By Michael Stutz

Donald J. Trump remembers when America was great.

I don't.

For as long as I know, the American past was better than the present – and the future would obviously be worse. That's been the daily reality for my entire adult life.

I might've caught a glimmer of America's greatness in the eye of childhood, but early on the culture of my youth was a complete bombardment of degeneracy and ruin. Twenty-first century American life now resembles a dystopia that worsens every day.

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It took a long while for me to wake up – I was a product of postmodern American culture, post-Vatican II parochial schooling and all the other dumbed-down influences from television to rock. But eventually I came to see how I was born into a society that had already gone into collapse.

The West has been off track ever since the '60s revolt – it was like the French Revolution, and has caused all institutions to fail.

In the fallout, it's been depressing to see people my age settling down into grotesque and poorly built McMansions, filled with junk furniture from IKEA and Communist-made trash from Wal-Mart. They permanently disfigure their bodies with tattoos and piercings in a quick return to pagan ignorance, and have lost their shame. Grown adults, even parents and grandparents now, walk around unself-consciously in T-shirts like they were toddlers – or tenth-century serfs – while shoving machine-food garbage in their mouths at joyless chain restaurants.

I knew I'd never do any of that – and I didn't. As the millennium approached I rejected the globalist corporate world completely. Turning back to what I knew was far superior, I discovered a whole lost world in vintage cinema and books and music. It showed a better way of life. Of course it wasn't perfect then, but it was better than the present, and I longed to be a part of it.

So I became a "retro" – retreating to a time when there was still the promise of a future I could never have, from a past I never was a part of.

Us retros bought incredible made-in-USA stuff from estate sales; on eBay we found vintage suits and clothes that were better and cooler than anything new; we ate real food from the few remaining independent roadside landmarks or conjured up from old-time cookbooks; our mid-century modern homes amazed people like movie sets – all because we simply rejected the mainstream currents of the age.

But now this retro's moving forward. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, there's a way ahead. I no longer need to live inside the amber of the past – in the battle between the wonderful way we were and the horror we've become, we finally have a leader in Donald J. Trump.

The DJT era is going to be one of tremendous, radical change, a bold return to that far-flung America that existed before the counterculture, when this country was not only the greatest manufacturing and industrial power in the world, but also the producer of great art and culture.

I can see it all coming into place. We're going to have a national identity again. With that will come regions and neighborhoods and families. People will greet each other on the street and not have to lock their doors at night; TSA will be a forgotten nightmare of the past. There will be cool-looking cars and high-quality furniture, better housing and new transformative inventions, and with the Hollywood vampires at bay we'll have a chance at real culture. Poetry and literature will have a place in American life again, and the noise of rock, rap, and anti-culture will fade into the irrelevance it should.

Most people who share my view feel that the JFK days were the apex, that his assassination was the moment when it all fell down. And, yes, it was obviously a coup d'etat against the American republic; JFK was going to dismantle the corporate overlords and send us to the stars – but before he could make it through they shot him repeatedly in the head and gave us half a century of darkness.

Almost nobody remembers anymore that JFK's campaign slogan was "A time for greatness."

But everyone awake today knows in their guts that the greatest rescue mission in our nation's history has just occurred – that DJT has boldly given us another chance.

Michael Stutz is the author of "Circuits of the Wind," the story of the Net generation. Working as a novelist, correspondent and itinerant poet-photographer, his writing has appeared in many publications online and off, including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Age, The Daily Caller and Wired. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelstutz.