‘Retrofilia’ Is the Desire for Yesteryear-Do You Have It?
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Retrofilia (n.)- the unhealthy desire to return to a time that did not exist. To be blindly fascinated with an idea of the past. See also: nostalgia.
That nostalgia is a powerful feeling. It is the longing feeling of reminiscence for a time or memory of the past. I believe it emanates from the same area of the brain responsible for denial. We always seem to hear about the good old days from every prior generation. How their generation was the best and how today’s generation doesn’t understand what it was like to grow up in the [insert decade here]’s. But if we honestly look at our generation, whichever one that may be, we have to look through a clear lens with no “Golden Age” filter applied.
When we hear the history of this country repeated on anniversaries and holidays, we hear the congratulatory pat on the back from the public record. We hear about our victories, but not our defeats. We hear about justice, but not about injustice. We hear about our accomplishments and not our failures. We celebrate the achievements of our country and seemingly do everything to whitewash the big black-eyes we’ve received and of which we are the least proud. People end up longing for a time that never actually existed.
The 50’s seem to be the current yardstick for “the good ol’ days” of yesteryear.
The Baby Boom, Korea, I like Ike, everything-o-matic era of days gone by, was marked with prosperity, enthusiasm, and optimism. June and Ward Cleaver were the standard bearers. Men wore hats and suits, women wore dresses and pearls, air travel was a special occasion, but your doctor would also recommend which cigarettes you should be smoking. Your grandparents may have been part of the “Greatest Generation” that dealt with WW2 on the battlefield and/or here at home. But they also belong to the generation that openly allowed or pushed racism and segregation to grow and divide this country for decades. They were party to the internment camps that housed over 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry. They have a collective memory of the two times in history where a nuclear weapon was used against another country. They belong to the generation that allowed McCarthy to become a cancer that still festers in our halls of government today.
Now, in all fairness, I will say that I don’t know of any other generation that would take well to gas rationing, meatless Tuesdays, Victory Gardens, and air raid drills as well as my grandparents’ generation. Thankfully, those are things that haven’t been necessary since. Their generation built the interstates, the space program, the infrastructure that was the envy of the world, and a military the likes of which the world had never seen before or since. But each subsequent generation looks back at the prior’s history with a little less fondness and a little less rose colored tint. The Baby Boomers blame their parents, the Gen-X’ers blame the Boomers and the Millenials blame the Gen-X’ers. But only because their nostalgia is for a different time. Each group sees the mistakes of their predecessors with more clarity than their own but now, with the information age, the lens can be focused on any point in history. The Vietnam War, church bombings, and Civil Rights battles for the 60’s. Nixon’s resignation, Cambodian genocide, and the Ayatollah for the 70’s. Iran hostages, Iran-Contra, cocaine, Wall Street debauchery and AIDS for the 80’s. The prequel to Enduring Freedom, Crack, Waco, and Bosnian genocide for the 90’s. And the market crash, recession, 9/11, the sequel to Desert Storm, and the spin-off “The Afghan Adventure” for the 00’s. I’ve omitted quite a few eggs from the face of the nation but most of these things we are taught not to remember or question the existing narrative. Anything other than agreement calls your patriotism into question rather than the memory of the accuser.
The truth is, there were great times in our past but there were also atrocities and grave mistakes that have been forgotten. You can’t learn from something you’ve forgotten, on purpose or not. I believe that future generations will see that we began to make a turn for the better in this decade, at the turn of the century by being more honest with ourselves. By not only looking at our past mistakes and how to minimize them in the history books but by learning from them as well. And I hope that this marks a period in history where we can start celebrating future victories in real-time the way we celebrate airbrushed versions of past accomplishments, now. In America, we are encouraged to follow our dreams, and we should, but we should also document their results in reality.
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It was, is and always will be the best and worst of times, as you point out. Every generation ( and take this cum grano salis because humans don’t have model years) imposes new standards of judgement on previous generations and since nobody remembers history, they just listen to people who tell them their versions, some of those new moral judgments aren’t objective any more than the past was a Garden of Eden. That idea, after all is a cornerstone of Western mythology as well as conservative politics and it’s hard to be rid of it in our thoughts and opinions.
My parents’ generation gave us George Wallace and it gave us Pete Seeger; Strom Thurmond and Martin Luther King. My only addition to this is to say that if we sometimes see through a glass darkly, sometimes we simply misjudge the past because we see only an edited view of it, designed to further some later notion unencumbered by all the facts. The past was better and it was worse and we see it as we’re taught to see it, not as it was. We often see the present through the same glasses and how many of us grew up nostalgic for a future that, for better or worse never came true?
Hiroshime? Your opinion has much to do with how much you know about the deaths of 20 million Chinese and the manner in which they died. It has to do with the likilhood you’d be dead yourself within months or days if you were a young man in 1945. They still celebrate it in China.
Let me be nostalgic for 1957 for a moment. Segregation, sure, in fact this county had no schools beyond the 8th grade for non-whites. People were being lynched and everything was restricted and segregated ond for WASPS only. But I could buy a brand new 1957 Corvette and drive it well into the next county without encountering a stop light or a strip mall. The countryside was enormously better looking and there was no hip-hop on the radio. Is it wrong to miss that and should I have eaten my spinach because children were starving elsewhere?
I’m sorry, but I’m neither delusional or in some sort of denial, we have lost much over time whether or not we have gained other things. If nostalgia and the love of history are so different, if it’s wrong to miss Walter Kronkite and hate Fox News, I don’t know why. Was there a golden age? No. Was American once greater than now? Probably not, it was always the best of times and the worst of times.
The poor will always be with us, as the man said. So will liars and con men and frauds and garden of eden politicians. Do we make ourselves wretched over things we can’t change? Will there be steady progress toward the light? We can’t really say that. But there was much to be said for 1957 and a whole lot of history as well. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.