Hi y’all.
Before we begin, I want to pay special homage to Tom Daley, who finally won Olympic gold! I just love Tom Daley, who might be the most adorable man on the planet. His resilience and determination are a lesson to us all in perseverance and self-belief. May we all doggedly pursue our dreams until they came true, just as Tom Daley has.
That said, it seems an awkward time to tell you that I am going to be stepping away from this newsletter. Not forever, just for several weeks. I’m going to be reducing my workload in August to spend more time reading and researching but also enjoying what is left of summer. I may send out one or two issues in the meantime, especially if there is something I really want to write about, but don’t expect regular weekly installments again until sometime in September or possibly even early October.
Moving on… what a week, huh? For those of you who don’t know, Jack – the puppy in the recurring “picture of the puppy” section – was ill on Friday. I had to take him to the emergency vet in Knoxville. We thought he was bitten by a snake, but the vet assured me that was not the problem. After a series of x-rays and exams, she determined he has hookworm (eww) but could find nothing else wrong with him. Six hours and $500 later, she gave us some medicine and sent us on our way.
Jack seems to be doing much better now. I want to thank you all for your prayers and well-wishes. I especially want to thank Sheena for the very generous contribution towards Jack’s vet fees. I was not expecting that, but it made a very scary and awful day a little bit better. I truly appreciate not just the money, but the kindness behind it. I have the best Internet friends in the world.
If you want to contribute to Jack’s vet bills – or just help me make a living from writing – you can become a Patron for as little as $3 a month, make a one-time donation using PayPal, or buy me a book to help with my research. All contributions are greatly appreciated, no matter how big or how small!
But as always, this newsletter is and remains free. No contribution is expected. So without further ado, let’s proceed to the main event!
On Millennial patriotism (or the lack thereof)…
Back in the 1990s, I watched this made-for-tv film called What’s Right With America. From what I remember it was narrated by Patrick Duffy (of Dallas and Step by Step fame) and focused on a family whose father or son (or maybe both?) were forced to fight for a fascist American government against insurgent guerillas determined to preserve democracy and freedom.
IMDB says the film came out in 1997, when I was 11. Even at that older age, it scared me so badly that I remember it after all these years. I thought about that film as I read Jacob Jarvis’ Newsweek cover story about declining levels of patriotism among Millennial and Gen Z Americans. Polling shows that while 84 percent of Boomers and 71 percent of Gen X is proud to be American, only 52 percent of Millennials and 58 percent of Gen Z said the same. “It raises an obvious question,” Jarvis writes. “Why do younger people feel less proud than their elders?”
As a Millennial writer who isn’t always the picture of American patriotism – I am cheering as much for Team Great Britain as I am Team USA in the ongoing Olympics – I nonetheless have written quite a bit about this phenomenon in my day. I even tackled this topic, at least tangentially, two weeks ago in this very newsletter. “…an honest look at American history,” in addition to providing a lot to be ashamed of, I wrote, “also provides much to be proud of.” And I believe that. I really do.
Jarvis does a good job of explaining why patriotism might be declining among younger generations. Explanations range from an honest reckoning with our bloody history to downward mobility (Millennials are poorer than our parents were) to the more mundane explanation that younger people tend to be more antiestablishment and will likely grow more patriotic as they grow older.
There’s some truth in all of these, and I will not rehash them here. Instead, what I want to do is write about the things that make me, a working-class gay Appalachian Millennial, ashamed to be American. And then I want to write about the things that make me proud to be American. In doing so, I hope to provide some light on why my generation might not be as proud to be American as our parents and grandparents, and on ways to help build a sense of patriotism in young Americans.
I was born in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president. We still live in his world. I was 15 when the Twin Towers fell. I was 17 when we invaded Iraq. I was 18 when George W. Bush was re-elected. I was 22 – an age most of my peers were graduating from college – when the economy collapsed, and the Great Recession began. That was also the year Barack Obama was elected as the first Black president, which kicked up so much white outrage that eight years later we elected our first Orange president.
