(Jewish Group) Once again, I'm an outsider in America -- like liberal Jews always were [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

These last few weeks, I’ve been listening to The Cure’s excellent new album, Songs of a Lost World. Particularly in the last few days, its typically gloomy lyrics and brooding guitar work has provided an apt soundtrack to the news.

Listening to these now-aged rock stars reminds me of when I was a teenager, decades ago, hearing The Cure in their prime. Back then, they were the voice of all the misfits who didn’t belong in the mainstream society of the Reagan years — and I was definitely one of those. A nerdy, thin, Jewish, pre-gay intellectual, I had nothing in common with seemingly everyone else in my junior high and high schools. I didn’t go to football games, wasn’t trying to “get” girls, and didn’t celebrate Christmas.

Already, I was also aware that my politics, my entire worldview, was at odds with mainstream America. In 1980s Florida, people were patriotic, religious and conservative. Everyone, including me, made fun of gay people — Reagan’s press secretary made jokes about AIDS while his administration did nothing to find a cure for it. But not just gays. We made racist jokes, sexist jokes, jokes about “handicapped” people and, I guess we’d say now, R-word people with intellectual disabilities. In retrospect, it was a cruel time. But it was the only time I knew.

Now, of course, we face the possibility of a return to those years — which the once and future president has called the “great” America to which he would have us return.

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As it was, so it seems it will ever be.