I CANNOT FUCKING STAND IT when utterly clueless people stand around and pontificate about how things were better back in (pick an era, any era, that isn't now). Although Republicans and fundamentalist Christians are almost all guilty of this, they aren't the only ones. Even the young and idealistic are guilty of it. Take, for example, my own generation (the "13th Generation", "GenX", etc.). Raised on a steady diet of TV movies, Nick at Night, and high school history classes taught by coaches, a great many of my compatriots are guilty of wallowing in that most useless of emotions--NOSTALGIA.
Nostalgia is STUPID. Nostalgia for any era inevitably includes a TOTAL WHITEWASH of that era, if you lived in it, and COMPLETE IGNORANCE of the era if you did not actually experience it. For instance: when I was a senior in high school, our beloved English teacher, Linda Elmore, broke her arm in about six hundred places and had to be on sick leave for several weeks. Her replacement...well, she was a nice lady, and she really liked me, but her assignments were somewhat, let's say, less inspired. The only one you need concern yourself with was entitled "The Good Old Days", and we had to pick a favorite period in history and write a three-page paper on why we liked that period and what it had to recommend it.
I'm a complete, unashamed, slavering history buff. At the time, I had been reading extensively about the Edwardians, so I dashed off some fluff about the endless round of parties, and modern art, and all the cool new technology they had (movie theaters, telephones, the beginning of radio, improvements in medicine, etc.) I made the entirely unoriginal point that people in 1900 had more in common with the modern era than they did with people in 1800. I also made it very clear that I would only want to live in the Edwardian era if I was violently rich, because this was in the days before Progressivism, FDR, and LBJ, and BEING POOR WAS BASICALLY A DEATH SENTENCE.
I was also the teacher's assistant in this class, so it fell to me to proofread all the papers except my own. I wasn't exactly expecting a lot, but OH MY GOD you would not believe some of the UTTER GARBAGE that I had to endure. This was not my first experience with the utter pig-ignorance of Nostalgia--but it was the worst experience-- like being DROWNED IN A SEWER FULL OF THE STUFF.
Item: there were eight different papers about the 1950s. EIGHT. Four by guys, four by girls. AND EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN ONE OF THEM USED A SINGLE "PRIMARY SOURCE": you guessed it, Happy Days. Yes. THAT SHOW.
Red Scare? What's that?
Uber-conformism and the "Good Consumer" society? Huh?
Jim Crow? Wasn't he in Dumbo?
Duck and Cover drills? Oh, was that like Black & Decker?
Euuuuugh. God. No, no mention of "any of that boring stuff"...but Oh my GAWD, the SOCK HOPS! Poodle squirts! (Sorry, 'skirts'.) MALTEDS! CARS! THA MOTHERFUCKING FONZ! Everything, everything, EVERYTHING was so fucking peachy back then! And it was an INNOCENT TIME TOO, did you know that part? Nobody took drugs (evidently the Beatniks and William S. Burroughs and EVERYBODY'S MOM WHO WAS ON VALIUM were figments of our imaginations). Nobody got knocked up because nobody even knew what sex was (teen pregnancies in the US peaked in 1957, go look it up). And there wasn't all this VIOLENCE (as long as you were white and suburban anyway...oh, wait, I forgot about The Outsiders). I went home that day and reported all of this to my, at the time, 70-year-old mother, who laughed mirthlessly, looked me straight in the eye, and said "Honey, the Fifties SUCKED."
So, that was bad enough, but wait! It gets even better! Another seven people wrote about, yep, you guessed it: THE CIVIL WAR. (This time it was six girls and only one guy.) It's every American's favorite period of history for no discernible reason! This was about four years after Ken Burns' film, ALL NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY HOURS OF IT, had aired on PBS, so the topic was still pretty fresh in everyone's minds. Not, mind you, that any of my classmates had watched the damn thing. They HAD, however, seen Gone With the Wind. Theoretically, at least.
One of the papers mentioned the fashions of the period as a reason for loving it: "Women wore hoop skirts(sic) and pretty bonnets and lace gloves." OK, sure, they did. They couldn't put on any of it without at least six slaves to help, and they wore nine pounds of underwear all year round even in the South, but 8 out of 10 for effort on that one. Male fashion, however, had been less rigorously observed: "Men wore stockings, and such." Uh. No. Firstly, that ain't much of a sentence, and secondly, knee-breeches and silk stockings were already forty or fifty years out of date by the 1860s. Did you see Rhett Butler in knee-breeches? OF COURSE YOU DIDN'T. He, and every other male in the period, was clad in ill-cut wool, with those god-awful checked trousers and beards you could lose a badger in.
"It was a more genteel time." I don't even pretend to know what that means. I think she was saying that people had enough time to eat gigantic multi-course meals and loll around on chaise longues drinking mint juleps (because of the MILLIONS OF HUMAN PACK ANIMALS they fucking OWNED, who did all the cooking and cleaning and ass-wiping). Or maybe she means that people had "better morals and manners"...you hear that one a lot when the sadly misinformed get up on their hind legs and talk about history. Personally, I have NO desire to live in an era when everyone continually pretends that they NEVER, EVER shit, piss, fart, or vomit, to say nothing of their attitudes about sex: no one ever has sex, women are impregnated mysteriously (and chastely!), and NO ONE EVER EVER EVER RAPES THE SLAVES, despite the fact that in the real world, 90% of the slave children at Tara would have been obviously half-white and LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE MR O'HARA.
Sadly, this problem seems only to have grown with time. Go into any Wal-Mart or "Christian" bookstore in the country, and there is--I shit you not--a WHOLE SECTION of fiction books devoted to...are you sitting down?--AMISH ROMANCE. My wife calls 'em "Bonnet-Rippers". Apparently, MILLIONS of people think there's something romantic about living in a community of hairy German-speaking yokels who abuse their women, do tooth surgery with hammers, and HAVE SEX THROUGH A SHEET WITH A HOLE IN IT (you can't make this stuff up!) 'Cause it must be ROMANTIC with all the sweaty horses and suspenders and bonnets, right? That's "Old-Timey", and "Old-Timey" things are clean and pure, but somehow also sexy. Or something.
Folks, the fact is, whatever its problems, I'll take the big, sprawling, noisy 21st century and its 21st century problems ANY DAY OF THE WEEK. We've got the Internet, and penicillin, and air conditioning, and all kinds of stuff that makes any other era pale by comparison. As Andrei Codrescu famously said, "I'd happily go on vacation to 14th century Romania. But trust me, you wouldn't want to live there." Damn skippy, say I.