As you can see, my early life was defined by the events that have led to the decline, if not the fall, of the American empire. Things have been pretty bleak from where I stand. More than 500,000 Americans have died of COVID, most of them unnecessarily. We just survived an attempted coup. Minimum wage workers can’t afford rent anywhere in the country. Our healthcare system is unaffordable and inefficient, the consequences of adopting and refusing to let go of a for-profit model. Millennials like me are already earning 20 percent less than our Boomer parents. We have more debt and less wealth than them, too.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t believe that America is “the greatest country on earth,” not least because that is impossible to quantify. Yet, I also realize that I’d much rather live here than in Hungary or Poland or Russia or Belarus or any number of other nations and places on any other continent. Some of that is cultural – I like being Appalachian, and you aren’t going to get a lot of Appalachian culture in Minsk – but some of that is material, too. “…on the whole, I’d rather be alive and in America in 2021 than at any time or any place in human history. Especially as a gay man,” I wrote for Newsweek earlier this summer.
That remains true. Gay Americans have more rights than almost anywhere in the world. The USA ranks number 20 in global quality of life – not great, given we’re the richest nation on earth, but on the whole, not terrible. By many measures, the poorest Americans still live better than the vast majority of the world’s population; writing in 2012 for The Oregonian, Elizabeth Hovde reckoned that “[i]f your family income is $10,000 a year, you are wealthier than 84 percent of the world.” That may be a damning indictment of capitalism as a global exploitative system, but it also means – materially speaking – there are worse places to be than the good ole’ U S of A.
People on the right, especially older generations, will no doubt think that ought to be enough to make me proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. And that I shouldn’t forget the men who died who gave that right to me… wait, that’s a Lee Greenwood song. Sorry.
Certainly, yes, I am happy to be here when I think of all the other places where things are demonstrably shit. But just as chiding recalcitrant Republicans about the virtues of vaccines and masks doesn’t seem to be making them any more receptive to science, scolding Millennials and Gen Z for not embracing some Mel Brooksian “could be worse, could be raining” patriotism isn’t going to work, either.
I think it is important that we acknowledge the elephant in the room here. Neoliberal policies, initiated by Ronald Reagan and carried out by predecessors, have destroyed America’s working class and upward mobility. 40 years of attacks on not only the welfare state but on government and civic institutions in general have taken a toll. Trust in our universities, scientists, and civil service is at an all-time low. That’s a problem.
The America that Boomers and even, to some extent, Gen X grew up in simply is not the America that I and my fellow Millennials – and certainly not the America that Gen Z – grew up in. The union jobs that used to represent social mobility have disappeared along with America’s manufacturing might. With them, the things Boomers and their predecessors looked forward to – decent wages, regular raises, good benefits including medical, and a pension on which to retire – have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
I read somewhere once that Millennials will have at least five careers in their lives. Not jobs. Careers. I’m 35 and on my second. Third if you count the brief time I spent in the service industry right out of college. My grandfather worked 30 years at the Chrysler Corporation, retiring in 1994. He and my grandmother still live off his pension, supplemented by Social Security. That is not a life I will ever know.
The economic precarity of my position, and the position of so many Millennials, obviously engenders a certain bitterness and cynicism. As I have regularly said since the 2008 crash, we were promised the keys to the kingdom only to find out that they had changed the locks. Study hard, they said. Go to college, they said. It’s the only way to ensure your future and a stable income, they said.
They lied.
To be fair, I don’t think most of the people telling us this – our parents, our teachers – knew they were lying. Most genuinely believed that having us go thousands and thousands of dollars in debt would pay off in the long run. What they weren’t banking on was a market saturated with bachelor’s degrees would drive down the value of said degree in the capitalist marketplace, in turn pushing those who don’t have degrees or some special certification either into the most menial of jobs or out of the workforce entirely.
In 2011, a year after graduating with my history degree, I didn’t know what to do. I took an entry level job at a mortgage company in Chicago. At the time, they only required applicants have a high school diploma. Two years later, when I left that company (having been twice promoted), the same job I was hired in at required a bachelor’s degree.
