Don’t Look Back in Anger
December 9th, 2006 by 
Caroline Spector
Nostalgia has always been with us. 
You just know that when we were still on the savannah and Gog lit the first fire, some guy in the back of the cave muttered, “Things were better before we had cooked meat and warmth.”
I bring this up because my dad sent me nostalgia spam yesterday. It was a right-wing propaganda spam saying how those of us born in 40s, 50, 60s, and 70s were so lucky because things “back then” when things were “so much better.”
Apparently, our mothers were all cigarette-smoking- martini-swilling-fun-loving gals. Our cribs were painted in lead based paints and we ate white bread, sugared soft drinks, and American cheese with impunity. (I think the point of this missive is how hearty we all are to have survived this perilous time.) Then it talks about how we played outside all day long and farted sunshine and roses.
What galls me about this asinine crap is that it’s so patently bone-headed. In the forties we were fighting a World War and coming out of The Depression. In the fifties we destroyed people’s lives because we thought they might be Commies. And let’s not forget our little sojourn into Korea. In the sixties we had Vietnam. In the seventies we had inflation, the oil crisis, and polyester. Not to mention that polio and smallpox were still threats to people’s health. As were the usual plethora of diseases. (We didn’t have antibiotic resistant bacteria yet, so that was better.)
Blacks didn’t have equality, neither did women. (And in 1940, women had had the right to vote for all of twenty years. Think about that. Women in this country have been able to vote for less than one-hundred years. And we still don’t have equal rights.)
In short, it wasn’t the halcyon nirvana that the author of this spam believes it was.
I think it’s amazing that human beings are so good at tinting our history in rosy shades. I’m certain there’s some kind of evolutionary reason for this adaptation.
History is replete with the misery of mankind — and of the people who willing blind themselves to the reality of that.
For instance, I find the whole SCA thing both amusing and depressing. Yes, I think it’s cool that people want to keep alive the traditions of a different time. But, it seems to be only the surface stuff they’re interested in.
I’m pretty sure they aren’t shitting out of a hole in the side of their castle. (Or in a trench dug next to the water supply.) They probably use dentists and doctors. And they probably have indoor plumbing, electricity, and cars. The “romance” of that age only applied to a few people in a very exclusive class. The rest of us slobs were serfs, lived a mean existence, and died young.
And if you took Henry the VIII out of his grand palace and dropped him into any middle class American household, he would think they were the king of the universe. “Thou hast heating throughout thy house? And what is this miraculous device that keeps thy food cool and free from vermin? And these lights which glow so brightly yet emit no odor or smoke? Art thou a wizard or a king in this fabulous land?” “No, dude, I’m living with my parents and I work at the Quickee Mart.”
Okay, so my Henry the VIII English sucks. . .
I could run through this century by century, but I’ve already gone on long enough. So before you cocoon yourself in the golden glow of your glory days — stop and think about it. I believe you will find that your past isn’t as fabulous as you remembered, and maybe, just maybe, you will look at your life now, and realize that it isn’t as bad as you believe.
Posted in Caroline, Daily Life, History, Politics | 
December 9th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
On the nosy, Rosy!
We have some bad things today but these are not the things these guys are pointing at, are they? They’re not complaining about Iraq and Somalia and AIDs. They’re pissed becasue the SUV cost a fortune to fill, it’s not polite to call that guy who mows the lawn a “boy,” and two gay guys just bought the condo down the street.
I wish we could let them go back to their precious fifties–but they have to change race or gender or sexual orientation as the cost. Or they get to be on the wrong end of a congressional hearing.
Maybe what they really want is just to be young again, and I can sympathise with that.
And you really hit it when you talk about disease. “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Yeah, right. Like polio, maybe? There’s a real stamina builder.
December 9th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
We’re all time travelers, and the world is a different place now than it was when we arrived here. Watching Adam’s Rib, a movie I dearly love, with my kids, I saw for the first time how trivializing and demeaning the attitude toward the women–even Katharine Hepburn’s character–was. You couldn’t make a movie like that any more.
Every now and then I’ll meet someone who’s read one of my Regencies of one of the Sarah Tolerance books and says “Oooo, don’t you wish you lived then?”
No. Emphatically no. Unreliable plumbing. No notion of asepsis. No painless dentistry, no painless childbirth. Deep suspicion of bathing. No reliable refrigerator. And I know damned well that I would not be the Duke’s Daughter, I’d have been Boopsie the miserable goose wrangler, have died early of smallpox or died early of exhaustion…
December 9th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Ah, yesssss! I remember the Good Old Days!!!
Orange Sunshine lab-tested at 2000 micrograms, instead of the lame 100 mikes you see in blotter acid these days.
Killer weed went for $10 an ounce. Already manicured.
Bottles of a hundred Dexamyl spansules for $6.
