes up against the truth, though.

I grew up on 400 acres of rural Minnesota woods and farm land. My childhood companions were a herd of Holsteins and a lone 60 foot white pine in our oak and elm and birch woods. My favorite book from childhood was Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to North American Wildflowers, because I could find and identify about half of the entries in our woods and fields. I spent large portions of my days in those woods and fields utterly and blissfully alone.

So yeah, I can see his point. And I agree with him. My own kids have some wild woods experiences, but nothing like those with which I grew up. Their childhood is different than mine.

Good discussion here -- thanks for the digressions.
posted by mooncrow at 12:13 PM on January 3, 2007

history's neither a straight progressive line upward nor a straight regressive line downward but something more like a mad scribble in a thousand directions at once.

Great line, and very true.

Mightn't it be that the old men (and women) remembering lost things have often been correct? I think so.

I think so too. "Correct" is not the same as "interesting." See my earlier comment re: timeless truths.

my experiences sure have been that:
- people have gotten steadily [etc. etc. etc.].
From where I sit, Theroux here manages to strike more than one true note.

Well, of course! That's why editors commission these thumbsuckers, these celebrations of the blindingly obvious and the sadly unavoidable: because everybody can identify with them, everybody feels they "strike more than one true note"! When I was young, I read such laments and (with an unearned pang of nostalgia) felt that I had been in touch with some deep wisdom, some Truth the author had vouchsafed me. Now, having read approximately 500,000 such pieces over the course of the last half-century or so, I just roll my eyes and wonder at man's capacity for self-delusion. Yes, of course you (the author) feel these things; doesn't it give you a moment's pause to reflect that people have felt these same things ever since they learned how to write, and presumably long before? "Man, Sumer isn't what it was when I was a boy..." "This cave used to be a nice cave, not so smelly and messy like it is now with all these damn people..." It's just like the claims that music, language use, style sense, etc. etc. have been going downhill all your life. It's nostalgic bullshit.

None of which is to say there aren't problems in the world that need fixing. But talk about the problems, don't mix it into your damn nostalgia. Save that for your grandkids.
posted by languagehat at 12:22 PM on January 3, 2007

These sorts of discussions always remind me of the section in Fast Food Nation where the author interviews an elderly fast food franchise owner. The restaurant owner looks at what used to be a wild space and is now one of those streets, filled with strip malls and chain stores, that could be pretty much any city in North America, and considers it progress because most peoples' lives are much easier than they were when he was a boy. The author, of course, sees an urban dystopia and an ongoing environmental catastrophe. Who's right? They both are. The problem is, this sort of progress is slowly killing us.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:23 PM on January 3, 2007

I heard once (and someone correct me if I'm totally off) that if the entire world's population lived in one city, the area would be about the size of the (US) states of Texas and Oklahoma combined. FWIW Great thread!
posted by jaronson at 12:29 PM on January 3, 2007

It's nostalgic bullshit to complain about music/art/culture/etc. going downhill, because they're matters of subjective taste. It's not nostalgic bullshit to point out that the environment is getting, by pretty much any objective measure I'm aware of, worse.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:36 PM on January 3, 2007

I remember when we used to have much more imaginative and considered threads on Metafilter.

But seriously, older ain't better. I don't have a hankering for Victoria values or Victorian urban pollution or Victorian social inequality. I do have a hankering for old-growth forests, clean water, diverse cultures not commercial monoculture, no climate change etc etc.

I'd just like to have them with a fast internet connection, a fair-trade latte, and proper contraception. The luddites were never against all progress, just the bits that were going to condemn them to poverty.
posted by imperium at 12:46 PM on January 3, 2007

...if the entire world's population lived in one city, the area would be about the size of the (US) states of Texas and Oklahoma combined.

And "Get offa My Lawn" would be the greatest and most popular country music song ever created.

There used to be a grove of trees behind my house growing up. And a creek. And lots of bunny rabbits.

Now there's lots of convenient shopping, I learned the "creek" was man-made drainage, and the grove of trees has migrated far to the north.

The bunnies....they're gone.

