So astute. Also, it's interesting to me that you didn't feel welcome at Abercrombie, because I didn't feel like I was either (not skinny, too poor) and that leaves me wondering who DID they want in there? The target audience starts to get awfully small if you eliminate every teen girl who didn't have the skin tone, heritage, body shape or socioeconomic background of the models on the shopping bag. And maybe that IS how America collapsed like a dirt mall. A large swath of America shrugged when people weren't make to feel, as you put it qWHITE welcome and didn't seem to notice the power holders aren't exactly rolling out the welcome mat for everyone else, either. Didn't notice that only a very, very tiny silver of humanity is deemed by those power holders to be acceptable, and only while they comply to keeping power in those hands, while they remain useful. These power holders have done a masterful job, just like Abercrombie did, of making people WANT to be in an in-group that doesn't actually serve them.
My friend and I both interviewed for Abercrombie back in high school, and they literally had a super specific looks policy for their "models" (what they called sales associates). Only natural makeup, only neutral nail polish, you had to wear their flip flops if you wore sandals. My friend was much more fashionable and outgoing than me and I felt so awkward.
This from an old white boomer who likes your writing.
This piece especially touching because I worked mall retail from '75 to '86, from the deep south, to the lower midwest, to the south Chicago suburbs. Yes, that old boomer. I worked music stores when they were full of LPs. (Duck, duck, go to learn about LPs.)
Was born and raised in the south, indoctrinated with 'the lost cause' and 'fergit, hell'.
My sixth grade teacher in Mississippi, crying, sent me out to sit in her car on 22 November, 1963, to bring back updates about JFK's assassination. She was aware enough to be heartbroken. In junior high school in South Crackerlina (with one black student, school bordered on three sides by black neighborhoods) when LBJ signed the VRA.
Seeing how far we have fallen from the meager progress we have made since then is horribly stunning. Growing up in the environment of the south, I never had confidence in the intelligence of most Americans. I hate having that knowledge rubbed in my face, 60 years later, by the behavior of such a large number of Americans who support and celebrate maga-ism.
NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US. We must defeat this deformed nostalgia ourselves. RESIST.
Love the piece but think America's vibe is much darker. The Pew Research Center in Dec 2022 reported that 39% of Americans believed we were living in the end times with evangelical christians and black Americans leading the charge towards despair at 63% and 68% respectively. This was before the start of the Gaza War in October of 2023, and before Trump was reelected and went to war with Iran. War in the Middle East is supposed to bring on the end times. Guessing that a majority of Americans now believe we are in the end times. The silver lining is that revolutions happen when things are taken away. Minneapolis illuminated a path out of darkness in the dead of winter. Resistance is not futile. It's existential.
That’s right. But there are no end times until the very last person dies, just change. Each person needs some basics like a clean place to wash, eat and sleep. And they need a community to live with and share experiences with. We’ve obviously been sold lies in the form of capitalist consumer culture for 200+ years, now breaking down into microplastics and despair. I hope people will realize that community is more valuable than anything nostalgia could ever give you.
Robert Reich, in his book Coming Up Short, postulated that America had lost the sense of we are all in this together that was present during and after WWII, and that we need to bring that back in order to make fundamental positive change.
Something I’ve been learning in the last few years is seeing things as they are with all the positives and negatives, the feelings and hopes, the chains and trap, and accepting them for what they are. Maybe this is anti-nostalgia. Accepting that I loved certain things/music/places and that they were never what I perceived them to be and/or have changed. And I have changed. And the world has changed. You can’t bring things back because what was is only an idea now. You can’t bring things make choices based one what is and what we have learned. I feel like if we can somehow snap people out of the nostalgia, we can start making choices to ease all of this suffering. Nostalgia is a form of attachment suffering… It is lovely to remember. It is dangerous to drown in it.
I think nostalgia is a powerful drug full of the promise of restoring what was, returning to the top like the head cheerleader and football captain. I think the current regime has sold it so heavily and many white people are addicted to the promise or at least possibility, that they cant give it up. Nostalgia never delivers the way we imagine it wll.
I spent the winter of 72-73 in Southern California. I was so short of funds I had to ration myself to very few Orange Julius'es, but the memory was still sweet when you mentioned it.....
You said it. We are now two generations away from the initial trauma -- the demise of respect and patronage of local businesses run by real people trying to make basic livings and support needs in their community. The vision for the way forward needs to draw not only from the mall memories but from what and where communities' lifeblood comes from.
Or we can just let AI manage all of it, virtually, online, in delightfully curated lives that mean nothing beyond the fantasies we nurture. And then our transition from human beings to consumers will be complete.