As much sex with as many partners as you could make time for.
Loud, raunchy Rock and Roll being taken to new inventive heights constantly.
Tickets to the 3-day Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville for $18, where played Janis Joplin, Led Zep, Santana, B.B. King, Spirit, Ten Years After, Sly and the Family Stone, and Grand Funk Railroad. (Uh, I barely remember this part — the acid was especially intense that weekend…)
Widespread cultural defiance of authority.
The belief that we could change the world for the better by junking all the rigid, monstrous stereotypes that crippled our culture.
…Uh, yeah, and the sex….. Did I mention that already?…..
I gather that that’s what these Conservative types would like us Children of the Sixties to go back to.
I’m on board that train!
Where do I sign up?
December 9th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Incidentally, Peace, all.
December 9th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Rory, I knew you’d be the most starry-eyed of them all.
Yep, the sixties were great. Vietnam, riots in Watts, riots in NYC (ask The Dude what *that* was like), lynching in the South still common, Yoko broke up the Beatles, JFK, Martin Luther King, and RFK assassinated, Cuban Missile Crisis, Duck and Cover (we still did it when I was in elementary school), J. Edgar Hoover, Janis and Jimi died from OD’s. I could go on . . .
December 9th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Oh yeah, and the dancing in the 60s was ass.
December 9th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Always look on the bright siiiide of Life….
Yeah,I can go to the place, too, Caroline. The government badly wanted to send me off to kill and be killed by strangers in 1969, and it was terrifying.
I got busted for being in the same van with some weed, and faced multi-years in Huntsville.
Syphilis and the clap a couple of times.
The only culture I’ve ever felt at home in died, horribly and slowly, from downers and heroin and burnout.
I could go on.
But there were some amazing things in the world then, too.
It’s a darker place we live in now, I honestly think.
That may be the weight of years and selective recall talking, of course.
But I surely got laid a lot more back then.
December 9th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Rory,
There were some wonderful things about the sixties. I wasn’t getting laid, but in 1968, I was ten.
In all fairness, NONE of us is getting laid as much now as we did when we were in our twenties. That’s age more than anything else. (And if any of you are getting laid that much, don’t tell me!)
The time we’re in now is different than the sixties. Yes, in some ways it’s darker, but we have so many things that I think makes this an amazing time to be alive.
The Internet for one. Both the good and the bad of it.
We’re unlocking more and more aspects of DNA every year. That’s incredible.
If NASA is to be believed, we’re going to have a colony on the moon by 2024.
We can watch movies from the inception of the medium through today on amazing equipment IN OUR HOMES! When I was an RTF major in college, getting to see any German Expressionist film was a red letter event. And usually it was on a shitty hacked to pieces print.
Of course, there is The Girls Next Door which does make me think Armageddon is coming, but, hey . . .
December 9th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
I remember when I told the high school guidance counselor that I wanted to be a doctor. I was the school’s first ever national Merit Scholar. She told me about the joys of being a dental technician. Hell, it was 1975 in a small town in Ohio and who ever heard of anyone from Loveland being a doctor, much less a GIRL.
I think in retrospect, things always look simpler in the past. I remember my neighborhood being an uncomplicated place. There were no divorces, for example. But years later my mother casually mentioned that my friend’s mother had come to her one day with a paper bag and given it to my mother and said, ‘Would you keep this for me?’ Inside was her husband’s handgun. Mom also told me that occassionally this woman, a British war bride to a G.I. from Kentucky, would show up with a black eye. After a couple of months, she asked my mother if she could have the bag back. Nothing more was ever said.
A simpler time, without the problems of today.
And Rory, I hadn’t smoked weed for years and was offered some in the last year, and there is no comparison between the stuff I knew and college and this stuff. This stuff was STRONG. Knocked me on my ass.
December 9th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
I actually don’t spend much time being activley nostalgic for the Sixties. Believe it or don’t. Kinda burnt through that longing for the past, in the Eighties, which was the nastiest decade in my memory, for cultural and personal reasons so depressng that I won’t go into them here and now.
What I really, really mostly suffer from is nostalgia for the future.
Remember when we had things like interstellar travel, an end to war and hatred, no more poverty, immmortality, limitless resources and energy from nuclear fusion and transmutation, and so on? Space alien friends, too!
The horizon was limitless. I’d like to go back to that future. Thank you very much.
Oh, and lots more guilt-free and disease-free sex, please.
We may still end up there. But I have this dark suspicion that I might not make it, and that bums me out.
Is there a word for nostalgia for the future?
December 9th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Is there a word for nostalgia for the future?
There should be.
December 9th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Prestalgia?
I think it’s more nostalgia for the future that you thought you were going to be living in. But like I said in my “Not Fade Away” post — this is the time of life when we’re going to be feeling that way.
