Alfonso Ribeiro is back in the spotlight, and America can't stop smiling about it.
The man who gave us the Carlton Dance is now hosting a network game show, popping up in Super Bowl ads, and getting standing ovations on dancing competitions.
And that delight is exactly what worries me.
Because here's what we're really celebrating: nostalgia for a fictional 1990s Bel-Air mansion, sold to us by a man who has turned one goofy dance into a three-decade career.
That's not a knock on Ribeiro personally.
We have become a nation that would rather rewatch a rerun than confront the fact that the actual 1990s are gone, the middle class that watched that show is gone, and the shared culture that made a sitcom a national event is gone too.
Ribeiro is a genuinely talented guy — a child actor who survived the machine, a director, a father, a man who has spoken openly about the toll fame took on him.
We are hiring the past to babysit us while the present burns.
Meanwhile, the country he's entertaining is fracturing in ways that would have been unthinkable when "The Fresh Prince" first aired.
Young men are dropping out of work and school at rates that should alarm every parent.
And our response, as a culture, is to hand another trophy to a man doing a dance from 1992.
He's a working entertainer in a market that rewards comfort.
When a society can't generate new shared joys, it mines the old ones until there's nothing left.
We're strip-mining our own childhoods for content, and the seam is running dry.
Count the biopics about things that happened when you were in high school.
I'm not asking anyone to boycott a game show.
We keep applauding the past because the future feels unaffordable, and the present feels like a waiting room.
We get to feel something for thirty seconds.
Then the credits roll, the screen goes dark, and the same quiet desperation is sitting right there on the couch next to us.
It's fun, it's harmless, and the man earned it.
Just don't mistake a warm memory for a functioning country.
Final Thoughts
We can love the reruns and still admit the house we grew up in is gone.