I miss the malls, too. They were great places to go if you were bored or restless and didn't know what else to do with yourself. They were one of the last places young people could hang out and gather independently. But, as you note, they were also the reason economies based on locally-owned small proprietors were gone.
So, too, the US. It's sad to see the US fading like a mall. But, the things that kept the US wealthy and powerful were no more unalloyed benefits than the shopping malls were.
The post-WWII world order is gone. Trump and his enablers destroyed it - but they could not have done so if it weren't already riddled with holes and instabilities out like a termite-infested house; if the notion of a government "of the People, by the People, and for the People" wasn't already a hollow boast.
The question isn't how to revive the post-WWII world order. For a myriad reasons, it can't be done and shouldn't be done. (The US's post-WWII prosperity depended enormously on the fact that the US was the last industrialized nation still standing, and also on economic, if not actual, colonialism). The question is what comes next, and how do we make sure the people building "what comes next" aren't the ones who are in charge now.
I just spent the afternoon going through boxes at my mom’s before she moves out of her house. I may be ill from the dust on memory lane. I’m still seeing my dad naked under a sheet at the hospital and wondering why they kept so much dusty old stuff- even things given to them by relatives, when none of it meant anything anymore at that point.
I want a new America where we don’t need momentos to remember because days are great to live through. The best times are when someone at a fair hands you some delicious food they made.
Flea markets look like above-ground landfills. That’s all I see now when I see the malls crumbling in the suburbs.
In Trumpworld, Trump is always winning & can never lose. Endless "glorious victory”, “obliteration", "the golden age" that only America haters & the fake news won't acknowledge.
Trumpian depravity & corruption is endless.
Of course, the WHCD shooting does not prove the need for a ballroom as school shootings don't prove the need for new schools. Gun violence requires gun safety laws & regulations. Trumpian violence begets more violence. The corruption is a cancer.
"The Castilian literature I studied in school included a poem by the Marqués de Santillana that dealt with this same theme in the 15th century (year 1476). One of the stanzas went like this:
«Recuerde el alma dormida,
avive el seso y despierte
contemplando
cómo se pasa la vida,
cómo se viene la muerte
tan callando;
cuán presto se va el placer,
cómo, después de acordado,
da dolor;
cómo, a nuestro parecer,
cualquiera tiempo pasado
fue mejor.»
(translate)
'Let the sleeping soul remember,
awaken the mind and stir it
by contemplating
how life passes by,
how death comes upon us
so quietly;
how quickly pleasure fades,
how, once remembered,
it brings sorrow;
how, in our view,
any time in the past
was better.'
The theme is universal to humankind; if you immerse yourself in the complete poem, you will find parallels with your excellent writing.
Well written, you hit the nail on the head both with the dying-mall metaphor and the nostalgia warning. As an older person from overseas, I have no nostalgia for malls - I found malls and car suburbs completely alienating when I first arrived, and almost as much now - but I can see how you’d feel different if you’d grown up with them.
Regressive forces have been weaponizing nostalgia for ever, it was a big part of Italian and German fascist propaganda in the 20s-30s.
Gil Scott-Heron’s B-Movie is a brilliant 80s skewering of how Reagan rode to power on a wave of cheap nostalgia, and it’s still just as relevant 40 years later: you’d just have to call it Reality Show now instead.
Well said. We need to look toward the future we hope to give to our children and grandchildren and accept that we have a lot of work growing together as a community of people of all cultures, denominations, skin color and gender. Are we mature enough to set aside our differences and seek to share our commonalities. Can we set aside our selfish blindness and embrace a self-interest that works together to make us better as a people.
What I find so amazing is that our oligarchs like Elon Musk seem unable to understand that their wealth comes from consumers buying their products. If they depress the ability of the consumers they sell their products to then where can they acquire wealth. If they poison the well, by killing off their consumers (making the world that they and their consumers live in a toxic waste dump, inhospitable to life), where will their future revenue come from.
I was a prolific reader of science fiction in my youth and at some point came across Adam Smith’s concept of Enlightened Self Interest (Not science fiction but the projection through science fiction to a world based on his ideas), this always made sense to me, perhaps because I was ignorant and innocent, it just seemed the way that people could elevate humanity, leaving us with a healthy world which we share with other fauna and with flora that makes us feel good to see and smell, living in harmony with others and the big wonderful world we live on.
This is such an unfortunately spot-on way of putting it.
Thank you !
Hi James!