Honestly, I think men have a harder time with middle-age than women do. (Or maybe this is who I hang with.) For women, middle age can be very freeing. Going from being an object of attention to being invisible to members of the opposite sex is pretty feeing.
December 9th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
freeing, that is . . .
December 9th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
You got that right, Caroline.
December 9th, 2006 at 6:52 pm
You just want us to tell you again how hot you are.
December 9th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Not so much.
December 9th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
Laura, It’s been interesting talking to my male versus my female friends during the last few years. My female friends really do seem a lot more sanguine about things.
December 9th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
A bit of seriousness from me for a moment here, lest you all suspect me of being wholly superficial. Rather than merely 95% superficial.
I too, went through the ‘no longer young/attractive’ thing in my mid-forties. It felt devastating. A few of you know enough about my relationships after that to know how I compensated.
Then, about five years ago, a few things came together to jump me up to the next plateau of terror. One thing was a two-year prostate cancer scare.
For much of that time, I had a urologist who was hell-bent on performing a prostatectomy, which had about an 80% likelihood of breaking my favorite toy. And leaving me in diapers for the rest of my life, as a charming added fillip. Killing me if it was too late or incomplete.
Fortunately, I finally ended up with a guy who had some actual clinical and diagnostic skills.
But — I finally got the point. I’m gonna die. It may be as soon as next year, it may be thirty or more years from now. But it’s coming. and it’s likely closer than the day of my entering this world.
I didn’t feel much benefit from having that insight. And, again, some of you got to watch how graceful I was as I worked my way through it during the early part of the decade. (Watching my beloved country trying so hard to enact Orwell’s ‘1984′ was glorious icing on the cake.)
This isn’t about me being special in any way. Most of us who post here are entering the range where we realize, more than intellectually, that our bodies are getting ready to sneak up on us in the middle of our dreams, and murder us. We visit the doctor more often than we used to, with more foreboding.
Sometimes, some days, that means that I seem to have a choice between histrionic sorrow and frat-boy humor, when the aging process is discussed.
I’m more balanced about it than I was for a long time, but I had to make a conscious decision to lighten up a lot on the subject.
And, dammit, I’m still waiting for, and mostly believing in, the possibility of the Nanotech Singularity, immortality, interstellar travel, space buddies, peace on Earth, goodwill to men.
And… well, you know…
December 9th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
MY EYESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!
…seriously now. We should totally stop talking about my dad’s STDs from the sixties.
December 9th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
Humans. Why’d they have to be…human.
December 10th, 2006 at 12:32 am
I do think those of us born in the fifties were saddled with the greatest misconception of what our future was going to be like. Intelligent robots, flying cars, the conquest of space, you name it; we were supposed to get it. So I think there’s a correspondingly high level of disappointment.
As far as women handling middle-age better than men, that may be true in the larger sense, but it’s still a person-by-person thing. For me, middle-aged male angst is captured perfectly in a line from “Moonstruck”, which goes something like “a man wakes up one morning and realizes his life means nothing, and that’s a bad, crazy day,” I got a head start on misery by virtue of being raised Roman Catholic. That’s pre-Vatican II RC. Offer up your pain to God, children.
December 10th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Jeez Louise. I leave for a week, and look what happens.
Caroline, you’re a Troublemaker. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
December 10th, 2006 at 12:59 am
A snarky trouble maker.
December 10th, 2006 at 1:08 am
But hot…
December 10th, 2006 at 1:12 am
Not true, Caroline is even more cold-sensitive than I am, which she proved at breakfast this morning.
December 10th, 2006 at 2:38 am
Could be her thyroid.
December 10th, 2006 at 4:33 am
The discussion in the comments reminded me of an interview with David Bowie I read once. He said being over 50 was terrific, that it was during your 40s you really came to grips with the whole aging thing. But as the card I gave Ed two and a half weeks ago for his 50th birthday, “Aging is mandatory (inside) Maturity is optional” He and I have voted for not growing up all that much. Seems much more fun this way.
December 10th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Definitely hot. :*
December 10th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noiseiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparion only.
December 11th, 2006 at 1:27 am
I think that men and women have different reactions to aging, but my disappointment with becoming unnattractive to the opposite sex is modified by my “becoming invisible” as Caroline and Laura have expressed. The pressure is off. I look at my wife Carolyn every day and in her face is reflected my own aging. I don’t need to find a mate to reproduce; that’s been accomplished. I’m just amused by the failure of my genetic programming to subside. And I think the future of a child born in the early fifties has been more than achieved! Flying cars would be a menace; look how dangerous they are when they’re still on the ground.
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:36 pm
[…] But it is 2007, six years into the new century, the new millenium, the decade. (You can’t call it the “new” decade–it’s more than half over.) As Caroline said, things are genuinely better now than they were fifty years ago. […]