If there is nostalgia years from now, it won't be for us. People
are not going to dress up as us or stage re-enactments of our wars or
collect our cellular phones, our books on healing and empowerment, our
CD's of Old Age music, our pepper grinders, our billions of T-shirts.
They will resent what we did to the country, and
we will go down in
their history as the age of effluvia, with the simple moral: If you
love trash too much, you will make yourself stupid.
By "trash," I don't mean this fine publication. People are going to
miss it a lot -- they'll think: What a wonderful thing a newspaper
was! You opened it and there it was, you didn't have to wait three
minutes for the art to download, and when your wife said, "Give me a
section," you did.
People will also miss the verb "said," which was replaced by "went."
They'll miss handwritten messages. E-greetings will have dancing
graphics and sound effects and be incredibly creative and
multi-layered and dense, but it was nice when people used to
put a pen to the paper and scribble something.
They'll miss that time in the past -- it really did exist -- when kids
used to mess around outdoors. Go off and just do stuff.
Build
forts, have wars, die, hang out.
People will feel nostalgia for celebrities, real ones, like there used
to be back when there were three networks and Americans watched the
same shows at the same time and talked about them the next day at
work. Television was common currency. Sunday afternoons you watched
the N.F.L. game with your dad on the couch and then you went to the
table and ate pot roast and mashed potatoes. Everybody else did the
same thing.
Every American knew Sinatra by sight and by voice, but when you
scattered the audience among 200 cable TV channels and 1,000 movies
you could watch on the Internet and 10,000 CD's you could download,
there weren't many true celebrities anymore. People will miss them.
There will be new celebrities, thousands of them, but not many people
will know who they are.
People will miss that it once meant something to be Southern or
Midwestern. It doesn't mean much now, except for the climate. Out on
the Minnesota prairie, the little Swede towns are dying and the vast
suburbs are booming, which are identical to the suburbs of Atlanta or
Charlotte, where people live on Anonymous Drive in Homogeneous Hills,
people who, when you meet them, the question "Where are you from?"
doesn't lead to anything odd or interesting.
They live somewhere near
a Gap store, and what else do you want to know?
One more thing. People will miss a time when there wasn't so much
nostalgia. In the 50's, we looked to the future, which we imagined
would be streamlined, shiny, modern, and then suddenly
modernism died. The past got preserved left and right, historic
buildings, old streetlamps went up like weeds, and Victorian theme
malls. Sleazy TV producers renovated big white Congregationalist
houses and filled them with old bookcases and rocking chairs and
pretended to be New England transcendentalists -- the past was copied,
quoted, constantly evoked, until one day the country looked more like
it used to than it ever had before.
I say, forget it. Just get over it. There's the future out there.
Go live it.
People will look back fondly on the day when you could race to
the airport, check your baggage at the curb and get on a plane, before
security required that bags be shipped ahead as freight and every
carry-on be unpacked and the contents spread out on tables and many
specific questions be answered. Six hours to fly from New York to
Washington or Boston.
Old American institutions fade away, like the family doctor.
Patients wending their way through the labyrinths of factory health
care will think back fondly on that legendary man with the stethoscope
who knew who you were and knew your family. And the American public
school: how remarkable it will seem someday. With the introduction
of school vouchers, you got to send your kids to schools where they
learned the truth -- your choice -- Our Lady of Sorrows,
Foursquare Millennial Gospel, Moon Goddess, Malcolm X, the Open School
of Whatever, the Academy of Hairy-Legged Individualism, the School of
the Green Striped Tie, you name it, and who could argue with the idea
of free choice? -- until you stop and think about the old idea of the
public school, a place where you went to find out who inhabits this
society other than people like you.
I think that people will be powerfully nostalgic for the
mid-century. The 50's wasn't Elvis or the Beats or Joe McCarthy so
much as it was the era of Middle America, when the earnings of skilled
workers and the earnings of executives were within view of each other,
not in two different worlds, and everybody's kids went to school
together, and everyone believed in a kind of social progress and
achieving peace through better understanding and working together to
make a better world. Eleanor Roosevelt was around then, widely
admired as an idealist and crusader. Then things changed, and smart
people didn't build a better world, they built careers, and they were
only interested in Eleanor as a closeted lesbian trapped in a
dysfunctional marriage.