So astute. Also, it's interesting to me that you didn't feel welcome at Abercrombie, because I didn't feel like I was either (not skinny, too poor) and that leaves me wondering who DID they want in there? The target audience starts to get awfully small if you eliminate every teen girl who didn't have the skin tone, heritage, body shape or socioeconomic background of the models on the shopping bag. And maybe that IS how America collapsed like a dirt mall. A large swath of America shrugged when people weren't make to feel, as you put it qWHITE welcome and didn't seem to notice the power holders aren't exactly rolling out the welcome mat for everyone else, either. Didn't notice that only a very, very tiny silver of humanity is deemed by those power holders to be acceptable, and only while they comply to keeping power in those hands, while they remain useful. These power holders have done a masterful job, just like Abercrombie did, of making people WANT to be in an in-group that doesn't actually serve them.
My friend and I both interviewed for Abercrombie back in high school, and they literally had a super specific looks policy for their "models" (what they called sales associates). Only natural makeup, only neutral nail polish, you had to wear their flip flops if you wore sandals. My friend was much more fashionable and outgoing than me and I felt so awkward.
This from an old white boomer who likes your writing.
This piece especially touching because I worked mall retail from '75 to '86, from the deep south, to the lower midwest, to the south Chicago suburbs. Yes, that old boomer. I worked music stores when they were full of LPs. (Duck, duck, go to learn about LPs.)
Was born and raised in the south, indoctrinated with 'the lost cause' and 'fergit, hell'.
My sixth grade teacher in Mississippi, crying, sent me out to sit in her car on 22 November, 1963, to bring back updates about JFK's assassination. She was aware enough to be heartbroken. In junior high school in South Crackerlina (with one black student, school bordered on three sides by black neighborhoods) when LBJ signed the VRA.
Seeing how far we have fallen from the meager progress we have made since then is horribly stunning. Growing up in the environment of the south, I never had confidence in the intelligence of most Americans. I hate having that knowledge rubbed in my face, 60 years later, by the behavior of such a large number of Americans who support and celebrate maga-ism.
NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US. We must defeat this deformed nostalgia ourselves. RESIST.
Ms. Attiah, you are a brilliant writer.
Aw, thank you. :)
Love the piece but think America's vibe is much darker. The Pew Research Center in Dec 2022 reported that 39% of Americans believed we were living in the end times with evangelical christians and black Americans leading the charge towards despair at 63% and 68% respectively. This was before the start of the Gaza War in October of 2023, and before Trump was reelected and went to war with Iran. War in the Middle East is supposed to bring on the end times. Guessing that a majority of Americans now believe we are in the end times. The silver lining is that revolutions happen when things are taken away. Minneapolis illuminated a path out of darkness in the dead of winter. Resistance is not futile. It's existential.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/08/about-four-in-ten-u-s-adults-believe-humanity-is-living-in-the-end-times/
That’s right. But there are no end times until the very last person dies, just change. Each person needs some basics like a clean place to wash, eat and sleep. And they need a community to live with and share experiences with. We’ve obviously been sold lies in the form of capitalist consumer culture for 200+ years, now breaking down into microplastics and despair. I hope people will realize that community is more valuable than anything nostalgia could ever give you.
Robert Reich, in his book Coming Up Short, postulated that America had lost the sense of we are all in this together that was present during and after WWII, and that we need to bring that back in order to make fundamental positive change.
Something I’ve been learning in the last few years is seeing things as they are with all the positives and negatives, the feelings and hopes, the chains and trap, and accepting them for what they are. Maybe this is anti-nostalgia. Accepting that I loved certain things/music/places and that they were never what I perceived them to be and/or have changed. And I have changed. And the world has changed. You can’t bring things back because what was is only an idea now. You can’t bring things make choices based one what is and what we have learned. I feel like if we can somehow snap people out of the nostalgia, we can start making choices to ease all of this suffering. Nostalgia is a form of attachment suffering… It is lovely to remember. It is dangerous to drown in it.
I think nostalgia is a powerful drug full of the promise of restoring what was, returning to the top like the head cheerleader and football captain. I think the current regime has sold it so heavily and many white people are addicted to the promise or at least possibility, that they cant give it up. Nostalgia never delivers the way we imagine it wll.
U def were hanging in the malls. Texas style.
Yes on orange Julius.
But we gonna make it 100% organic
You know I’ve never had one!!!
Among other ills, nostalgia is a luxury that can be indulged at the direct expense of reality and all those who inhabit it.
I spent the winter of 72-73 in Southern California. I was so short of funds I had to ration myself to very few Orange Julius'es, but the memory was still sweet when you mentioned it.....
You said it. We are now two generations away from the initial trauma -- the demise of respect and patronage of local businesses run by real people trying to make basic livings and support needs in their community. The vision for the way forward needs to draw not only from the mall memories but from what and where communities' lifeblood comes from.