This was in Texas....I think they are moving here!
posted by wah at 12:53 PM on January 3, 2007

languagehat, or anyone: Isn't there some succinct Latin phrase along the lines of "where are the heroes [of yesteryear]" that has long nutshelled these sentiments?
posted by everichon at 12:54 PM on January 3, 2007

It's nostalgic bullshit to complain about music/art/culture/etc. going downhill, because they're matters of subjective taste. It's not nostalgic bullshit to point out that the environment is getting, by pretty much any objective measure I'm aware of, worse.

See my response above:

None of which is to say there aren't problems in the world that need fixing. But talk about the problems, don't mix it into your damn nostalgia.

Do you really think people will be more concerned about global warming if you throw in some crap about how when you were young you used to drive and drive in the moonlit night and listen to the cicadas?
posted by languagehat at 12:54 PM on January 3, 2007

everichon: Ubi sunt.
posted by languagehat at 12:56 PM on January 3, 2007 [2 favorites]

Nostalgia ain't what is used to be.
posted by Sparx at 1:03 PM on January 3, 2007

Do you really think people will be more concerned about global warming if you throw in some crap about how when you were young you used to drive and drive in the moonlit night and listen to the cicadas?

As opposed to what? Spouting off a bunch of statistics? Personalizing an issue has always been the best way to get people to empathize with it.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:07 PM on January 3, 2007

It bears mentioning here that as cities fill, small towns, whether in Nebraska or Nigeria, are emptying, as youngsters move to where the money is. I've been in too many depressing small towns where half the storefronts are empty and half the others charge so little rent that Aunt Clara can sell cookies and doilies and make a profit.

And, BTW, languagehat, there is a difference in writing about more or less objectively true phenomenon (including increasing lack of biodiversity and, perhaps, increasing rudeness) and complaining about how music, style sense, and language usage is going to hell. That kind of stuff is obvious bullshit. Comparing Beck to Louis Armstrong to Beethoven? And I know you and I are equally fed up with curmudgeonly prescriptivists in the language realm.

Perhaps you've read too many of these "thumbsuckers," and perhaps the thesis was too easy. Shooting fish in a barrel for ten cents a word. Valid complaint. I liked it, though.
posted by kozad at 1:07 PM on January 3, 2007

Good lord, LH, your New Year's resolution didn't last long!

Thinking about your statement - "None of which is to say there aren't problems in the world that need fixing. But talk about the problems, don't mix it into your damn nostalgia."

I suppose I could limit myself to scientific and rational discussion about the problems in my area - pollution, particularly - but it seems to resonate more if I compare the current state to what the area was like 50 years ago. And I have the postcards from then to add to the nostalgia!

It reminds me of a line in Lovely Bones (though I hated the book), something like "I was longing for a time, not a place, and one that would never come again."
posted by Liosliath at 1:11 PM on January 3, 2007

languagehat: Do you really think people will be more concerned about global warming if you throw in some crap about how when you were young you used to drive and drive in the moonlit night and listen to the cicadas?

Of course. People are more responsive to anecdotal arguments than statistical or rational ones. They do not relate to the grand tapestries, but rather to the individual threads and narratives within.
posted by kid ichorous at 1:19 PM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

everichon: Ou sont les neigedons d'antan? ;-)
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:20 PM on January 3, 2007

Mygoth: That one I remembered, not from Villon, but from Heller...and I am pleased to see the tidy triangle they create based on LH's "Ubi sunt" link. Thanks, languagehat!
posted by everichon at 1:23 PM on January 3, 2007

Personalizing an issue has always been the best way to get people to empathize with it.

People are more responsive to anecdotal arguments than statistical or rational ones. They do not relate to the grand tapestries, but rather to the individual threads and narratives within.

Sure, absolutely, but they have to be relevant and accurate personalizations and anecdotes. To me, his dime-a-dozen generalizations about how America Was Better When He Was Young don't cut it.

Good lord, LH, your New Year's resolution didn't last long!

Heh. Sadly true, but like I say, I make 'em big and break 'em fast.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on Theroux or anyone who likes this piece, and it's not even that I hate this piece in particular—it's perfectly well written, and the editor got his or her money's worth—I just find the whole genre a bore. Nostalgia was so much better when I was a kid...
posted by languagehat at 1:29 PM on January 3, 2007

So gender equality is an evolutionary disadvantage?

