Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, and Gaza
Before my mind was turned to the subject of my title, I started to write a piece called “Are the Dead Nostalgic?”
It’s a touchy philosophical question that has no definitive answer. It seems flippant in an impossible way, which it is, but its flippancy holds a secret message. So I asked the dead who would speak to me and got a few mixed and muffled replies. You can understand their reluctance to say anything. If I heard correctly, one of them said, “You should ask the living.” Most didn’t answer, which had me wondering why. Were they disgusted with us?
I have always heard that nostalgia was not good for you since it kept you rooted in the past; that this ache for home – the good old days that may or may not have existed but you miss them nevertheless – prevented you from living Zen-like in the present or looking forward to the future. But I wondered if nostalgia could be a form of utopian hope in reverse at a time when humanistic utopian thinking is at a nadir, overwhelmed by the machine dreams of people like Elon Musk and those at the World Economic Forum.
This denigration of nostalgia assumed you were alive. I was wondering about the dead. What did they think? Did they wish they were still alive? Was being alive the good old days for them or did they feel they were finally home and that life had been a dream?
Or did the dead have no future, no nothing, or perhaps some afterglow of sorts, an everlasting rest in peace, whatever that may mean, a phrase that always seemed to me a bad knock on life. Who wants to sleep forever?
I guess I was thinking that if I could get in touch with the dead and get them talking, they might also tell me what it was like to be dead. Although I am no statistical whiz, I figured there were a lot more of them than us and the odds were pretty good that someone there would spill the beans.
I thought of this recently when watching the new film about Bob Dylan’s early years, A Complete Unknown, when his girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (based on Suze Rotolo, played by Elle Fanning) gets angry at him for concealing his true past and identity, and he replies, “People make up their past, Silly, they make up what they want; forget the rest.”
This was especially true for Dylan in his early years and has a ring of truth for everyone to a lesser extent, whether it’s from memory lapses or some sense of wanting to fictionalize their pasts for reasons known only to them. Our memories and forgeteries are interesting creative faculties.
But as I said, I was interested in the dead. Did they also do that? Were they nostalgic?
Then this proclivity of mine toward philosophical thought and dark humor flipped in my mind as the pictures of dead and weeping Palestinian children swept in and tortured me in dreams. I had seen the photos and videos of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians and felt sick and outraged afterwards. I have written against it many times. Yet as I wrote about this issue of nostalgia, I felt like a speculator in abstractions, and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experience when on January 14, 1967 he was at an airport restaurant thumbing through a Ramparts magazine and saw an article by the journalist William Pepper, “The Children of
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