How to tell if you're cool
or if you're a fascist
Dear Emily,
Today I was watching a documentary about a musician whose music I liked very much in the 80s and 90s. He's still making music, different stuff now but still enjoyable.
In the documentary, there was a scene of him scrolling through his iPad mini and I was so disappointed. It was a real pull back the curtain moment. I don't want to see that.
There's nothing wrong with it, of course, but I had such a visceral reaction, like thinking about your elementary school teacher going to the bathroom or something. I'm worried that now everything that was special, mysterious, unreachable might actually just be mundane. What's wrong with me? Is it because I am going to be 50 this year?
-Yearning for mystery and people to look up to
Dear Yearning for mystery and people to look up to,
Between the ages of 24 and 27, I dated a math professor from Poland. He was 19 years older than me and had very strong opinions about history and semantics and culture and language and the Math Department’s idiotic preference for applied mathematics over pure math. Such peasants, really, idolizing application and utility.
He had two PhDs, one in mechanical engineering and one in math. He lifted weights at the gym in his street clothes, suspenders and all. He insisted that our dog, Gus (named after Gus Hall, leader of the American Communist Party during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s) be allowed to wander freely all day long. Sometimes Gus would bring friends home, other dogs.
Andrzej called non-smoking places “cathedrals of health,” and he said that there was an “American face,” that was distinguishable from white European faces—blanker, childish, more generic, with boring noses. His devastating announcements gave me a thrill. I’d never heard anyone put down America. He preferred Jews and black Americans. I was safe from his critiques because I wasn’t all white, I didn’t have bad handwriting like his calculus students, I wasn’t a blind conformist, and I was still young enough to guide away from stupidity.
He thought it was a waste of time for me to have a job selling clothes at the mall. I should spend my days reading books and drawing and writing, and he would pay for everything. He thought I should be a writer or a textile designer.
Whenever I’m tempted to memorialize him (he died a decade ago) as a pure genius because he had read every history and philosopher, it seemed to me, and truly knew the political history of every nation on earth, I remind myself that he liked Steve Forbes as a presidential candidate and was for the flat tax.
But Andrzej was the one who explained fascism to me in a way that really stuck. He said that fascism is a nostalgia and reverence for a fake past. The lauding of the past as more pure and true and good than the present and then using that fake picture of the past—especially if it’s marked by heroic, rustic purity—to bully people in the present.
Are you a bit of a fascist?*
Are you using your nostalgia for a fake past (when composers from the 1980s wrote music down in ball point pen on scraps of paper wrapped around clean engine parts—I don’t know what that means, it just seems cool) to bully yourself about your level of coolness?
Maybe you define coolness or artistic legitimacy as whatever is unknowable and different from YOU. Ergo, you can never be cool!
Everybody poops and everybody uses iPad minis.
No, I’m kidding. Some people do not poop. But they’re to be pitied because it’s a very dire medical condition.
I sent my father-in-law a card last year that showed an illustration of some plants or animals or maybe cells (I can’t remember which) and he recognized that they were drawings by an old favorite of his Ernst Haeckel, a zoologist who discovered, named, and drew many species of plants and animals in the 1800s and early 1900s. (The drawing of bats above is by Haeckel.)
It’s cool that Haeckel took so much time to study and draw things with pencil and pens. If he were alive today, he’d probably use Photoshop, right? But I hope he’d still be fascinated by the world and interested, like a manic collector.
Hockney makes paintings now with an iPad. Nietzsche pooped. Toni Morrison pressed command C or control V or whatever. Rappers buy beats. Vermeer used a camera obscura.
You are as cool as anybody.
And there are still special and mysterious things in the world, even now that we are older and can reach and see more, and are familiar with more of the recipes and tools. Food that we make ourselves can still taste good, right?
Best,
Emily
P.S. I agree, there are tools that make us into slaves. Maybe the iPad is one of those tools? I don’t know because I have never used one.
Please write to me about what’s bothering you! EmilyWritesBack@gmail.com