![]() ![]() She would hide under the covers reading, in the small, silent hours of the morning while her parents slept in the next room. She'd collected vividly illustrated books about them. She remembers begging her mother to spare the moths that fluttered out from wardrobes, the gauzy spider's webs that clung to the ceiling. She was fascinated by insects as a child. The word swims up from the depths of her brain: a damselfly. The dragonfly-like creature with the iridescent wings. She shuts her eyes, opening them again when she feels something brush her hand. She stays like that for a long time, listening to the birds, the water, the insects. She can't remember what it's called: smaller than a dragonfly, with delicate mother-of-pearl wings. ![]() I even saved up a whole month's worth of allowance when I was in seventh grade so I could make 'Buela a special birthday dinner of filet mignon.” Sausages that I watched Italian abuelitas in South Philly make by hand. Fish we'd never heard of that I had to get from a special market down by Penn's Landing. When other kids were saving up their lunch money to buy the latest Jordans, I was saving up mine so I could buy the best ingredients. But 'Buela let me expand to the different things I saw on TV. I started playing around with the staples of the house: rice, beans, plantains, and chicken. This self-appointed class is the only one I've ever studied well for. I have long lists of ideas for recipes that I can modify or make my own. Like, actual notes in the Notes app on my phone. When other kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons or music videos on YouTube, I was watching Iron Chef, The Great British Baking Show, and old Anthony Bourdain shows and taking notes. Eventually, those who seek power on the back of restorative nostalgia will begin to cultivate these conspiracy theories, or alternative histories, or alternative fibs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.“Since my earliest memory, I imagined I would be a chef one day. The essential identity that we once had has been taken away and replaced with something cheap and artificial. Someone-the immigrants, the foreigners, the elites, or indeed the EU-has perverted the course of history and reduced the nation to a shadow of its former self. At a minimum, they can offer an explanation: The nation is no longer great because someone has attacked us, undermined us, sapped our strength. ![]() These needn't be as harsh or crazy as the Smolensk conspiracy theory or the Soros conspiracy theory they can gently invoke scapegoats rather than a full-fledged alternative reality. It is not by accident that restorative nostalgia often goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories and the medium-sized lies. They don't want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as think their ancestors did, without irony. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. ![]() They don't acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want, as Boym puts it, to "rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps." Many of them don't recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: "They believe their project is about truth." They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. Restorative nostalgics don't just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. Radically different from the reflective nostalgics are what Boym calls the restorative nostalgics, not all of whom recognize themselves as nostalgics at all. Once upon a time life might have been sweeter or simpler, but it was also more dangerous, or more boring, or perhaps more unjust. Perhaps this is because, deep down, they know that the old homestead is in ruins, or because it has been gentrified beyond recognition-or because they quietly recognize that they wouldn't much like it now anyway. But they do not really want the past back. Some of them study the past and even mourn the past, especially their own personal past. “Reflective nostalgics miss the past and dream about the past. ![]()
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