It's possible, but then so is civilization itself-- all that healing the sick and protecting the weak and the old and keeping around sick children instead of letting them die. We stepped off the evolutionary merry go round way back when: I don't think you can make a case that natural selection has been in force for a very long time-- at least not since we learned how to guarantee (in a good year at any rate), a food supply.
posted by jokeefe at 1:49 PM on January 3, 2007

relevant and accurate personalizations and anecdotes.

How on earth are you to judge? You cannot, since you aren't Paul Theroux.
posted by wilful at 1:55 PM on January 3, 2007

In my lifetime the population has doubled. I’m glad I grew up when the number of Americans was so much smaller. How does one explain to anyone under 50, or to the grateful unfazed immigrant from an overpopulated nation, that this was once a country of enormous silence and ordinariness — empty spaces not just in the Midwest and the rural South but in the outer suburbs of New England

Well, for one, maybe he could just visit the midwest, or the full west? I mean there is a lot of nice empty space in the U.S. Plenty. For all the urban areas compacting, there are rural small towns dwindling. Ohio's population is declining, for example.

Plus civil rights, the internet, Wiis. The world is a better place, and like I said, there is still plenty of open space.
posted by delmoi at 2:03 PM on January 3, 2007

Theroux's article does seem self-indulgent (oh, there's so many poor people in the way, playing the rich tourist is no fun any more) and just resigned to the parasitic nature of humans.

Languagehat: Doesn't it occur to him that Gosse recalled "the richness and beauty of the English shores of his youth" a century ago, and fifty years later old men were recalling the richness and beauty of the English shores at the very time Gosse was lamenting their disappearance, and now old men are recalling their richness and beauty fifty years ago, and fifty years from now... well, you get the idea.

This quote and the article together call up for me the frog in the pot of water gradually heating. Each temperature increase correlates to the changes during a generation, the members of which dismiss the last and refuses to learn from them. I don't know if the frog represents the species or the planet. Hoping it's the species. This is how the forests on Easter Island disappeared. Does vibrant culture have to lead eventually to a parasitic, climactic collapse? Well, this isn't askmefi. I ordered a book called Parasite Rex. Haven't read it yet. Thought it was about homo sap, but apparently not.
posted by Listener at 2:03 PM on January 3, 2007

there is still plenty of open space.

Shoulda previewed.

But not natural space. "The End of Nature," by McKibben.
posted by Listener at 2:05 PM on January 3, 2007

I would venture to say that a well-written "thumbsucker" sounding in nostalgia can resonate with those d'un certain age if it evokes sympathetic nostalgia: it is, of course, universal to the human condition that each of us must leave behind that which we love--if only because of "Time's winged chariot rushing near"-- and we are forced to leave a favorite place, or a loved one dies, and only the beautiful but ineffably sad memory of "before" remains. To evoke this "memory pain" need not involve any congruence of nostalgic symbol: shared emotion suffices. Each of us has a "before" to be nostalgic about, AntiPanglossians included.
posted by rdone at 2:36 PM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

jokeefe: It's possible, but then so is civilization itself-- all that healing the sick and protecting the weak and the old and keeping around sick children instead of letting them die..

Jokeefe, I think I agree, with the exception that those civilized behaviors (healing the sick, protecting the weak) increase survival and reproduction rates overall, rather than lowering reproduction rates overall.

I think a better question is whether a causal relationship between gender equality and lower birth rates would imply that truly gender-equal societies could only encompass a dwindling minority of population. And while they might compensate through immigration, it's also arguable that massive immigration from more populous, gender-unequal societies would gradually erode their own institutions of equality.
posted by kid ichorous at 2:47 PM on January 3, 2007

Do old colored black people talk about the good old days as well?
posted by wah at 3:12 PM on January 3, 2007

rdone: A beautifully written and convincing comment, and god knows I can get into the spirit of a good lament for les neiges d'antan; I guess what bugs me about the Theroux piece is that it's a misbegotten cross between a nostalgia piece and a Problems of Today rant. One or the other, please; don't get your peak oil in my nostalgic tears!
posted by languagehat at 3:14 PM on January 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Civil rights is to the modern Panglossian what WWII is to today's militarist. "Military spending is out of control, huh, NEVILLE!" vs. "The world is going to hell in a handbasket? What do you want, Jim Crow?!?"

