My friend Page would recall some adventure of Bix Beiderbecke’s, which would then remind someone else of an interesting story about Django Reinhart, which would remind me that Django Reinhart had only two good fingers on his fretting hand. To which, my friend John, who had been having some trouble fretting a difficult chord said, “Well, now I really feel discouraged”. And so it would go as we drifted from one topic to another - as most conversation does. The striking thing about our conversations was not the drifting, but that we so often talked about people and events from times long before our own.
Mention of The Great Gildersleeve would immediately remind someone else of Fibber Magee & Molly’s famous closet shtick, or the original radio version of Gunsmoke, staring William Conrad as Matt Dillon. Often enough the talk would turn to Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein or any of the many expatriate writers who added intellectual glamor to the bright lights of Paris during the 1920s. Then the talk might segue to the innovative painters of the same period, from Picasso to Braque. My friend, Tom, would bring up notable photographers like, Bresson, or Diane Arbus. And so on, and on, through all sorts of personalities who had little more in common than that they had all become famous during the first half of the 20th century. We thought the past was interesting and worth our attention, and our interest in history really extended to all history.
I started reflecting on the odd out-of-time-ness of our reflections . On the other hand, was it really odd? No. In fact it was, and is, typical of most people born before 1946.
We arrive at birth slightly in the past. Our first look at the world is seen through the lens of a culture decades gone. That’s because most of what we learn in our early years we learn from our parents, aunts, uncles and their friends. By the time we’re ten we’ve absorbed the previous twenty-plus years almost as though we had actually lived through them.
This creates something like nostalgia for a pseudo past.
At least it had that effect on me and many others of my generation. Not so the Baby-Boom generation, or the generations that followed
The Baby Boom generation officially spans 1946 to 1964.
I was born in 1943. People born before the cutoff date of 1946 are different from Baby Boomers in ways that the small difference of only a few years doesn’t really explain.
I have some ideas that may explain.
After WWII, America was transformed. The 170 years before 1946 had more in common than any year that has followed since. Before the war America was not a World Power. After the war - it was the only World Power. It has stayed that way for decades - decades the Boomer’s believed were normal. Those decades were not normal. They grew up in a golden age of peace and plenty never known before - and not likely to happen again.
Those of us born before 1946 were steeped in the hard times of our parents. We, “remembered”, when times were hard. We had close-up knowledge of many years before our birth. What the boomer’s considered history, we thought of as yesterday. We were only a few years apart from the Boomers
at birth, but we were generations apart in attitude.
I don’t think there has ever been a gap that large between any other generation. The only thing close to it in cultural confliction is invasion & occupation by foreign forces.
“Oh, c’mon”, you may think, “Every generation
is in some revolt against the generation that came before”.
That’s true, but it misses the peculiar permutations of this particular gap.
The consequences extend from the baby-boomers to the millennials. “Never trust anyone over 30”. That was the battle cry of the 60’s. Whatever was old was bad. Whatever was new was good. Simplistic, invidious and effective; a virus that has befuddled doughy minds ever since.
The slogan has been largely forgotten. The disease
rages on.
For centuries people identified, “Golden Ages” - all of which were located somewhere In the past. After 1946, “Golden Ages”, were passé with a vengeance. Anything similar could only be located in Tomorrowland. Yesterday’s cultures were all hopeless moral swamplands occupied by knuckle-dragging savages intent on abusing Mother Earth and enslaving minorities. Only, “Progressive”, new thinking could provide hope. And, indeed, that’s what Progressive thinking usually does provide; hope - false hope, fresh trouble and little else.
Why does it persist? It persists because you can’t remember what you never learned. The educational establishment has done everything it can to bury or distort the Great Ideas of Western Civilization. Pop culture and the left-wing media have aided and abetted the process.
It’s not the kids fault. They never had a chance.
Maybe the only possibility for redemption is a time capsule loaded with the liberating wisdom of the hidden past - along with some history books – real history books.
Blessedly, paper lasts longer than electricity.
Meanwhile I’m going to lay low and be grateful for my twenty-plus upbringing.
Mmm, I wonder what’s on yesterday?