Who knows what compelled Peter Allen to release “Everything Old Is New Again” in 1976. Maybe it was the excess of Bicentennial celebrations. In the seventies, pop culture was obsessed by the 1920s (The Great Gatsby), the 1930s (Bonnie and Clyde), the 1940s (Summer of ’42), the 1950s (American Graffiti), and even the teens (Pretty Baby). Everything except the sixties.

And now it feels like the worst headlines from the decade of Allen’s song are making a group comeback—inflation, high gas prices, a global energy crisis, the battle over reproductive rights, Sinn Fein, and most horrendously, the prospect of nuclear war.

When I heard on March 9 that Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship, the Endurance, had been found, I remembered reading that Shackleton had begun the expedition to cross of Antarctica from sea to sea by quoting the Roman Stoic Seneca: “I will find a way or make one.”

When the Endurance got frozen in an ice floe in the Weddell Sea, Shackleton and his crew ought to have perished by the law of averages. But he courageously led his men to one island and then another and went back for those who didn’t get in the lifeboat.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous post on “selling out”—specifically, why I wanted to discuss an inevitability that has been with us for decades. This was common knowledge way back when This Is Spinal Tap was released. Rob Reiner’s mockumentary suggested that even a band that’s vacant at the core could be incredibly proficient musically, hitting all the stadium highs. No one can accuse you of being a sellout if you have nothing artistically or spiritually to trade.

More than three decades later, the rock mockumentary had evolved into something that’s done for laughs but morphs into unexpected pathos. In the two-part “Gentle & Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee,” part of IFC’s Documentary Now! series, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader play the principals of an Eagles-type soft-rock band in a way that questions whether there is any value at all in the notion of authenticity.

For the fall premiere of Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update offered its own solemn tribute to the late Norm Macdonald after a substantial outpouring from the standup universe, with Pete Davidson even donning the former Weekend Update anchor’s face on a kitschy T-shirt. The nerve that Macdonald’s death struck among white men in comedy was an unexpected example of what Joe Biden likes to call an “inflection point.” I think this is because Macdonald—a member of the last generation to make the refusal to “sell out” any kind of value—was an exemplar of this now archaic concept.

What the faces of Colin Jost and Michael Che show is the understanding that they could never do what Macdonald did in anchoring Weekend Update—relentlessly go after a celebrity accused of murder to the point where you got fired. I also think they were chagrined by the irony that in just seven days, the show’s host would be Kim Kardashian, whose family celebrity was launched with her father’s defense of O.J. Simpson.

For the super-rich, 2021 has been casting lots of shade—from the Sackler family’s weaseling out of any accountability for opioid deaths to the Pandora Papers’ exposure of billionaires’ offshore and domestic tax havens. We had reminders of how America’s richest families keep that “super” before the “rich”—like with tax loopholes allowing them to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs by avoiding capital gains taxes. We also learned from the New York Times that in the homes of the very wealthy, many recognizable postwar kitchen appliances are now being hidden within bespoke cabinets—that is, a regular person couldn’t find the fridge chez Cher.

And yet after Democrats failed to get the votes for a corporate income tax hike to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure and social spending bill, they are also unlikely to pass a proposed billionaires’ tax that would make the super-rich pay annual capital gains taxes on the value appreciation of their humungous assets. Sadly, I think the populist talking point that Americans are finally over billionaires is a myth. First, because many on the center-left are pro-billionaire; but more importantly, because of the endurance of a more formidable myth about money and power in Anglo-American culture.