I’ve
lately been afflicted with a nasty bout of nostalgia. A few months
ago I had dinner with an old friend, someone I hadn’t seen
in over twenty years. He’s a wealthy entrepreneur looking
for a wife; I’m happily married but still trapped in Dilbert-world
at a supremely lousy corporation … it’s a sitcom in
the making! The point is that even as I became increasingly aware
my old friend and I had little or nothing in common, I couldn’t
help feeling some longing for that year when I was 11 years old,
and he and I and two other guys were all best friends together (the
only time in my life I’ve had that many close friends), and
I had my first girlfriend, and I had the first inkling I wanted
to be a writer.
This episode was followed some weeks later by an even more pathetic
trip down memory lane, which began when I heard from my mother that
the house in Saline where I spent the first five years of my life
was up for sale. I drove over to the house and sat outside it for
a spell, basking in the kinds of memories you see on schmaltzy TV
shows accompanied by a plucked acoustic guitar or a tinkling piano.
Then I picked up one of the real estate agent’s pamphlets,
and spent the forty-minute drive home trying, and failing, to come
up with justifications to my wife for why we should buy a smaller,
uglier house with a bigger mortgage that would get us no closer
to Ann Arbor than we already are.
Even as I write this, nostalgia bedevils me. I’m just now
at the end of a two-week vacation, which was long enough to remind
me of all those languorous childhood summers but short enough to
drive home the blunt truth that my summers are no longer my own
and never will be again. I’ll be returning to work in Ann
Arbor just as the students return to their apartments and dorm rooms,
and while I still consign them all to Hell and Damnation for their
inconvenient street-crossing habits and pop culture references I
don’t understand and therefore fear, there’s a fresh
dose of wistful envy mixed in with my usual peevishness.
At first I attributed all this unacceptable misty-eyed nonsense
to the fact that I’m now older than Jesus was when he was
killed and haven’t accomplished even half of what he did.
But then I began to wonder if I’d contracted some sort of
wasting disease from out of the air. Nostalgia, after all, has been
spreading like a slow stain over the culture for decades and has
now sullied everything from television (VH1’s “I Love
the ‘80s”, NBC’s “American Dreams”),
to music (The White Stripes, The Thrills). It’s responsible
for the recent beatification of Ronald Reagan and the Cold War overtones
of John Kerry’s speech at the Democratic Convention. Businesses
such as Cracker Barrel and Wal-Mart have based entire empires on
corn-pone notions of folksiness and the simple life while at the
same time reinstating 19th-century labor practices. An exhibit called
“Killing Ground” currently on display at the University
of Michigan’s Museum of Art shows photographs of Civil War
battlefields side by side with contemporary photos of the exact
same locations 140 years later, and while the exhibit itself may
escape accusations of sentimentality, both the artist, John Huddleston,
and the museum’s curators must be well aware of the enduring
gauzy allure of the War Between the States; you can almost hear
the weepy soundtrack from Ken Burns’ Civil War playing
in the background.
Americans have been famously stereotyped as a people without a regard
for history, whose high school students think the Great Depression
has something to do with El Nino. Certainly we Americans tend to
wear the burdens of our history lightly. This characteristic has
often been a boon, sometimes even the key to the nation’s
survival. From the founding of Massachusetts and Virginia to the
colonies’ final split with England, from the Jacksonian revolution
through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and on through two world
wars and the civil rights movements of the 1960s and ‘70s,
when faced with a choice between clinging to a simpler, safer past
or embracing an unknown future, Americans tossed their past over
their shoulders (or swept it under the rug) and plunged into the
unknown every time.
Now, in the midst of our great national mid-life crisis, astonished
at how old and creaky we’ve become, we seem to be having a
harder time shaking off our past. Maybe there’s just too much
history behind us to ignore, or maybe we just can’t make any
sense yet of what the future holds for us. Unfortunately, when it
comes to retrospection, we’re dangerously out of practice.
Our formerly benign lack of perspective has left us susceptible
to such dubious concepts as the Greatest Generation, the Wonder
Years and Saint Ronald, ideas that were harmless when no one paid
them much mind but have become toxic now that everyone’s trying
to glean their lessons. In this way, believing in an ersatz history
can be far worse than believing history is bunk.
I for one choose to forget. Let America be America again: fast and
smart and practical and above all nostalgia-free. Nothing was ever
as good or simple as we think is was, and anyway it’s over
now. Time to let it go, people. Let it go. A2P
Email
deepbackground@annarborpaper.com
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