What changed? The job didn’t get harder. The role was not expanded. It had the same duties it did when I was hired. The company could simply afford to be pickier because there were so many Millennials with college degrees and no job to show for it. So now you have young people with mountains of student loan debt taking entry level jobs that pay at best a little over minimum wage, trying to balance repaying said debt with an ever-increasing cost-of-living. Meanwhile, you have non-college graduates who are being pressed out of jobs which, two years earlier, they were qualified for. What are they to do? Where are they to go?
This is not a tenable situation. Millennials recognize this. Gen Z will increasingly recognize it as they enter the workforce. A lot of the bitterness those of us under 40 feel towards America are directly related to our material circumstances. We did everything you told us to do – you being our parents, grandparents, teachers, and elected leaders – and then you screwed us over. So, there’s a lot of rage there.
It isn’t that we are lazy, either, which is the stereotype so often attributed to us. Yet, research shows we are actually “work martyrs” who are more likely to work overtime and less likely to take vacation than our elders. No doubt some of this is down to ambition, but more of it is also down to survival. We have to work hard in order to simply live. Millennials are increasingly burning out, and in the process, questioning whether the capitalist system which sold us a bill of lies is really the best system for us – and whether a country which embraces such an exploitative system can truly call itself the greatest country in the world.
As if the dawning realization that we are being crushed under the jackboot of capital is not enough to sour our mood, young Americans are also waking up to the fact that America has a history – and, lets be honest, current habit – of being pretty damn racist. The murder of George Floyd sparked countless protests against police brutality but let us be sure: George Floyd was not the first and he will not be the last. We do not need to list the name of every unarmed Black person killed by police in this country, as their names – such as Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland – are burned in our collective memory.
There is currently a moral panic on the right over “critical race theory.” I put this in quotation marks because of the chasm separating what critical race theory actually is and what those right-wing culture warriors opposing critical race theory think it is. The actual critical race theory is an academic field of study in which legal theorists and scholars examine how laws and legal structures arise from and/or perpetuate racism in a systemic level.
Critical Race Theory is so incredibly narrow that I only experienced straight up critical race theory being taught in one class at university. That class was called “minority politics” and was – quelle surprise – about how politics and law affect people of color in the United States. Interestingly, the professor invited the noted Black conservative Niger Innis as a guest lecturer. I still have his business card somewhere.
I offer the above explanation because I think it is important that we define our variables. Critical race theory is a very specific term. It is not being taught in public schools anywhere in this country, not that I am aware of. What opponents seem to be complaining about is diversity and inclusion curriculums that build off a Robin DiAngelo “white guilt” model and the teaching that some of our Founding Fathers were not demigods but were men of their time who did such unspeakably cruel things as own other human beings as slaves.
I will leave aside the DiAngelo bit because I have written about my opposition to this kind of self-flagellation-as-anti-racism in the past and no doubt will again in the future. I want to talk instead about the way we teach history, because that to me seems the more salient issue. Repeatedly in Jarvis’ Newsweek story, folks mentioned that learning the “true history” of the United States made them less prone to patriotism. As a Millennial American with a history degree, I can understand that. Our history is bloody, brutal, and one of oppression. As I wrote in 2017, “violence is ingrained in our national DNA:”
The United States of America was born in violence. We gained our independence through a bloody revolution in which we waged war to throw off the yoke of British rule. But before that, we were founded on white settler colonialism which saw us enslave Africans to work our plantations and exterminate the Native Americans of the Eastern Seaboard, Southeast, and Midwest in order to “settle” those lands.
Any honest accounting of American history is an accounting of these atrocities. There is no shying away from them. No getting around them. And there should be no downplaying them. These were crimes against humanity. Genocides. They should be treated as such.
The problem is the right doesn’t want to treat them as such, while the left wants to treat them as the be all and end all of American history. Neither approach is correct. Sure, if all you teach is that America and Americans committed atrocity after atrocity in the past, you are going to come away with a view that it’s a pretty evil country.
