Your Presidents

 

Who would be your fifth face on Mount Rushmore, if it was even possible?

Or, "I will turn your face to alabaster..."--Sting

Presidents form the highs and lows of your life as backstory; Your world is colored by the president that was in office when you first entered real adulthood, got your first good job, your own house or apartment, began raising a family, and voted in elections. But your zeitgeist is different from zeitgeists of other generations. Before then, presidents are people who are on the news and nothing more--save for an interest you had in history classes in junior high. They were people your parents were intensely concerned with. You hadn't lived long enough for there to be any backstory to set the narrative context.

This reminds me of the 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter. The opening scene is of a school bus crash, but the film wasn't about that--it was contextual foreshadowing. If you hadn't read the Russell Banks novel, you would be thinking that it was somehow central to the narrative. But it's just the backdrop--the inflection point in which the story unfolds. The bus crash is in some sense more generically symbolic--a common trope or archetypal tragedy and could have been any other tragedy that stresses a community. When I watched it then, I was in a personal zeitgeist period and wasn't "triggered" in any way. It was something that happened to other people.

Tragedies that occur under presidents are 'epigenetic' in the sense of the effect of the stressor on individuals. These effects are more likely to affect adults, and children pick up on the anxieties. If the parents bemoan that the world is going insane, that could eventually rub off on the kids. Imagine how parents 25-50 felt in the 1960s and 70s, yet you were 5-15 years old. There is unnerving imagery on the TV but you're more interested in the cartoons. I've heard from several people that the Kennedy assassination had created nervous breakdowns within families. This is one of my takeaways from the book Hidden Valley Road with the high of a postwar zeitgeist creating strange side effects (or hangovers) in suburban families--with the television set the new "hearth", showing images of a world going to hell circa 1966. It's only in your mid-20s in the early 90s, during Bush 41 and Clinton, that you begin to look at what went wrong, and we (most of us) look to presidents to fix them. Children born circa 2012 will be looking back at 2020 with the same questions in the mid-40s, and might also be looking at presidents as "fixers".

I must say, 2020 is certainly the polar opposite of 1992 as it affects the life of someone in their 30s. For someone born in 1942, the Clinton presidency might be viewed as a complete travesty. There are some who would still agree with that sentiment, even today in any generation. They would include the people who voted for Reagan as a reaction. When Reagan was in office, I had political views, but they weren't at the center of my life, and even if I kept a diary at that point, I might not have been reacting to it as a way of life. In the 1980s, I was more of a jazz musician--or simply an enthusiast of jazz (still am). Jazz doesn't now have a large capacity for politics, although many jazz musicians, such as Charles Mingus, as well as other musicians in the Civil Rights Movement, had used the art form for political signaling. (An art form or genre can be political only to the degree of its popularity--usually for the artists themselves. Anyone can make something political but it won't create a movement. Bob Dylan created a movement. Jakob Dylan didn't--as far as I know. Since jazz is esoteric it doesn't have a loud enough voice).

Perhaps it was a coincidence, but I began to write songs with lyrics--as opposed to jazz compositions--around 1992, the beginning of the Clinton era. In your 30s you've probably been triggered by world events and you want to express it in some way. Some artists continue making political statements their entire lives, probably based on how reactive they are to stressors, as well as being proactive against them. I tend to gravitate to core processes rather than Statements. If there is a Statement it's junior to the process for the sake of itself--or at least something with universality or wisdom, rather than something that's "hashtaggy"). Many times I recycle my old political songs like an old car--a chord change (a bumper), a rhythm (a taillight). I'm not attached to the ideas or ideologies involved as praxis: I don't live as a political expression of myself. Creativity is not a form of activism, although I'm glad people do it well.

This is a verse from a song reactive to Gulf War I, written in 1992, which now seems naive or old-hat, but there are universal themes about modernity within it. (Norman Schwarzkopf was one of the characters at play at that time). 

A soldier on the front line
Covered in stars and stripes
His mother waits at home
For the daily dose of media hype
Major General, you're just told what to say
"We can drop them bombs on them for a year and we'll still be here." (On the compartmentalization that occurs in order to comply with a "decapitation" Operation).

The Clinton years were the most interesting years of my life, and I suspect that people who are in their 20s and 30s now look upon the current administration as being the best part of their lives. (Mayors can work the same way: Richard J. Daley was my mayor). But you probably wouldn't have found those sentiments during the Roosevelt administration in the Great Depression as someone in their 20s--so it stands to reason that more people are suffering as they were in the Depression-era. I can't imagine that once Millennials are in their 50s and 60s they will not be looking back at the salad days of the early 2020s. It certainly is not a zeitgeist, because the spirit of the time would have been enjoyed globally. The diaries and journals will tell the story if they are accessible, as well as all the internet activity, social media accounts, and so on. 

We speak of being from different generations, but the real Generation is all of the people who are currently living. Obviously, we are sharing everything that is happening at the moment, but individual intragenerational memory tends to color the experiences differently.

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[11/1/2024: If you’re 18 in 2024 you probably can’t conceive of what’s actually happening now in the US and globally. It’s a good time to get nerdy about history. I wish I had done it back then. Perhaps Reagan wouldn’t have gotten elected, or would have served only one term had we been more involved. 11/2023: Ask how many people in Gaza have no interest in politics or if there is voter apathy, and you will determine how many people are in the crossfire and are being disproportionately attacked.]