Driving home from the supermarket and my freakin' Sirius receiver was misplaced by the boy (Grrrr!), so I was listening to NPR. I used to be a good college-educated liberal and listen to hours of NPR every day, and now I can't freakin' stand it. I mean, it's been years since they had that talented author on All Things Considered...what was his name again? He wrote some book about his wife having cancer? And, of course, I am well aware of Terri Gross' power to move books off the shelves. (Terri! I have a new book coming out! Call me!) But, overall, I like getting my news from the newspaper and my political commentary and fart jokes from Stephanie Miller. I mean, even when I listened to Talk of the Nation every day, Ray Suarez only rarely made fart jokes. Actually, it was only once--he had Warren Christopher on and said, "Whoa! Mr. Secretary, did you just let one rip, or is somebody eating egg salad in here?"
But just now Scott Simon was chuckling warmly as Bill Bryson read from his new book about how glorious and carefree the nineteen fifties were, and something occurred to me. There are few things more annoying than other people's nostalgia. That's why I gave up on Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude even before everybody else did. Eh, who cares about the glorious 1970's? Who cares about the glorious 1950's? Who cares about anybody else's childhood? I can't wait to see American Hardcore, but at the same time, I recognize that all these talking heads talking about "Oh the scene was really something special, and then it all went to hell" would probably be really annoying to anybody who wasn't there.
Basically, if you are lucky, you have a childhood that seems carefree in comparison to your adulthood. And, if you're lucky, you'll have a nice adolescence, and the music and movies of your adolescence will remind you of the joys of that time and the horrors will fade away. But it's dumb and inane to draw any kind of cultural conclusions based on your experience of growing up. It's not that America was more innocent--it's that you were. And while your thing you liked when you were 16 was changing and, according to you, getting bad when you were 19, maybe it was changing into something that kids a few years younger than you liked better. Or maybe they were starting their own thing across town.
It's not that the country, or the culture, or the zeigeist or anything was simpler or more innocent when you were younger, it's that you were. Duh!
