Little Pieces of America All Around Us

Yeah? What America is that?
(click to enlarge)

I really, really like Creedence Clearwater Revival. But the reason why is pretty embarrassing: when, at sixteen, I rebelled against my parents’ popular culture, as sixteen-year-olds do, I wasn’t ready to embrace Nirvana and Pearl Jam like my peers. I feared getting into anything “new,” and getting left behind, like my friends who’d previously enjoyed Nu Shooz or Duran Duran. Novelty was risky; old stuff came pre-screened. So I started listening to the oldies station.

As half-hearted rebellions go, mine probably seems mild. Given the recent popularity of steampunk, crypto-fascism, and hipsters dressed as Canadian loggers, digging the rock’n’roll of a prior generation isn’t that bad. Except, I’ve increasingly realized, I didn’t really embrace that generation’s vision. Any listen through Casey Kasem’s back catalog reveals that American Top Forty radio has long been dominated by tedious music, driven by labels and producers who manipulate, rather than listen to, the market.

So yeah, I understand the impulse driving people made uncomfortable by today’s cultural divides. I witness friends, people I like and trust, embracing the “Make America Great Again” motto, creating excuses for everyone from Bill Cosby to Peter Cvjetanovic, and calling anything that doesn’t support their power structure “fake news.” Meanwhile, the political party that represents organized progressives offered voters a choice, in the last presidential primary, between nostalgia for the 1990s or the 1950s.

This massive aversion to risk comes at a time when America’s structure is already changing. Our demographics are in motion, as immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East give this country an increasingly brown complexion. Our range of media options continues to increase as the carrying capacity of TV and Internet sources improves, and we’re drowning in new ideas. Even commerce has become chaotic, with the hectic panoply of chains and online retailers.

Naturally, a large fraction of Americans retreat into what’s comfortable. Whether that means pining for a sunlit Norman Rockwell townscape, or voting for the candidate who promises to restore what we consider our glory days, or listening to “Bad Moon Rising” with the volume at eleven, we’re seeing the same motivation. People intimidated by change, which happens faster now that we can (or choose to) manage, naturally retreat into their favorite version of the past.

I understand this impulse, but I fear it, too. Back in the 1980s, when I began paying attention to social issues, I remember people already complaining that suburban sprawl, with its lack of shared common spaces like parks and downtowns, created vast “communities” bound together only by geographical proximity. Residents sorted themselves into real communities by their workplaces, churches, watering holes, and their children’s schools. Ideas, like people, became unofficially segregated in our diverse America.

Today’s media landscape sees that segregation happening even more quickly. We watch Fox News or MSNBC and have our favorite prejudices ratified by well-coiffed pundits, and equally importantly, we see our ideological challengers reduced to manageable caricatures. We choose our radio stations to ensure we hear only what we know we already enjoy, and, as Gretchen Rubin writes, streaming services like Pandora and Spotify actually narrow our exposure. We’ve improved innovation exposure to a science.

Nor am I immune to this. After resisting new culture for decades, I embraced indie rock when I was pushing forty. But at a recent concert, I realized: this audience is almost as white as the Charlottesville Nazi rally. I could excuse even that as the natural self-sorting nature of crowds, except that I’d driven over 320 miles to see this concert, which I’d heard advertized on an out-of-town radio station I listen to online.

Sadly, I have no ready solutions. I see how aversion to novelty reduces me to a stereotype, the middle-aged white “kid” listening to indie with other honkies. But the alternative is switching my listening habits to locally available radio, which not only bores me, but is overwhelmingly owned by out-of-town corporations famously unresponsive to local needs. I could complain that corporations shattered my community… but I’d have to admit they did it with my assistance.

If America is shattered, as the nostalgia vendors claim, then we have broken it, you and I. We could, as many do, pin responsibility on corporations, or government, or millennials. But that’s just punting the issue down the field. We elect a government, but we lack leaders. We join social networks, but we don’t organize. We look at the little pieces of America all around us and, like good little passive citizens, we do… nothing.