But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

This is not a criticism of identity politics (even though I know it will be taken that way), nor is it some attempt at diminishing the work of new writers who don’t culturally resemble the old writers (because all writing is subjective and all writers are subjectively valid). I’m not saying this progression is unfair, or that the new version of unfairness is remotely equivalent to the old version of unfairness. Such processes are never fair, ever, under any circumstances. This is just realpolitik reality: The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.