Or we can just let AI manage all of it, virtually, online, in delightfully curated lives that mean nothing beyond the fantasies we nurture. And then our transition from human beings to consumers will be complete.
I miss the malls, too. They were great places to go if you were bored or restless and didn't know what else to do with yourself. They were one of the last places young people could hang out and gather independently. But, as you note, they were also the reason economies based on locally-owned small proprietors were gone.
So, too, the US. It's sad to see the US fading like a mall. But, the things that kept the US wealthy and powerful were no more unalloyed benefits than the shopping malls were.
The post-WWII world order is gone. Trump and his enablers destroyed it - but they could not have done so if it weren't already riddled with holes and instabilities out like a termite-infested house; if the notion of a government "of the People, by the People, and for the People" wasn't already a hollow boast.
The question isn't how to revive the post-WWII world order. For a myriad reasons, it can't be done and shouldn't be done. (The US's post-WWII prosperity depended enormously on the fact that the US was the last industrialized nation still standing, and also on economic, if not actual, colonialism). The question is what comes next, and how do we make sure the people building "what comes next" aren't the ones who are in charge now.
I just spent the afternoon going through boxes at my mom’s before she moves out of her house. I may be ill from the dust on memory lane. I’m still seeing my dad naked under a sheet at the hospital and wondering why they kept so much dusty old stuff- even things given to them by relatives, when none of it meant anything anymore at that point.
I want a new America where we don’t need momentos to remember because days are great to live through. The best times are when someone at a fair hands you some delicious food they made.
Flea markets look like above-ground landfills. That’s all I see now when I see the malls crumbling in the suburbs.
In Trumpworld, Trump is always winning & can never lose. Endless "glorious victory”, “obliteration", "the golden age" that only America haters & the fake news won't acknowledge.
Trumpian depravity & corruption is endless.
Of course, the WHCD shooting does not prove the need for a ballroom as school shootings don't prove the need for new schools. Gun violence requires gun safety laws & regulations. Trumpian violence begets more violence. The corruption is a cancer.
Resist MAGA gangster authoritarianism! #VoteBlue!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lfjmXnTeSQ
"The Castilian literature I studied in school included a poem by the Marqués de Santillana that dealt with this same theme in the 15th century (year 1476). One of the stanzas went like this:
«Recuerde el alma dormida,
avive el seso y despierte
contemplando
cómo se pasa la vida,
cómo se viene la muerte
tan callando;
cuán presto se va el placer,
cómo, después de acordado,
da dolor;
cómo, a nuestro parecer,
cualquiera tiempo pasado
fue mejor.»
(translate)
'Let the sleeping soul remember,
awaken the mind and stir it
by contemplating
how life passes by,
how death comes upon us
so quietly;
how quickly pleasure fades,
how, once remembered,
it brings sorrow;
how, in our view,
any time in the past
was better.'
The theme is universal to humankind; if you immerse yourself in the complete poem, you will find parallels with your excellent writing.
Best regards."
Well written, you hit the nail on the head both with the dying-mall metaphor and the nostalgia warning. As an older person from overseas, I have no nostalgia for malls - I found malls and car suburbs completely alienating when I first arrived, and almost as much now - but I can see how you’d feel different if you’d grown up with them.
Regressive forces have been weaponizing nostalgia for ever, it was a big part of Italian and German fascist propaganda in the 20s-30s.
Gil Scott-Heron’s B-Movie is a brilliant 80s skewering of how Reagan rode to power on a wave of cheap nostalgia, and it’s still just as relevant 40 years later: you’d just have to call it Reality Show now instead.
Well said. We need to look toward the future we hope to give to our children and grandchildren and accept that we have a lot of work growing together as a community of people of all cultures, denominations, skin color and gender. Are we mature enough to set aside our differences and seek to share our commonalities. Can we set aside our selfish blindness and embrace a self-interest that works together to make us better as a people.
What I find so amazing is that our oligarchs like Elon Musk seem unable to understand that their wealth comes from consumers buying their products. If they depress the ability of the consumers they sell their products to then where can they acquire wealth. If they poison the well, by killing off their consumers (making the world that they and their consumers live in a toxic waste dump, inhospitable to life), where will their future revenue come from.
I was a prolific reader of science fiction in my youth and at some point came across Adam Smith’s concept of Enlightened Self Interest (Not science fiction but the projection through science fiction to a world based on his ideas), this always made sense to me, perhaps because I was ignorant and innocent, it just seemed the way that people could elevate humanity, leaving us with a healthy world which we share with other fauna and with flora that makes us feel good to see and smell, living in harmony with others and the big wonderful world we live on.
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/self-interest-rightly-understood