What We've Lost

Some time spent under the weather and escaping into the old world of Disney movies shows something hard to believe.

I spent the last four days in a state of sickness. I don’t fall ill often, but when it comes, it hits hard. This one was no exception. I threw my usual kitchen sink of supplements at it: quercitin, ivermectin, vitamin D, C, and garlic, and the thing had to take its course anyway. My lovely wife, who cares for me more deeply than I deserve, reminded me that it might just be my body’s way of telling me that it has had enough and needs a few days in bed. I don’t like that much, but it happens every 5 years or so, and if I just allow myself to embrace it, I usually am recharged and ready for the next cycle. My wife and I have lived a whirlwind. Raising four children, less than 3 years apart in total (I can see you doing the math), has seemed nothing short of living life inside of a joyous hurricane. I have loved nearly every minute of raising them. My oldest sons are in college, and my next two are getting ready to leave next year. We have been so fortunate to live the lives we have. But I do get tired. I work a lot. I write a lot. I make movies and play in bands. In many ways, I have lived five lifetimes in my short fifty years here on planet earth. I wouldn’t trade any moment of it — with the exception of being sick, lying in bed. When illness rears its ferocity on me, I spend a lot of time in a strange, comatose state of nostalgia. I love looking through old pictures and movies. I watch with fondness our first ski trips, our trips to Disneyland, and the beach. It all reminds me of how great this life has been.

I also have a strange infatuation with 1950s and ‘60s Disney television shows. YouTube has a lovely collection of most of them, and I can while away hours listening to Uncle Walt tell us about the next adventure we are about to see. I have some favorites…go-to’s if you will, during my infirmarous moments. My absolute favorite is one called Disneyland After Dark. It was a made-for-TV movie before such a thing existed. Walt walks us through the park and showcases his stars like Annette as she sings and dances at the Tomorrowland Bandstand. He also invites people like Louis Armstrong and Bobby Rydel into the show. It’s so cheesy and slathered in nostalgia, but it’s the perfect movie for watching from the couch on a sick day. But something struck me differently as I watched it this time. Even though it is an older movie, it has never felt unfamiliar. The park and the scenes from the movie all seemed to be from an older time, but it was not inconceivable that something like that might still be available during a visit to one of Walt’s parks. Yet this time as I watched, it all seemed like something from a different planet. The people looked different. Thinner, healthier, happy, and not a stitch of green hair in the batch. There were no phones taking pictures of the fireworks or the parades. There were no FastPass, lightning lane elite lines. The people were respectful of the entertainment. They stopped to listen to the barbershop quartet and laughed at the silly antics the entertainers added to their act. There were no princesses with mustaches, and there were no Disney adults. (Those who are stuck in a fantasy land of escapism, childless and self-indulgent.) It was jarring this time to watch. The America from that time is completely gone. The park remains, and the songs of the Disney library still fill the air, but nearly everything else is gone. The people look different, most of them ride scooters bedazzled with big gulps and sugary somethings. The America of that time has dissolved. It was disturbing to watch, and when the final credits rolled, I found myself saddened by what had happened to this great country, to a place that was once the brightest star in the cultural universe.

Maybe I channeled my inner Tucker Carlson, but I started to find myself disappointed with the generation that decided all of that needed to change. As I watched the young Boomers enjoy their time in a safe and stable Disneyland, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that made them decide that loveliness was worth abandoning for Porsche 911s and their condos in South Carolina. Disneyland was a place that most American middle-class families wanted to travel to. The average person could go to Disneyland and see their neighbors alongside the Prince of Thailand. Disneyland represented an egalitarian vision of what America could be. Walt himself thought that his best work would be coming in his Florida project and his Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow. He wanted to take the successes of Disneyland and see if he could reverse the troubles that were starting in the cities of America by the late 1960s. He didn’t live long enough to see it happen, but the world he left behind in 1966 seems to have been the peak of what America would ever be. I find myself overly hard on the Boomers- but sometimes it feels well deserved. The ones in power seem to have forgotten that there were others who would come after them. For the generation that invented the phrase, “leave no trace”, the elite of that generation scorched the earth behind them and destroyed what was once a beautiful, thriving land of opportunity that was solving its most egregious issues, while still adhering to their founding principles. Unfortunately they’ve left no trace of the America they inherited. Because of that, Disneyland After Dark shone like a bright spotlight on the changes that have come as a result of a self-indulgent leadership class that always loved themselves more than anyone else.

