...at the end of a low, dishonest decade. W.H. Auden
Are you excited about this new decade? Because I am convinced the 2020s will be the best decade of the century!
Remember the 1920s? Nobody does. Not even Jimmy Carter. (My grandmother used to call them, “those dear dead days beyond recall.”) But not only was that the first decade to get nicknames – “The Roaring ’20s!”, “The Jazz Age!” – our country was transformed by an incredible cultural leap back in the day back then. The air was filled with radio waves, and newspapers were king! Both media publicized an explosion of mind-bending art and body-bending music. Ladies had evolved into “flappers”: taboo-breaking, freewheeling spirits who hung out with a variety of fedora- wearing gentlemen, drinking till dawn in “speakeasy” establishments – bars invented because alcohol was outlawed from 1920 to 1932. Introducing, the independent American woman: Emancipated, living in her own apartment, sexually free. In shorter skirts, dancing alongside something called a “jukebox.” She smoked, contemplating jazz and Joyce’s Ulysses.
Consumers could purchase the latest in appliances: a refrigerator, a washing machine, an electric razors, a dazzling instant camera! The new “Dada” movement grew wildly out of antiwar outrage:in World War One (1914- 18), death had come from the sky for the first time in history. So 1920s artists in seeking something outrageous as that madness, came up with mad, absurdist, shockingly creative works. Dadaists were original thinkers, nonconformists evolving into dreamy Surrealists, Abstract Expressionists and the avant-garde. They dreamed big. Artist André Breton wrote a 1924 antifascist manifesto, asking: “Can’t the dream be used in solving the fundamental problems of life?”
(The nightmare of the Depression loomed, but don’t consider 1929 part of the ’20s, because the Depression lasted the full-blown ’30s. Similarly, 1969 gets attached to the second-rate ’70s, rather than being any extension of the ’60s radical counterculture.)
So what can we absorb from a hundred- years-old modern era? One producing groundbreaking changes that still influence how we live? Conceivably, a ’20s 2.0, where hard, creative work brings on a better ’30s this time around the wheel. You may say I’m a dreamer. You’re not the only one. But think of the alternative. This has to be the best of all possible decades!
“Hello!” you sigh, eyes rolling. “Couldn’t be worse than the previous two decades.”
Yeah. I’m kidding myself; forget about it. Who hasn’t been beaten down by the first two decades of this dishonest century? My deep dive into the rabbit hole began with, “Bush v Gore.” And everything since 2001 have been one, long mindlessness workshop. How about a “Boring ’20s”? A tedious time period. Unexcited. Mellow. Where things get really quiet. Shhh. Maybe they’ll go away. Who can spend another ten years of a century in full- frontal-lobe-panic-attack mode?
In 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald published an article in The Saturday Evening Post, called “Gatsby’s Girls.” “It’s all life is,” he wrote. “Just going ‘round kissing people.”
Okay! Ten years of that please! If we let go of those other decades (deep breaths, yoga, anger management, aging responsibly), and maintain our freedom, imagine the technological advances humans will accomplish ’20 to ’29. Cures for diseases, antidotes to pollution, better transportation and ways to end poverty and homelessness. Cow-free everything. Why, introducing ourselves to ETs alone will open billions of minds to a new consciousness. This is a decade to lean into. I’d like to submit one change, something we can all do: say, “Twenty-twenty,” instead of, “Two-thousand- and-twenty”? Who’s got time for extra syllables? This modern decade will pass faster than any we’ve lived before.
Hank Rosenfeld is a Santa Monica resident.
