Acting Citizen: Looking Back

By James Knudsen

Now, why would I begin a column with a picture of my high school ring? Hidden from view, inside the band, is an inscription, Jimi Jai. It’s a disaster phonetically, but I was “going through a phase.” A new wave of conservativism was sweeping the country, and I had recently discovered my older sister’s record collection, with its hopeful strains of the late ’sixties and early ’seventies. I wanted to be a hippie, change my name from James to Jimi – yes, like Jimi Hendrix – and swim against the prevailing current of Reagan-era optimism and conspicuous consumption.
    Phases tend to be short-lived and this one was no different. By January of 1983, the flower-child of 1980 was off to Marine Corps boot camp, where hippies are generally not welcome.
    Phase, arc, pendulum swing, they all bring to mind an oscillating motion, a movement with varying degrees of dynamic shift. My education doesn’t include enough sociology courses to list things like fad, phase, trend, movement, and era by duration, intensity, or significance. How much time must elapse before a fad is considered a trend? How many people must show up to a march on The Mall for a trend to reach movement status?

How many words can I milk out of this Dylanesque literary device?
    Confined to the consumer level, fads and trends add colors and textures to the world. Years later those textured hues evoke chuckles or winces as we look back at them via celluloid, Polaroid, or Facebook Timeline. I missed the hula-hoop, Beatlemania, and most of the disco scene, but succumbed to one haircut that may have been considered a mullet.

    Oh, and I never voted for Donald Trump. I can say I never even entertained the idea. Recently, I heard from a former student who, as fate would have it, had announced to the Tuesday night class I was teaching on November 8, 2016, that Donald Trump had just won Florida. Cognizant of her vote for the Florida winner, I reminded this former student of her small role in history, to which she replied, “Oh God, he was awful!”
    I am not suggesting that Trump and mullets are moral equivalents, although questionable hairstyles apply to both. I am wondering – wistfully, fitfully – whether I might be willing to look back on the period January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021 as a four-year-long, incredibly stupid haircut? Of course, the people who sat down in the barber’s chair early in that period and, pointing to a picture of the 45th President, said, “Make me look like him,” will have to start the party game of looking-back by saying, “Wow, that was a bad idea.”

Copyright © 2021 by James Knudsen