It seems like the concept of nostalgia is something that is bubbling up quite a bit these days, here and elsewhere. For the last several weeks, I’ve been going back through my music collection and re-visiting the thoughts and feelings those fifteen and twenty year old records dredge up. I’ve written at least three pieces over the last couple of weeks that touch on different aspects of the idea. Other folks have been writing about it too, or at least using it as a framing device.
I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that a large chunk of the internet’s top talent are all around my age, and we’re all (not that I consider myself “”top talent,”” just someone who has been here a while on the fringes), in our own writerly ways, coming to terms with getting older; part of that process is looking back at the patterns of our past and trying to work out exactly what they mean. Thus, we’re queueing up lots of meta-commentary on the subject of nostalgia, and not so much about how great the good days were (in fact, most of us agree that they weren’t always, no matter what affection we have for them), but about how we’re dealing with our longing for days gone by, and how, in some cases, we’re uncomfortable with that longing.
It’s really a very Generation X thing to be doing, frankly.
As a generation, we’re a cynical and reflective lot. Unlike those that came before and after us, we’ve never been particularly reassured by anyone how special we are, and generally, have accepted our place in the universe with a sense of verbose fatalism: we’ve always kind of accepted that things are going to hell, and don’t hold hope that anyone will get out of the way long enough for us to have a chance at fixing things. At the same time, we just can’t stop talking about why that might be and how we came around to feeling that way.
At the risk of this blog becoming simply a repeater for the musings of other, more talented and insightful writers, I’m going to point to a couple of pieces I read this week that wallow in exactly this sort of navel-gazing from two writers whose work I really enjoy:
First, over at pandagon, Amanda (who’s been on fire this week, really) answers the question of whether we’re too nostalgic, in the sense that in this age of the reboot and sample, nothing new is being created. The question, of course, was asked by a Boomer, with the clear intent that “”kids today”” simply don’t have the oomph or whatever to make their own mark like the previous generation did. Amanda doesn’t think so, citing first that of course, there’s lots of new, innovative stuff being created, and second, that the youth culture of the sixties that boomers romanticize wasn’t exactly cut fresh from whole cloth either. It was innovative, certainly, but draws just as much from the past as today’s pop rennaisance does. There is, however, a lot of rose-colored glasses wearing going on, both by Boomers, who’ve largely turned into the machine they raged against, and from some of our Gen-X peers, who through age are becoming disconnected from youth cuture. Her message is that even though we’re getting ready to cede the cultural stage to the next act, we can’t make the false and selfish assumption that innovation won’t stop after we’ve had enough.
Secondly (even though this piece was written first, thematically it makes sense here), Fred Clark at slacktivist waxes nostalgic about a time he wasn’t even around for, writing about how the current economic problems in our nation might be rectified if we looked back, realistically, at how an earlier generation, the so-called “”Greatest Generation”” handled similar problems and managed set things up for the rest of us. The problem we’re facing is that those in charge today are largely failing to pay it forward, so to speak, unwilling to make investments for the future that they won’t see immediate material benefits from. For all the lip service paid to the sacrifices and contributions made by those in the past, certain elements in government are not only not willing to display the kind of forward thinking and investment that ended the Great Depression and built the infrastructure that set the United States up to be the innovating powerhouse it became in the post-war years, but through obstruction and often selfish motives (such as lowering taxes at all costs, despite the consequences), are actively impeding current and future America from developing new sources of innovation as well as the means to sustain those sources.