But if you downplay these things, you erase the experiences of millions of Americans across the centuries while also downplaying the ongoing effects of these atrocities in the lives of our fellow citizens today. That in turn breeds resentment and anger, and understandably so. The unforgivable sin is not the actions of our ancestors but our own inaction to correct the injustices of our own time.
In the United States, we teach history very much as a top-down phenomenon. We learn about the presidents, about the generals, and to a lesser extent about the great leaders of thought and movement, from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr. We learn less about the common woman and man. Less about the folks who toiled as slaves and then sharecroppers, yeoman farmers and then factory workers. We might learn about them in the abstract – say, the injustices of the postbellum Southern economy or northern factories – and we might even learn one or two specific incidents of national outrage, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. But the people who lived and worked and died here? Their names and stories are left out of our national narrative.
There are consequences to this. For one, history becomes almost exclusively the story of rich dead white dudes. That’s a problem not only for representation, but also accuracy. The history of this country has never been solely that of rich white men. It is, in fact, mostly the history of those who have struggled against a system which privileges rich white men.
It is the story of Nat Turner leading a slave revolt and Harriet Tubman leading her people to freedom. It is the story of Sitting Bull resisting colonization and of Chief White Eagle advocating against removal. It is the story of Abigail Adams prevailing upon her husband to “remember the ladies” when doling out rights and of Alice Paul standing sentry outside the White House so Woodrow Wilson wouldn’t.
There are many ways to look at American history. One is the way we were taught when I was a child: America is the greatest nation to ever exist, the bad bits of our history were blips and can be quickly brushed over, and everything is fine now in the land of the free and home of the brave. This is called propaganda. It is not fit for purpose.
Another way is that American history began in 1619 with the arrival of the first slaves from Africa. Ever since then, this nation has been shaped by the oppressive forces of racism and capitalism and misogyny. Members of those oppressed classes have struggled and continue to struggle for their rights and the recognition of their basic humanity. This is more accurate. But it isn’t the whole story.
As a historian, I recognize the past is a foreign country. You cannot apply the standards of 2021 to 1921 or 1821. You can’t even apply the standards of 2021 to 2001. Society does not stay the same. Its norms and moors shift. Women can wear their hair down and skirts above their knees without middle-class outrage. Men can marry other men and nearly 70 percent of the country thinks this is a good thing. Times change.
Applying our own standards to figures from the past is problematic. So is pretending everything this country ever did was amazing and perfect or, at least not that bad and we fixed it so let’s stop talking about it. The right approach lies somewhere in the middle. It is to say, essentially, that America – like every other nation on this earth – is imperfect because nations are made of humans and humans are imperfect. We committed some horrible atrocities, but never without opposition. There were those fighting for justice, even against horrific odds.
Those are the people we should celebrate.
In order to make younger Americans proud of this country, we have to stop pretending it is something it isn’t – namely, the greatest nation to ever exist. America is a fantastic place to live, don’t get me wrong, but we can be patriotic without being chauvinistic. In fact, I think it is more patriotic to say “we’ve done some horrible things, but every time we did we had heroic Americans rise to the occasion.”
We must reframe how we think about our own history and with it our identity. This means changing our perception of who is or isn’t a hero. Who was Robert E. Lee, anyway? I mean, think about that. What did he contribute to the betterment of our nation or our world? Why is he more deserving of statues and commemoration than, say, Nat Turner – a man who rose up against what anyone who isn’t a white supremacist would agree was an unjust system of human bondage in an attempt to lead people to freedom? Shouldn’t we want our children emulating Turner, a man who saw injustice and refused to accept it? Or is that too dangerous in an exploitative economic system like capitalism?
I think we know the answer to that.
On the other hand, those of us on the left need to recognize that not all of American history has been horrible. From the Knights of Labor and the Haymarket Martyrs to Eugene V Debs and Mother Jones, we stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no denying things have gotten better. Could the be better even still? Yes. But let us not continually downplay the achievements of the past nor forget to celebrate the advances we make. The left doesn’t do enough of either, and it affects how we look at our own history as well as our own society today. We need to remember that even if things are bad now, they were a lot worse in a lot of ways even just 20 years ago.