I don't see anything wrong with Theroux's nostalgia - not every downhill trend is Last Chance to See. Is it so wrong to remark on how long it's been since I've seen the stars?
posted by bonecrusher at 3:48 PM on January 3, 2007

languagehat: muito obrigado for the kind words. If it weren't for adultery and nostalgia, the purveyors of art and music would be out of business.
posted by rdone at 4:17 PM on January 3, 2007

The world was always better when we were young...

Robert Crumb's A Short History of America

When I first moved to Seattle, one could drive ten miles out of town and see the Milky Way in the night sky. Now you have to drive over a pass to Eastern Washington to see it.

When languagehat and I were babies, there were still a few score wild cheetahs in Iran. When I was in grade school, the population of this country was 150 million and the last wild tiger in Afghanistan was killed. Now we number 300 million and there may not be a wild cheetah left on the continent of Asia. You may be able to hear cicadas in the summer but, man, good luck on seeing a night sky like the one I saw in Idaho when I was young.

The Yangtze porpoise is already gone. In our lifetime. We all here may quite possibly outlive the wild Indian tiger and the wild black rhinoceros, even languagehat and I.

And then there is all that frozen methane yet locked in all that now defrosting Siberian tundra...
posted by y2karl at 4:41 PM on January 3, 2007

Nostalgia may be timeless, but the sadness of losing open spaces, and clean water, and certain species, and clear skies, and an intimacy with the natural world . . . these are not timeless or clichéd concerns. These are real threats and real losses to what it has meant to be human for thousands upon thousands of years. You can blah blah blah it all you want, but we have been raping our resources for about 300 years, unnaturally distancing ourselves from something essential to our humanity, and we should not think it "cranky" if some of us express sadness, or anger, or imagine ever more dire consequences to come.

This kind of situation, this whole "losing the planet" thing, isn't old as the hills. I'd say it really got going in the mid-1800's with the steam engine--just yesterday in the scheme of things. Is it a coincidence that Transcendentalism (arguably the progenitor to Theroux's brand of sentimentalism here) popped up about the same time? We've been taking/losing the natural world for generations now and it's only getting uglier. It's bad, it's real, and we better fucking do something about it. Please get your head out of the sand, our your ass, or wherever you find it warm and safe and mildly amusing. We're about to civilize ourselves into oblivion.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 4:44 PM on January 3, 2007

. . . or what y2karl said.
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 4:46 PM on January 3, 2007

Theroux touched on the disappearing world in the Misquito Coast also.

Which makes the post content rather ironic, since the protagonist of Coast was as much incapable of adjusting to the future as Theroux is (apparently) now.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:26 PM on January 3, 2007

The writing that effectively created theenduring picture in my imagination of America when I was a child, of what is and was good about America, was the work of Ray Bradbury. Despite the fact that I was an avid science fiction reader as a pre-teen, it wasn't so much his Martian stories I loved as it was his evocative, half-fantasy portraits of small-town America. It may be debatable if the places he described ever really existed, but if they did, it's probably not debatable that they continue to disappear, swallowed up in the sprawl of concrete and industrial-scale commerce. Much as people have accused me of being an America-hater in the intervening years, and much as that may have been accurate when I was enraged by things that America the nation had done, I could never really be one, because I still carry in my heart the quiet, sunset-lit, sepia images of Bradbury's small town America.

All that is to say: Though it was too short, I don't have any problem with Theroux's essay, or his sentiment. Arresting writing need not be cloaked in the new to be beautiful or memorable. The tree is a perennial.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:43 PM on January 3, 2007

Nostalgia is a relatively recent phenomenon.
posted by maxwelton at 6:28 PM on January 3, 2007

I hate nature. It bites me.
posted by dame at 6:45 PM on January 3, 2007

And I know you and I are equally fed up with curmudgeonly prescriptivists in the language realm.

