- Long piece by Mike Lofgren at Salon about how we got from the 1960s to here; how we’re in an era of stagnation;
- My brief thoughts about how this might apply to science fiction;
- Tim Callahan at Skeptic spells out why holy relics and holy places are fiction;
- With comments about how many many people reached his conclusion early on, and my wondering if we’ll ever get beyond this.
- And a teaser about the nature of music, items to be posted tomorrow.
This is more than another piece about Trump’s gold kitsch White House. The writer is looking for a deep explanation of how we got to this state, saying there have been “surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to describe how and why our country lurched into its present state.” Actually I think I’ve seen quite a few, it’s just that there’s no consensus among them.
Salon, Mike Lofgren, 9 Aug 2025: How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?, subtitled “Our culture turned on itself, stagnated and went rancid — that’s how”
Quite apart from the fact that 20 years ago, almost none of our supposed thought leaders foresaw that the United States would slide into a fascist-style dictatorship by 2025, there have been surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to describe how and why our country lurched into its present state.
Endemic racism is often put forward as a rationale. …
Long piece. After racism, the writer briefly considers the mid-1960s reaction to civil rights, Nixon acting as a dictator, later economic anxiety; and gradually dismisses them. E.g.
Many of the same people who howled that Biden was wrecking the country because gasoline went up by a nickel a gallon, but praise Trump to the skies even as his tariffs damage their business and threaten to leave them unemployed, are clearly not operating according to the rational choice theory beloved by economists and political scientists.
So perhaps the answer is in culture?
He goes through many examples from music and film (mostly) to contrast the vibrancy of culture, both serious and pop, in the 1960s and up through the ’70s, with the backlash that set in by the late ’70s. The 1970s was the fulcrum. E.g. ambitious ‘arty’ films of the early ’70s were replaced by blockbusters like Jaws (and I would add Star Wars) and many others that have become endless franchises. Similarly in music: the adventurous, polyphonic West Side Story in 1961 became square only after a few years with the folk revival of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, which quickly gave way to the British invasion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Things changed very fast.
Now we have pop music with singers like Taylor Swift and country songs that all sound the same. (Curious aside from a decade ago: This video proves every hit country song sounds the same which I haven’t yet listened to.)
With the benefit of hindsight, I propose a more uncompromising thesis: American culture has become incurious, unwelcoming, backward-looking and fearful. It does not seek the new, but demands endless repetition of the same themes, merely with greater elaboration, gaudier technical effects and greater expense. The culture industry (now synonymous with billion-dollar mega-corporations) does little more than regurgitate stereotyped forms and simulacra. Its symbiosis with a political era that is reactionary, anti-intellectual and xenophobic should be clear.
That is, we’re in an era of stagnation. Examples of our elderly politicians, our falling life expectancy (we’re now 55th in the world), and how good ideas are rejected: “While some residents understood that steel wasn’t coming back and that the town should embrace new opportunities, others denounced it as some sort of woke Democratic plot to undermine the community.”
This analysis dovetails perfectly with MAGA and its obsession of returning to a mythical golden past and resisting new ideas as “woke.” Circling back to the kitsch:
At the more exalted level of national politics, cultural stagnation is a dive into tackiness and kitsch. Trump has been busy (when not otherwise occupied ruining the country) desecrating the White House: bulldozing the Rose Garden and slathering everything that doesn’t move with faux-rococo gold leaf, transforming a once-restrained neoclassical structure into something like one of Saddam Hussein’s Tikrit palaces or a 19th-century Naples bordello. Which, upon consideration of the president’s current Jeffrey Epstein-related difficulties, is grimly appropriate. He even intends to deface the entire White House complex with a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, Versailles as reimagined by Tony Soprano.
And concluding:
When culture stagnates, and the degradation of political life feeds back into that culture, it doesn’t merely stay the same; it degenerates into a hideous pastiche of itself. Where have we seen Trump’s megalomania before? Hitler’s plan to transform Berlin into Germania? Stalin’s wedding-cake architecture? The extravagant kitsch monument in Rome, finished under Mussolini’s rule?
There is of course no firm one-to-one correspondence between a stagnant, decaying culture and the collapse of civic politics into dictatorship-as-reality TV. But as with pornography, we know it when we see it.
\
Finally, I’ll note a correspondence with science fiction. SF’s history in the 20th century was somewhat like that of jazz music, as originally being disregarded as not “serious,” and later somewhat like that of “classical” music, where different writers of composer developed mature styles that were distinctive — you would not confuse Silverberg for Le Guin for Delany any more than you’d confuse Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner. (The academic critics who dismissed science fiction as sub-literary never noticed this.)
But there were ups and downs. Arguably, SF reached peaks of thematic variety and artistic achievement by the early and mid 1970s. Right before Star Wars (and, in parallel, the popularly of The Lord of the Rings and its spinoffs), which undermined them, and led to a kind of stagnation today, with precious little original science fiction anymore amidst a tide of endless fantasy novels, many of which are, just like the movies, sequels and series.
\\\
Another topic which, I suppose, might be tied to the theme of stagnation, e.g. no amount of explaining will undermine the human inclination to believe in supernatural beings in order to maintain allegiance to cultural tribes. This is more about taking human experience at face value, as discussed in a previous post. If you try to spell this out to someone, they won’t understand, or will pretend not to, and will refuse to believe you, because maintaining their identity and their allegiance to the tribe (religion) is of paramount importance.
This is more than about current politics; it’s more about the ultimate limitations of the human species. Despite the scientific and technological advancements made in the past couple centuries, culturally we’re stuck, stagnant.
Skeptic, Tim Callahan, 1 July 2025: Holy Relics, Holy Places, Wholly Fiction
I recently watched a television show alleging the fascination Hitler, Himmler, and the Nazis had for certain holy relics and their desire to possess them. Among these were the Ark of the Covenant, containing the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai; the Holy Grail, the chalice Jesus drank from at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of Christ at the Crucifixion; and the Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Jesus during the Crucifixion.
Of course, the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail call to mind two of the Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. While these films are acknowledged as fiction, the three relics the Nazis supposedly desired are thought by many to be real. And throwing in Nazis is a convenient hook to hoist up sales in just about any medium on just about any subject.
The writer goes on to discuss the Spear of Destiny (which I’d never heard of), the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, and Holy Landmarks of Jerusalem and the Moon. In each case, discussing where such artifacts emerged, and how stories about them were consciously shaped to correspond to Biblical texts, with many quotes from scriptures. In great detail, worthy of Thomas Paine. It was very important to people to try to validate the prophecies of the ancient scriptures.
Why?
Personal comments venturing beyond the article. This is analogous to “follow the money” — the claimant has some motive other than simple truth. To the many of us who left religion at an early age, this seemed blindingly obvious. All these stories are told for a reason; *they are not literally true.* What are the reasons? To maintain the cultural myths that bind tribes and communities together. And therein lies human culture and politics. And conservatives. And MAGA.
Will we, the species, ever get beyond this? I would say, we are getting beyond this, if only gradually. America is not, quite yet, a nation is where you can be arrested or put to death for challenging the beliefs of the church.
Though if Trump and MAGA have their way, it might turn out that way. It’s hard to ascend, easy to slide back.
\\\
Tomorrow I’ll have a couple items about Bruce Springsteen and the nature of music. Except the say this:
When you listen to modern music, it’s like being exposed to a new language. It sounds weird, and you reject it at first, but eventually it becomes understandable, even essential. It opens new realms of perception and understanding.
