Ed Lindsay's Radio and the Great Regression

 

One of my favorite science fiction shows is The Twilight Zone. Despite being some sixty-five years of age, it remains one of the most fascinating exercises in televised speculative storytelling. With its iconic scripts - many penned by the giants of the pulp science fiction scene - and brought to life by a 'who’s who' of A-list talent, the series remains a landmark of television history, perpetually rediscovered by subsequent generations of viewers.

The Twilight Zone also possesses a curious tendency to intrude into the real world, much as it did for its cast of characters. Consider the myriad times you have heard someone proclaim, 'I felt as though I were in an episode of The Twilight Zone!' Today, for me, was one of those days.

This morning, I tuned in to Pluto TV to seek sanctuary from the stale, post-holiday news lineup being endlessly regurgitated by the increasingly irrelevant cable networks. It so happened that the episode airing was 'Static.' Written by Charles Beaumont, author of such classic TZ installments as 'The Howling Man' and 'A Nice Place to Visit', the story concerns a character named Ed Lindsay. As the tale unfolds, we learn that Lindsay is a man of profound regret, desperate for a chance to relive the halcyon days of his youth, this time with wiser choices and fewer squandered opportunities. What is more, he is embittered by the modern world, and particularly scornful of the banal television programs with which his fellow boarders are enthralled. He and I would have been fast friends.

In an act of cultural rebellion, Lindsay retrieves a vintage radio set from the basement. To his astonishment, he discovers that the programs of his youth are still being broadcast through the ether. Yet, when he summons the others to witness this miracle, they hear only the hollow hiss of static.  If you are at all familiar with the series, you know precisely where this narrative leads. In this episode, Lindsay’s particular destination in the Zone is a bespoke nostalgia refuge, occupancy of one.  Lindsay is content in his timeless shelter, even if his peers see only a man tragically ensnared in a cycle of longing.

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I began this discourse with the observation that I felt a kinship with Lindsay; a sentiment stirred by the news that the iconic MTV - a cultural cornerstone of my youth - is shuttering its musical outposts. This leaves only a flagship channel that broadcasts little more than the dross of 'reality' television. Like so many of its contemporaries, MTV has become a zombie network, a hollowed-out operation that perished years ago, yet continues to shamble forth in a mindless quest to harvest the attention of the few souls still tethered to the cable cord.

I find myself at an age where I am increasingly susceptible to Lindsay’s particular brand of melancholy. I survey the modern landscape, and it elicits nothing but a curl of the lip. There is a burgeoning part of my spirit that yearns not for the opportunity to re-navigate my life, for I stand quite firmly by my choices, but for the enveloping shroud of the culture and politics that defined my formative years. For me, that sanctuary is the 1980s, a decade I suspect historians will eventually identify as the final, gasping breath of Old America, possessing all its inherent virtues and vices alike.

However, unlike Lindsay, I have no desire to return to those years.  While I bemoan many aspects of the modern world, I also celebrate some of its benefits.  Readers of this blog - indeed, the mere fact that I keep a blog! - know I am a wirehead in my own way. As a kid who grew up reading science fiction, I am amazed that I now live in a world where the technology and science of fiction is now the technology and science of reality.  I am blessed to live in a world where disease is not free to run rampant, where I can sit at an affordable productivity device that can access all the world's information, including the first generation of machines that can truly be called 'artificially intelligent', while streaming a global library of music to a wireless speaker.  Incredible!

I suppose it is that affection for aspects of the modern world that keeps me grounded, that and a classical education that reminds me that, like it or not (and I don't - I will stubbornly stick by my cheese station until I starve just to give a foxtrot uniform to the world), change is as inevitable as water finding its level. Fashions change, empires rise and fall, the old is replaced by the new, that itself is inevitably replaced by something newish-old, and the cycle repeats.  

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It is this sober, if not entirely sardonic, attitude that renders me immune to the ensnarement that claimed Lindsay. I suspect this is also why I declined to take that fateful leap into the twilight zone of nostalgia that my erstwhile conservative cohorts embraced when they entered the 'MAGA' death spiral. That movement is nothing so much as a collection of calcified Americans who survey the landscape of the twenty-first century and find they despise every inch of it. Much like children in the throes of a tantrum, they have stamped their feet and screamed 'No!' at the passage of time, following the piping of a seventy-nine-year-old man who, with rare forthrightness for him, declared his intention to govern the American economy with counterproductive tariffs as though it were once again the 1870s, and conduct foreign policy with discredited 'spheres of influence' as though it were the 1930s. Even MAGA's health program resembles something from the pre-vaccination age.  

But even here, I can merely shrug with indifference. Anti-intellectual, reactionary movements are themselves nothing new. Indeed, whenever great change affects the world, such movements flower, much as we have seen happen not only in America but also in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere over the centuries. MAGA is but the most recent manifestation of a primitive impulse.

As telegraphed by its very name - Make America Great Again - MAGA is little more than a retread movement, a children's crusade on a quest to build Lindsay's mythical, antiquated radio so they can while away the hours listening to long-dead broadcasts, confident that if they wish with sufficient fervor, they will once again make the past present.

While there is much about the modern world I dislike, and even more that concerns me greatly, I am not such a fool as to believe that the way forward is backwards. For that to be true, I would have to be in The Twilight Zone.

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