Tru dat, yo.
posted by Tube at 7:16 PM on January 3, 2007

As in Dandelion Wine, a copy of which I picked up at a yard sale recently. Bradbury is linked in my mind to Bill's New Stand which was across the street from my father's office. I used to go down to my dad's office after school and read the new Scrooge McDuck and Turok, Sun of Stone and then go over to Bill's little corner store and skim the new comics and science fiction when they came. in. I read the Classics Illustrated War of The Worlds there. And read half of Martian Chronicles.

Bill, the guy who owned the place had cerebral palsy and got around with some difficulty with crutches and braces. It was very hard to understand him when he talked, at least for me as a kid, and he had a hard time making change. Which made interacting with him sometimes awkward and sometimes scary. And yet he was, all the same, like a tree or a crack in the sidewalk, a part of the world for me.

I don't know the circumstances of his job, whether it was make work or real work, but he was there everyday bantering with townsfolk. And he took photographs of high school basketbal and football games. Which was what led to his demise--he stepped backwards into a hole on the football field and fell and hurt himself and eventually succumbed to a subsequent infection. And then that little glassed in corner store with those little wire paperback rack, with the coke machine that was a cooler with six and twelve ounce glass bottles of Cokes and Seven Up's and Nehi's hanging on racks by their necks and with all those books and magazines was gone forever overnight. I started going to the library alot, thinking, Boy, the world was a better place when I was in second grade.

Oh, where was I ?

Oh, yeah, Bradbury. Yeah, you've mentioned this before. And I have mentioned how Kingsley Amis kind of ruined him for me in New Maps of Hell--which I read in sixth grade--while admiring his lyric touch but tweaking him for overdoing it amd quoting something like from Dandelion Wine

"Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic night might die by the first of September, but now in late June there was still plenty of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs."

It was meant as an example of Bradbury being too fey by half. Which made me ambivalent about Amis's opinion, because while I could see his point, that passage suited my twelve year old self to a Tee with all that stuff about new tennis shoes, running through backyards and screen doors banging in the summer because that was, like, my life at the time. I was at the right age in a reasonable simulacra of the right place in the right season and the right time when I read it. I mean, there I was, sprawled across my bed, with windows were open, the sun set, the the moon was rising over the house next door, a fly buzzing round the light bulb and kids yelling a block over when I read it.

And, boy, the phrase screendoor summer came up in a quote farther on. That one has stuck in my mind ever since. I even remember skimming Dandelion Wine at Bill's magazine store looking for that passage. I can't remember if I ever found it.

I've read a couple of passages of Dandelion Wine looking for that passage since I got it again but, you know, I start rolling my eyes after awhile and put it down. I don't know, I may pick it up again if the mood comes upon me, if I get back into a twee tolerant, fey friendly and non rolling eye mode again. But life is so short.
posted by y2karl at 8:00 PM on January 3, 2007 [2 favorites]

Decades later, I still remember reading that passage, y2karl, and I still love it, perhaps in part because I love the boy I was when I first read it, and the way it made me feel.

Fey? Perhaps, to some. I may be too sentimental by half, but I'd rather be that than cynical. And I guess I'd rather be in love with writing that meant something to me, even if in some ways I've outgrown it. I think life is too short, too: too short to be anything but in love with it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:14 PM on January 3, 2007

Oh, dear, I was trying to back out and went off line. Well, anyway, it was a response, I guess, to that quiet, sunset-lit, sepia images of Bradbury's small town America. stavros wrote above. I didn't mean to post that at all.
posted by y2karl at 8:14 PM on January 3, 2007

No, it's fine y2karl, and I think I totally understand what you mean.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:17 PM on January 3, 2007

As to cynical and sentimental, I'm six of one and twelve dozen of another by turns, so I will get around to it sometime.
posted by y2karl at 8:18 PM on January 3, 2007

As to cynical and sentimental, I'm six of one and twelve dozen of another by turns

Me too. I think the two have to coexist, or else a person (or a writer-person) slides into self-caricature.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:22 PM on January 3, 2007

Oh, I have to add that even while reading those passages when I was a kid, I was a cynic. I loved the lyric of it but it was a fantasy to me even then. My little town was dying on the vine as I grew up, becoming more like The Last Picture Show, bleak and mean and oppressive with everything old closed or torn down when the interstate was built close but not through and any farmer could drive to Boise in a half hour. And, man, the incredibly openly racism, the politics somewhere to the right of Joe McCarthy and ethnic food one Japanese restaurant in Ontario, Oregon, Mexican restaurants as yet unknown to us--I may miss the drive ins and the bowling alley part of the fifties but I don't miss the fascist culture part of the Fifties, the nowhere to go, nothing to do American Graffitti meets Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life vibe of small town life then. Not at all.

