Nostalgia: Why We Need and Love the Past
I
met my current girlfriend at a 70's party.1
That night the usual Irish décor of O'Donoghue's Pub
was obscured by posters of Farrah Fawcett and Burt Reynolds.
Men
in white suits and girls in disco dresses bounced and
swirled to the whining voices of the Bee-Gees and the
moans of Donna Summer. 2
Winners of the dance competition received timely prizes
- eight-track tapes, lava lamps, mood rings, and Studio
54 T-shirts.
Twenty-five years ago my parents, new hires at rival
law firms, met at a '50s party.3
It was the 1970s and my Mom, who normally tried to look
like Jaclyn Smith (the brunette on "Charlie's Angels"),
cut a striking figure in her poodle skirt and saddle
shoes. A fading Polaroid shows her leaning against my
Dad in his teen angel leather jacket, his hair greased
up into an early Elvis 'do.
Nostalgia is not new. Snapshots
my grandfather took in England during World War II show
a group of B-17 pilots partying in riding boots and
silk scarves, imitating the pilots of the First World
War.4
No doubt in 1917 doughboys tried to impress French girls
by impersonating Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders.
Why this appeal of the past?5 Why
does every generation seem to find a previous era more
interesting, more glamorous, more adventurous, more
fun?
In part, there is simply the desire to be young again.
6
The forty- to fifty-year-olds look back twenty years to
a time when they were young, attractive, and idealistic
- a time when their lives were new and their options
were open. To the teens and twenty-somethings this
former era offers safety.
In the past we can play and feel secure. 7
We can look back on the Seventies, the Fifties, even
the Thirties because we survived them. We find previous
decades "simpler" and "better" because they existed
before current problems. The 1970s seem simpler and
more innocent because AIDS, cyber-stalking, and crack
were unknown. We forget, however, that the Seventies
meant Cold War, Watergate, inflation, mass unemployment,
and gas lines. Back in the Seventies, people like my
parents could escape the malaise of the Carter era by
dressing up like Fifties teens and dancing to do-wop
music. No doubt, in their eagerness to find the perfect
skirt, locate the right nail polish, and fix their hair
to look like Annette Funciello's they forgot that the
simpler and nicer era of the Fifties meant segregation,
sexual hypocrisy, air raid drills, McCarthyism, and
war in Korea.
Nostalgia - that longing for the past - has deleterious
elements. It can trivialize problems and distort our
view of history. It can mar our ability to think critically.8
Looking back on the Sixties, certain figures like Martin
Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy emerge as icons.
We forget they were controversial in their time and
that intelligent men and women opposed them. The complexity
of Vietnam and the Civil Rights marches are blurred
because we can look back and easily see in hindsight
the right course the nation should have taken.
What we really look for in nostalgia is peace and direction.9
In the past we can side with the winners, forgetting
how stressful and fearful those times were. The Seventies
parties evoke a time when all sexually transmitted diseases
were curable with a penicillin shot, when feminism meant
reading Fear of Flying, and people assumed racism would
evaporate in a decade or two because the Love Boat was
integrated. In reliving that era and trying to dance
like younger and thinner Travoltas, we forget that the
crowds who jammed the discos then lived in an era when
imports were filling the parking lots, factories were
closing, and experts predicted America was doomed to
become a second-class nation owned by Japanese bankers
and Arab sheiks.
Maybe I am reading too much into nostalgia, seeing a
harmless pastime as some kind of brain-deadening addiction.
I just hope that in our desire to find the perfect costume,
remember who won the Academy Award in 1978, or which
team won the Superbowls in the Eighties, we learn a little
something about our past.10
Maybe in looking back and dressing up, we can think
about the progress women and minorities have made. We
might even imagine what it was like to write without
computers, conduct research without the Internet, and
live without cable TV.
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