Yesterday, while doing some reading, I saw that Dianne Keaton had died. I always liked her acting, and it seemed so surreal to me that someone who didn’t seem that old was gone. Those who knew her seemed deeply saddened. Her amazing career was filled with some of the quintessential movies my generation loved. The Godfather, Annie Hall, and Father of the Bride are all knitted into the aesthetic of American storytelling. Still not fully recovered from my bout with what assailed my lungs, I asked my wife if she would watch Father of the Bride with me. Our son is getting married next summer, and I thought it would be a nice way to wind out the last evening of my forced laziness. I have always loved the original with Spencer Tracy more than the one from the ‘90s, but in remembrance of a great actress, we cued it up and spent the evening together, both in laughter and tears, as the touching story and fabulous performances by both Steve Martin and Diane Keaton made for a beautiful evening of old-fashioned Hollywood escapism. Fresh off my Disneyland After Dark revelation, I couldn’t help but notice how much of that ‘90s world was also gone. Steve Martin’s character worked at a shoe factory in California. They had brunch in Bel Air with their future in-laws, who were far wealthier than they were. The streets of their small California town looked like the paradise I remember from my youth. At one point early in the film, Steve Martin has an incredible monologue about the world he loved:

We live in a small town in Southern California called San Marino. I love this town, and not just because it’s the kind of place where people still smile at each other, but because it hasn’t changed much in the past twenty-five years. And since I’m not a guy who’s big on change, this town fits me like a glove. I got Annie’s ten-speed all cleaned up and polished. New seat, new tires...I couldn’t wait to show it to her.

This is our house. 24 Maple Drive. Annie was just in grammar school when we bought it. A few years later, we got a surprise package. Our son, Matt. I love this house. I love that I taught my kids to ride their bikes in the driveway. I love that I slept with them in tents in the backyard. I love that we carved our initials in the tree out front. This house is warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and looks spectacular with Christmas lights. It’s a great house. I never want to move. But the thing I think I like best about this house are the voices I hear when I walk through the door.

Maybe what we feel when one of these iconic people from our childhood dies is more than just the loss of a great actor or musician. Perhaps what we feel is the loss of our culture and a more stable version of America. I feel a deep loss of something that I only had a taste of. I saw it, and even had the chance to partake in it when I was younger. I remember an America where I felt stable. I remember small towns with small shops and small businesses. I believed that the America I had witnessed as a young man was still available to me. I tried my hand at a host of small businesses. I believed that if I worked hard enough and gave customers what they wanted, I could build a business. But none of that was real. It wasn’t just about providing a great product or a fair price. It was about surviving the gauntlet of regulations, the tax confiscations, and the busy-bodied bureaucrat who never gives you enough information to succeed. When we see someone who has lived their best life like Diane Keaton, pass on to the next world, we choke a little on our sadness because it isn’t just the loss of her, it’s the loss of our childhood and the version of the country we knew once existed but seems to be fading quickly. It’s deeper than her acting. I think somewhere in there, we are wrestling with the death of an old America, one we are starting to remember only as a fading fairy tale.

My kids don’t have much memory of that world at all. They grew up in a safe suburban neighborhood, but their adventures into the world are not going to be filled with finding a small town they love because it doesn’t change. No place in America remotely resembles the San Marino of Steve Martin’s world. If there is a small town, its once thriving main streets have been covered over in weed shops and Dollar Generals. There are no shoe factories that a Steve Martin-like character runs in America. There are no local Italian restaurants, just Olive Gardens. The leadership of the generation that got to live in the best version of America somehow decided that personal wealth and self-satisfaction were more important than their own hometowns. The old America is dying, and we are reminded of it each time someone who showed how it could work dies.

We have lost a lot. I have some hope that politics can hold back the inevitable, but watching how it has worked with the greatest wrecking ball of my lifetime makes me skeptical that voting or democracy fixes any of it. I feel an urgency to return to something much more cohesive than we have, but there are many moments, like the ones I had watching some old movies, where I wonder if the threads are too broken to be repaired. The self-induced fire of destruction is raging, and I don’t know what can be done to put it out.