Nostalgia

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."

-Albert Camus

Looking out across the valley on this thirteen degree morning at the bare tree trunks and branches highlighted by the snow clinging to the hills.

Back at Tara we displayed a daguerreotype of Southside Hill with the house right there where it's been for 176 years now, backed by those same snowy hills. Nothing has changed. I find it reassuring every time I drive up the hill, view that scene, and think it's pretty much the same cradling hillside that's flanked this place for over a century.

Not a sentiment one feels in Florida all that often, particularly as one draws closer to a coast that's constantly being reshaped by nature and voracious developers.

As happens most mornings, I started to stir awake with a song playing in my head, usually something I would not have selected and have no idea why it's echoing in there. I reckon there's some sort of discernment or self-awareness in trying to figure that out.

The song was Old Days, by Chicago, released in 1975 and filled with the sort of mawkish nostalgia for the 1950s that filled those years.

Drive-in movies

Comic books and blue jeans

Howdy doody

Baseball cards and birthdays

Take me back

To a world gone away

Memories

Seem like yesterday

Two years before my mom took us to see American Graffiti, the evening-in-a-life film directed by George Lucas and produced by Francis Ford Coppola that asked the question, "Where were you in '62?"

Mom loved that movie, loved the music of that era we heard playing through our home when she wasn't serenading us with Joan Baez and Paul, Paul & Mary.

On television we watched Happy Days, which ran from the year after American Graffiti was released until the mid-80s, laughing at the Fonz and feasting visually on 57 Chevys, poodle skirts and bobby socks. Grease came along a couple years later with John Travolta gyrating in sneering black leather.

The funny thing is, that generation's love affair in the 1970s was with a time that was as removed from them as the 2008 financial crisis is from us. Or maybe Obama's election, if you want to recall something a little more uplifting. I've reached an age when something that happened maybe a decade or two ago is the blink of an eye. And no one as we close out 2025 seems all that dewy eyed about the golden memories of the fall of Lehman Brothers and whatever we all happened to be doing about that time.

But we do see a malignant version of that '50s nostalgia in MAGA beckoning back to a bygone era when white, Christian men ran the country for the benefit of everyone else. Even the slogan, "Make America Great Again", promises a return to a halcyon period that never actually existed.

What do we share with the 1970s that makes a chunk of the population in both eras long for a return to the 1950s? Both decades were and are pretty disorienting--- to their Watergate, Vietnam humiliation, burning bras and black liberation advocates, we've experienced Covid, the massive economic and social disruptions of the information age, and more and more People Not Like Us demanding their place at the table. So sure, a little more stability would be nice, although the average American of the 1950s would walk into our sprawling homes, ride around the block in our rolling computer/entertainment centers, and marvel at the whole planet at our fingertips through this keyboard, and suggest we have it pretty damned good. And no one has polio--at least not for now.

What separates the nostalgia for the Eisenhower era in the 1970s and what we're experienced today is its scope. Back when we'd have a '50s themed social at my middle school, everyone played along. Happy Days was the most-watched television show of its era. The whole country, it seemed, was glued to its TV on Tuesday nights to follow the adventures of Ritchie and Potsie, and then those of their spin off characters, Laverne and Shirley. We all seemed to be joined in this collective national escape to the recent past.

Now, however, the fixation on what we imagine we once were is pretty much the exclusive province of a swath of undereducated, white fundamentalists whom Fonzie wouldn't be all that interested in hanging around with. And the new nostalgia fogs the lens a bit; their nostalgia doesn't extend to the wonderful automobiles or the music or any other piece of the late-Ike era milieu beyond its unquestioning racism and sexism. The 1970s' version of '50s nostalgia was clothed in specific memories of that time for many (but not for me as an early '60s baby, although Mom filled in the gaps of what I'd missed). These recent atavists never lived the time, can't remember it, and mostly just want to roll back the clock to the time before what's been called the Second American Civil War in the 1960s, a time they populate with fantasy figures that look like the little villages folks used to assemble around their model train sets.

I guess I'm one to talk--part of why I love western New York as I do is that our towns and villages up here mostly look like what's assembled around that train set in the photo. I don't long to go back and live in the era that brought us these wonderful communities, but I'll take the aesthetics over the jarring sprawl of Plano or Alpharetta, or Panama City for that matter, all day long.

Time to get to work. A lost week with finals followed by a lost day yesterday getting a bed liner sprayed onto the new truck up in snowy yesterday leaves me up to my backside in alligators as the week rolls forward.