Pete Hamill & the NYC Underwelt -- Viewpoints

Recently I interviewed (for the third time) the prominent NYC journalist Ross Barkan about the recent victories of the DSA in primaries. I've also blogged about my sadness at the death of legendary NYC journalist Pete Hamill, and also about the quixotic, hopelessness of nostalgia -- part of what I dubbed the NYC Underwelt -- a longing for a past that is gone forever.

So it was fascinating for me to see these threads joined up when I stumbled upon a great new article by Ross in GQ that's about Pete Hamill, who made NYC nostalgia a huge part of his trademark. Ross's article is interesting because, while he cleary admires Hamill's life and career, it points out that the kind of career Hamill had isn't really possible anymore (thanks to the Internet, the need for advanced degress, plus the high cost of living in NYC), and that nostalgia has its dangers -- revanchism, regression, the kind of "make great again" mentality that led to Trump. Quite often, in fact necessarily, it's tied to racism/sexism/anti-semitism/bigotry of all kinds, to an attitude of "that's when those people knew their place", an ugly and dehumanizing worldview (one that Hamill tried strongly to denounce but that, nonetheless, hovers above). Hamill himself wrote about his dislike of (then) contemporary culture like rap (let's faec it, black) music and tight clothes, etc. and he rhapsodized about "Lost New York" -- where the Giants still played at the Pole Grounds, the Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field, the subway cost a nickel, no one was afraid of getting mugged -- oh, and with a post-WWII economy that boomed decade after decade.

Ross takes issue with the idea of "Lost New York", saying there really is no such thing: "There is no Lost New York, not lost Country. There are places we inhabit, and those we hope to do the best with while we're here." He believe that making the present better is all we have, and I agree. He also speculates that his Millennial generation (one I'm just a lil' too old to count as a member of but identify with) will be less prone to Hamill-esque nostalgia: he believes that the last 20 years of 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crises, the Trump presidency, and now COVID-19 (I'd also throw in the bizarre 2000 election into this litany of horrors) will render nostalgia for this time moot. 

To this I say ... perhaps. Sadly, most people of his or any generation isn't quite as thoughtful as ross.

Certainly the 21st century has been brutal for America, especially for a generation raised at the end of the 20th century. It was an era, in hindsight, of misplaced optimism -- the economy boomed relentlessly (thanks to lots and lots and lots of debt and crazy financial shenanigans), Bill Cosby was America's role model, Harvey Weinstein was producing great movies, and Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were wildly popular.

But here's the thing about nostalgia, about the unending journey that so many of us, especially New Yorkers, take into the underwelt -- we're hardwired for it. It's a reptillian part of the brain, of our psyche and soul, of human nature. We can't help it, it's instictual, reflexive, like swallowing. 

Hamill's younger days were a time when legal segregation reigned, either in law or in practice, and homosexuals lived in The Closet. There was McCarthyism, the JFK assasination, Vietnam, riots, Watergate, and stagflation. And yet ... people like Hamill remember it fondly. Even the most horrible war in human history lead to gauzy nostalgia movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, turning the tragedy of what killed my great uncle into entertainment (hey, I bought tickets to both!). When Marty McFly travelled from a rundown, porno infested Hill Valley in 1985 to a sock-hoppy happy one in 1955, the idea of "this time sucks, it was so much better 30 years ago" was quite au courant. Now we have Stranger Things, set in the 1980s, that does the very same thing!

The past is always better than the present -- because it's a safe, predictable place to go. 

In the time when Ross and I were young, we had Reagonomics, Rodney King, Lorena Bobbit, NAFTA, OJ, Monica -- and people today are super-nostalgic for that time. There's literally a movie called Mid-90s. NYC in the 1970s, when the city was subtley named "Fear City", has gained cultural traction today.

See my point? No matter how horrible the past was in reality, the present always looks at it through rose-colored glasses. The rough edges get smoothed, the messiness of the past is neatly re-packaged in books, documentaries, movies, TV shows, and podcasts, with narratives giving it a logic it didn't possess at the time. NYC today is a gentrified nightmare for a lot of people today, the same people who deplored the city thirty, forty-plus years ago when they thought it was falling apart. 

So I agree with Ross that we should cast Hamill-eque nostalgia aside and do our best the make the present better -- that we should not get trapped in the underwelt. But nostalgia, like racism and sexism and bad taste, will forever exist in some form. Again, it's just a part of who we are.

UPDATE: Comment from Ross Barkan on August 18, 2020: "I enjoyed the post and agree with the sentiments. Thank you for sending it to me. The Hamill legacy is a complicated one and deeply tied to NY."