Still more back to the future
‘Tis the season for nostalgia.
In a thoughtful piece in salon.com this week, Matt Zoller Seitz talks about how 2011 apparently was the year of nostalgia. He surveys mostly movies and TV shows and talks a lot about Woody Allen’s latest movie, in which a writer is magically transported back to the 1920s Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a time the main character idealizes. He also mentions the TV show “Pan Am,” set at a time when that airline was the go-to choice for international jet-setters.
As I get older, I fear becoming more and more nostalgic. The other night, Karon and I watched a documentary about the 1971 Chiefs-Dolphins triple-overtime game, to this day the longest game in NFL history. It was a very good documentary, I think. I’m not absolutely sure, though; I might have enjoyed it because the names, uniforms and game footage took me back to a time when football was the most important thing in my young life (I was just starting to discover girls, but still would’ve rather played football). And it was a different era; they make the point that even the biggest stars who played in that game still had to have off-season jobs. The minimum salary in the NFL is now something like $375,000; how many years would it take you to make that? It might be a brutal way to earn that much, but I’d still take a shot or two to the head for that kind of cash.
What scares me is that the possibility exists that the game wasn’t as much better as I remember it, though. Maybe I’m just becoming the sort of dusty old fart who sees everything newer than about 20 years old as being somehow inferior to its modern counterpart. I hope if I become that guy, somebody has the decency to euthanize me. With a new, quick-acting drug, just to add insult to injury.
Seitz is, of course, right about the public’s jones for other eras, but it’s not like it’s anything new. We’ve been living in nostalgia for at least 30 years now, since the Reagan presidency. Reagan was a terrible president – we’re only now finding out how terrible, since the ultimate effects of his world-view and policies now are coming home to roost – but he did, as the conventional wisdom says, Make Us Feel Better About Ourselves. He talked about us as we like to be talked about, as a nation of hard-working small yeomen and yeowomen, morally solid, secure in our small-town American values, yadda, yadda, yadda. It was all pure banana oil, of course, but we so wanted to believe.
And we still want to believe. Most of the “base” that now controls the Republican party is acting out of deep nostalgia, even if it’s a false sense of the past. The Tea Party wants to return to the time of white, male rule over America, when our fate was in our own hands and globalization wasn’t even a word. If you replace the word “Muslim” with the word “negro” in a lot of political discussions, it would have an eerily familiar ring to it. It’s perhaps the most odious kind of nostalgia, because not only is it false, it denies reality. It’s corrosive.
Even many of their candidates have that nostalgic look about them. Newt Gingrich looks like a fat, rich, white guy right out of central casting (I suppose he is). But Mitt Romney is nostalgia’s own poster boy. Not only does he look like a movie president, he also looks for all the world like the dad out of a 1950s sitcom. He even has that vaguely befuddled, deer-in-the-headlights thing going. I’m getting really worried that he’ll garner enough votes to win from people who think they’re actually casting their ballots for Ward Cleaver.
Okay, that’s not likely to happen literally, but it sure smells like it might happen in a figurative sense.
My regular contact with people half my age or less has so far kept me from getting overly misty about the past. An example: Students will argue over a single point on an exam, often using arguments that would make a medieval theologian look like an amateur. They do it because they’re terrified. I graduated into a lousy economy in 1981, but these kids will be graduating into an economy comparable to the Depression. They’re terrified. And they’re haunted by the possibility that that one point they’re arguing over will be the difference between a great job and flipping burgers. That shows a total lack of perspective, of course, but you can hardly blame them for their fear. They’re at the stage of life where they’re starting to realize nobody outside their family cares whether they’re a success. They’re starting to find out it’s a hard, cruel world out there and it gives you no quarter.
Being around and smelling that fear on a daily basis helps me tamp down any nostalgic impulses. It reminds me that no matter how good or bad the world might have been in relative terms 30 years ago, it still was an uncertain place to enter. I may or may not trade the physical powers I had now for those I had then, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to lose the hard-earned wisdom and perspective I have as a middle-aged man.
Of course, if you want to get all nostalgic, wisdom and peraspective are the first casualties anyway. And maybe that’s the real thing nostalgia robs us of. Problem is, we’re all-too-willing victims.