That they got better is down to American heroes. We need to rethink who those heroes are. The inconvenient truth is that more younger Americans don’t love their country because their country isn’t working for them. They look to our past and see injustices which they can draw a through line to present crises affecting our nation while never learning about the Americans who stood up to make this country better. Consequently, it can seem like nothing has changed or that things are getting worse. And, as the data on Millennial income and wealth shows, in some ways things are in fact getting worse.
Only by teaching an honest accounting of American history can we then address the injustices of today, and only then can we expect Millennials and Gen Z to show more pride in being American. We Americans have a history to be proud of, but it is not necessarily the history the right wants taught in our schools.
It is also, however, not a history that solely focuses on the worst moments in our national story. It is one that is rich but complicated, vibrant but complex, proud but nuanced. It is the history of a people, born out of many, becoming one. That is never an easy process. But it is a proud one.
On MTV’s 40th anniversary…
Today, August 1, marks the 40th anniversary of MTV. Like a lot of Millennials, I grew up watching shows like TRL and Daria, which I have recently been revisiting through clips on YouTube. It still might be the smartest tv cartoon I’ve seen next to King of the Hill. Daria Morgendorffer and her grunge attitude and attire aside, though, MTV gave me some pretty unrealistic expectations about life. Spring Break was never quite as glamorous as it appeared on the small screen, and I still don’t own a house, let alone a mansion worthy of Cribs. My high school did have about as much drama as Laguna Beach, but that’s another story for another day.
While life never quite measured up to the glitz of MTV, there is one way in which the show changed my life – and the world. The network led the way in LGBT representation from its very inception. In doing so, it changed the way two generations – Gen X and Millennials – thought about LGBT people and LGBT rights, increasing acceptance of LGBT people and support for our rights while also giving us then-untold representation on the small screen.
From Boy George and Culture Club to The Real World, as actor Wilson Cruz once said, “the seeds of marriage equality…were planted on MTV.”
The Real World alone has done so much to change perceptions of gay people and our lives. The first season included Norman, a bisexual artist, and subsequent seasons have almost always included an LGBT housemate. Most famous is Pedro Zamora, whose wedding became the first same-sex wedding in tv history and whose untimely death from AIDS was mourned across the country.
But there were others, including Danny Roberts, who was in a relationship with a closeted soldier when he appeared on the “New Orleans” season in 2000. A 2008 paper from the Brookings Institute even credited the show with helping to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (a bit prematurely, as DADT was repealed in 2011 – but the writing was on the wall, even in ’08). For me, Danny represented a watershed moment. It was the first time I remember seeing a gay man I related to depicted on tv. He had a clean cut, all-American image and wore Abercrombie sweaters. He was the man I wanted to date and the man I wanted to be.
I used Danny to test what my brother, also named Danny, thought of gay people in order to gage whether I could come out to him. I suspect brother Danny knew what I was doing, because he pointedly said there was nothing wrong with being gay. Both Dannys were pretty cool.
There were other moments too. From the get-go, MTV was somewhere music gay people loved could be heard. From Madonna’s Vogue on through to Lady Gaga, there has always been a gay sensibility in MTV video rotation. In an era dominated by grunge and gangster rap, RuPaul found success on the network with “Supermodel (You Better Work)” in 1993, launching his career. Shows like True Life documented the trials and tribulations of real LGBT people, providing my generation with one of our first exposures to what it was like to be young and gay in America.
Meanwhile, camp shows like Undressed – a somewhat risqué (to my teenage mind) show composed of romantic/sexy vignettes – sometimes featured gay storylines, which was practically unheard of in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Madonna’s same-sex kiss with Britney and Christina at the 2003 VMAs might be controversially queerbaiting, but it was still provocative and unheard of up until that point. Only a few years later, Brokeback Mountain would win best kiss at the MTV Movie Awards.
For me, as a young gay man in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, MTV was one of the few places I could see myself represented. It made me feel accepted, validated, and that there was hope at the end of the tunnel. It is hard to imagine where we would be as a community without it. For that reason, 40 years later, I still want my MTV.
What I’ve been up to…
For Newsweek, I wrote about how the working class in the US isn’t as divided as the media portrays us. Party politics does not define our class interests, and if you look at what Americans say they want, we largely agree across regional and political divides. Networks like Fox News and MSNBC profit off our division. We have to stop letting them.
In a far more personal piece, I wrote about being fat and gay for The Independent. Talking about my weight is not something I’m very comfortable with. I don’t like being fat. I’m working to change it, but it’s a slower process than I care to admit. But, this piece felt important to write for two reasons: 1) I needed to get this off my chest and 2) I wanted others who are struggling with body image issues, especially other gay men, to know they aren’t alone. That said, I mean what I write in the piece: I’m tired of hiding. I would like to start doing more YouTube videos. If you have any suggestions for topics, be sure to let me know.
What I’ve been reading…
I read RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky by Lesly-Marie Buer. It is one of the most important books I’ve read in the past five years. If you want to understand how systems of oppression, from our capitalist economy to the neoliberal state to patriarchal social and familial relations, actively and passively harm poor women – especially mothers – this is the book for you. I cannot recommend it enough. As the title suggests, Buer focuses on women who use drugs in Appalachian Kentucky, and that alone makes the book worthwhile. But by connecting these dots, Buer effectively shows how these women are being failed by society and government on every level.
I read Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoningby Alan Maimon. Like Buer, I appreciate that Maimon does not shy away from discussing structural issues affecting Eastern Kentucky. Unlike JD Vance, he doesn’t try to paint his experiences reporting on some of the unseemly stories of early-00s Appalachian Kentucky as indicative of wider cultural rot. Rather, he ties them to systemic failings hindering the region. On a personal level, it was fascinating to read this book about a time and place in which I lived. From 2001 – 2004 I was a student at Leslie County High School, though my time in Leslie County predates that thanks to the summers and other visits I spent with my grandparents. I returned to the region sporadically after moving across the state for college, and I have always kept tabs on it. Dr. Daniel Mongiardo’s 2002 state senate race brought back some especially strong memories, as I met both him and his opponent Johnnie L. Turner. “Dr. Dan” was someone I was excited about… until I wasn’t. I did not vote for him in 2004 because of his role in banning gay marriage in Kentucky. I wonder how many other gay people abstained that year, as well. In 2010, I grudgingly voted for him, but only because at that point I had been living in Bowling Green for six years and knew all too well what a repugnant man Rand Paul is. Ah, the memories.
H. W. Brands’ Newsweek cover story about how we are still living in Ronald Reagan’s America struck a chord with me. I disagree with some of his assertions – Reagan was racist, and there is material evidence of that – and I’m not getting all misty-eyed over the Great Communicator. Still, I find it impossible to argue with his conclusion (as this week’s main essay demonstrates). We are very much still living in Ronald Reagan’s America. God help us.
David French had a piece about “negative partisanship” in Time that I think is worth reading. His thrust is that Republicans and Democrats are motivated less by being for something than they are against being against the other party. I think this is true, if not exactly a novel observation. What makes this essay worth reading though is that French uses this concept of “negative partisanship” to explain why Republicans are refusing to investigate or face the truth about the 1/6 insurrection and why a figure like Liz Cheney is more popular among Democrats than Republicans. For anyone serious about revolution, or even just progress, on the left, it is worth considering how this kind of tribalistic us-vs-them mentality can stymie working-class unity and blind us to the problems we face. After all, while I am glad Liz Cheney is not denying reality, she is no friend of the working-class or poor.
This piece in POLITICO about how Democrats are “fucked” if we don’t pass federal laws (like the For the People Act) to counteract state-level GOP voter suppression laws is worth reading, if only as your weekly reminder that Democrats aren’t doing a damn thing to protect voting rights. I had a column in The Independent last week about this, so I won’t relitigate too much here. But especially if you live in West Virginia or Arizona, call your Democratic senator. Tell them to end this damned filibuster and pass the For the People act. This ain’t a game.
A picture of the puppy…