Oh, and on preview:

...or else a person (or a writer-person) slides into self-caricature.

Been there, done that, get in line.
posted by y2karl at 8:51 PM on January 3, 2007

i think bradbury's america was a sheltered version of the real thing, but it really wasn't as far off as you'd think ... some of that world still existed in the early 60s, but it was gone by 1975 for good

as far as i'm concerned ... well, there are things i miss about the 70s, which is when i became an adult ... but there's a lot more things that i DON'T miss about them

it's my opinion we're ALL going to miss the last 10 years pretty soon ...
posted by pyramid termite at 8:51 PM on January 3, 2007

Well, love it and lose it in the meantime, then. Such as it is, like Woody Allen's two old ladies at the hotel in the Catskills complaining about the food so terrible and the portions so small.
posted by y2karl at 9:03 PM on January 3, 2007

Doesn't it occur to him that Gosse recalled "the richness and beauty of the English shores of his youth" a century ago, and fifty years later old men were recalling the richness and beauty of the English shores at the very time Gosse was lamenting their disappearance, and now old men are recalling their richness and beauty fifty years ago, and fifty years from now... well, you get the idea.

And those old men were correct, as Theroux is. Those environments they loved and enjoyed have indeed steadily declined, as their inhabitants died as a consequence of human population expansion. This is nothing to sneer at.

I myself am having a great dose of this at the moment. It's summer where I live, and I would like to share with my daughter the kind of summer I had at her age. But this is impossible. There are fewer fish, and fewer different kinds. The beaches are full, and built up. The water quality has declined. You cannot roam freely in the hinterland because it is subdivided and fenced. Life is diminished in those areas. That is not a perceptual problem on my part caused by my becoming an old fogey, it is a consequence of greatly increased population density.

I would agree with you if Theroux was lamenting the rudeness of youth and the decline of manners. Cultures change, the old hate and fear the young, and that is the way of the world. But Theroux is talking about something different: a genuine qualitative change caused by large numbers of people. Whatever is unique about fewer people by definition cannot exist as we add more and more of them. Isn't that sad? I think so.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:07 AM on January 4, 2007

Interesting discussion re. nostalgia, youth and cynicism, y'all. Brings to mind the only piece of poetry that actually brings tears to my eyes:

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give me back
the soul I had
when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

- Federico García Lorca
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:07 AM on January 4, 2007 [2 favorites]

Thanks for that Card Cheat.
posted by vronsky at 2:50 PM on January 8, 2007

And y2karl - I took summer school once to makeup a credit or something and the class was made up of a motley bunch of early teen hooligans.

Every day after the lunch break, the teacher would read to us from Dandelion Wine. For about an hour, it was absolutely silent in the back rows, and I swear, even the toughest of the kids was transported by that book.

Thanks for reminding me of that.
posted by vronsky at 3:00 PM on January 8, 2007

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.

I’m alive, he thought. . . .

The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and far away below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were suns and starry spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. . . .

Well, I finally read Dandelion Wine all the way through, and, on the whole, have no regrets. It had more than a few moments, is a classic young adult novel, as it turns out, and darker than I expected. It is interesting that, like Martian Chronicles, it was assembled in part from short stories, that some of those were published when he was in his 20s, and that many began with things he wrote in high school.

It was news to me that Bradbury has written, a sequel of sorts, Farewell Summer. To mixed reviews at best. That should not be news. A sequel to a long established classic seems a dubious proposition at best.

And here is a recipe for Dandelion Wine. Hmm, but where to find organic dandelions....
posted by y2karl at 11:07 AM on January 11, 2007