Lately I've received a number of emails containing those lists of things grandma/pa did without and how wonderful life was back in their golden age. Somehow these lists just don't ring true for me. There is always a fly in the ointment, some aspect of those days that seem tarnished: you know - wars, disease, depressions, prohibitions, not to mention the missing appliances that had actually been around but not noticed by the list makers. This topic arose on Anthro-L, one of those email lists I subscribe to in an attempt to retain some ability for critical thinking. Martin Cohen, one of my fellow subscribers posted a message on this topic. I thought what he had to say worth a wider audience than just an email list. So, with his permission (and some editing on his part) what follows is an astute rebuttal to these recent golden age letters.

Every once in a while I receive an email with a “just-so” story about how much different (and better) life was in the past. The most recent one, discussed on a professional email list, begins: “One evening a grandson was talking to his grandmother about current events. The grandson asked his grandmother what she thought about the shootings at schools, the computer age, and just things in general. The Grandmother replied, ‘Well, let me think a minute, I was born before: . . .’” The grandmother lists several technologies that didn’t exist at the time she was born. She goes on to talk about moral behavior, sexuality, in some versions drugs, respect for the elderly, simple ways to have fun – you name it. It adds up to a very conservative view of what a proper culture should be. And it is wildly inaccurate, as we find out at the end, that the grandmother is only 59 years old – that is the big shock! Since I am 58 years old (or will be in less than 2 months), I can attest to the inaccuracy of the list of non-existent technologies – air conditioning, television, and penicillin to name a few. On the other hand, we did have institutionalized racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and the constant fear of nuclear annihilation.

When the world seems too much for us and there are widespread shared anxieties, people often look back at a “golden age”, a simpler, or better time. If change comes too quickly, there are conflicting views of a moral universe, or economic and political fears; a nostalgia for a time that never was becomes a longing, and a yardstick for comparison. Unfortunately, it also becomes the explanation for what is wrong in the present. The errors in these stories are often glaring, but unimportant, because like a history lesson from Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann, accuracy isn’t the point.

The Golden Age story is common in tough times, but it is not universal.  I grew up in a time that was far from golden, rife with racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. If you were white, straight, and middle-class you could be so unaware of this that you might look back with untarnished nostalgia.  However, selective memory seems to require forgetting the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, the bomb shelters, the test sirens and the monthly drills in school.  Not to mention the solemn voices and ashen faces of adults during the Cuban missile crisis.  This was a time of collective trauma.  If ever there was a time for looking back on a golden age, this would have been it, one would think.  But no, we looked to the future, naively, perhaps, but it had a very positive effect - we invested in education, technology, the space program (President Kennedy said that in less than a decade we would place a man on the moon, and we all should have called him insane, but we didn't; instead, we sent a mission to the moon).  We thought we could do stuff, and we did.  The Civil Rights movement had enough success to show us that social progress was possible.  We believed in ourselves as a nation, and we had hope.  These are what we lack today.  The 1950s and 1960s were not a time when folks looked back at a golden past, the past was WWII, the Great Depression, child labor, etc. We believed, again naively, in “progress.”  We looked to a "golden future."  We were even led there by the pied pipers of industry who painted a bright future through technology - Monsanto exhibits at Disneyland, World Fairs with exhibits by GE, grade school field trips to museums of science and industry.  Even the real ugliness, such as the Korean War and then the Vietnamese War couldn't dull the shine of the future - after all, these were the problems of NOW - and we will move beyond.  The anti-war movement was not one of resignation, but of hope and idealism.  And finally, when we completely pulled out of Vietnam, we knew we won something bigger than war; we had struck a major blow for democracy and a more peaceful future. Our parents had conquered the Great Depression; Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan; we had turned the off-switch on the great war machine in Washington and forced a corrupt president to resign! We really could do anything!  Surely, with peace, prosperity, and an eye on the future, human progress was assured.

Memory is short-lived in our society. In the next decade, Ronald Reagan used images of small-town America in a somehow depression-free 1930s movie landscape to depict the ideal American way of life - at the same time telling us constantly that we, as a society, we, as a collective power, we as a government of the people, for the people, were incapable of doing anything - and he killed the future. 

There was no golden age in the past, it's just that we are living in a leaden age today. It seems that most Americans are incapable of identifying the causes of their misery, so they are quick to buy these mawkish descriptions of quaint morality, personal responsibility, and societal docility as the key to our past greatness; the stuff that is missing from our lives today.  Worse, the ones I hear crying the loudest in their misery complain about the high costs private schools, and about paying taxes. These are people who make at least ¼ of a million dollars a year – which puts them in the top 5% of American households. While far from the super wealthy, who are quite public in cities such as Los Angeles, they are among the very wealthiest of people on a global scale. Their tears are embarrassing.

But back to the email in which the grandmother’s age is supposed to shock me: I don't know just how old Grandma is, but she should put down the damned crack pipe next time she waxes nostalgic!

Martin Cohen, August 11, 2011

For myself, I remember civil defense siren test, Rocketdyne engine tests, duck and cover drills and the bomb shelter my father built in our back yard. I felt little cause for alarm, I hadn't connected the dots yet and I was fully immersed in science fiction. Everything seemed possible to me. All we needed to do was try for it. JFKs assassination was my first significant jolt that the world was not what I thought it was. Currently it seems most people I know want little more than to resample moments from real and imagined pasts and view them on hand held devices.