text: Cathal Kelly has again written an elegant and insightful essay surveying our political landscape, reposted here: http://bit.ly/2i54pCU.  There is an antinomy in the essay. On the one hand, nostalgia is always surging upon us from whatever "non-special place" we happen to occupy in space and time. On the other hand, there are special moments and contexts that punctuate history and allow us to speak of "The Gilded Age:" or now the "Nostalgic Age". Nostalgia peaks most sharply in the face of trauma and dread. We prefer to look back from a precipice rather than forward beyond it. As we move over a precipice and survive, that experience can later be recovered nostalgically. Recall that Gott's somewhat reassuring calculations of human survival depend upon the assumption that there is no special circumstance associated with the moment of calculation. But we are now in a nuclear world and have entered the Anthropocene. The trauma and dread we face are neither mythic nor hypothetical.