Boomer Nostalgia

It must be worse in the states.

It really is.

Esiason?

Yeah, it's present in BC, but I don't think it's a pervasive cultural problem like Nickelback, golf, and oversized pickups. It must have something to do with the American fetishization of highschool and the glory days when you were under 20.

This is sort of a weird complaint in 2007. I think of boomer nostalgia as mostly an 80s phenomenon. Granted, it never really went away, but it's since been matched in annoyance by post-boomer nostalgia for the 80s and even the early 90s.

I agree with that. But, the current state is this bizarre mixture of odd appreciation for the shit that most people should've left behind a decade plus ago.


You've got shit like the Internet and New Media forcing down warm feelings of "Footloose" and the Power Glove down your throat, while you have the more traditional venues continuing to serve as the warm handed circlejerk for the folks that start the Boomer Nostalgia Boom of the 80s that just became this industry that it is now.

It's a battle to see who can be more annoying.

Every generation does it, just look at collegehumor.com.

For most of human history, culture has changed little from generation to generation, meaning it was hard to get nostalgic about butter churns and laudanum if they were still prevalent. Throughout the 21st century, generational differences grew at an exponential rate, and everyone eventually found themselves cut off from much of the culture they grew up on. That's not a comfortable idea for most humans. If the culture keeps moving this fast, I think we're all gonna feel like regressing to a simpler time.


On a tangent, it's not unreasonable to suggest that generational differences will keep growing wider, I don't think the divides will be along the same lines. There was a pretty significant ideological revolution that happened during the sixties and seventies, and as a result I see more similarities between the views of the teenaged and middle-aged people I know than between the middle-aged and old. New technology should continue to mystify those who didn't grow up within it, but the progressive ideals which made so much headway in the Sixities and Seventies are widely held by today's youth, negating a potential contrast which existed between the boomers and their folks.

I see your point and I don't. Marketed nostalgia is pretty bad, especially considering how many billion 50's burger joints we have across the country, or the cynical real reason why classic radio exits (buy your old albums on them new-fangled CD's! They're like shiny records they are.) And I think right around the second I Love the 80's we reached a saturation point on ironic t-shirts and tributes to things that happened 15 years ago.

However, I can't deny that I do feel nostalgia for these things. You mention the Power Glove and it does take me back to being a kid, when all I had to worry about was if Superman was going to stay dead and if it'd be nice enough outside to ride my bike. On the other hand, I also couldn't drive and I was much, much dumber at that age. You trade little comforts for freedom and knowledge. I think just as long as you don't buy into it on a consumer level, and can remember that there was no such thing as a time when life was ever perfect, you deserve to naval gaze just a bit.

So it's about the death of Elvis then? I mean, that was the whole year right there, right? Star Wars came out, Elvis died, Happy New Year, the end.

And just to be on subject, what really drives me nuts about the nostalgia boom is that it just keeps updating. Not only updating, but creeping closer and closer to the present. The problem is that it's turned into big money. Nostalgia programming has become so successful that we now have TV that looks back wistfully on the nineties as a decade. And I don't even mean recently. They started looking back at the nineties in 2002.

There was a blizzard, too. I heard a song about it.

I can't help it, I wish I could just wish away my feelings. I just miss Herbert Jefferson jr. SO much!
And people shoving their bullshit about the old days up their kids ass is nothing new. "This Buddy Holly is an abomination! Bring back the jitterbug!" You just gotta take what you like, and leave the rest. Like your salad bar.

I'd just like to point out that the Boomers are the ones responsible for taking women who were perfectly willing to be housewives who wore dresses with pearls while vacuuming the house and cooking dinner and turned them into the glass ceiling bumping harpies who think they should be paid the same as a man and that men should shoulder 50% of the housework and child rearing responsibilities.

And Disco...Those pricks came up with Disco.


Fuck those hippies and the VW Van they rode in on.

As soon as my generation started getting wistful about TMNT and Transformers I knew the world was fucked.

And, Rath, what's up with a five year reunion? Is that even enough time to heal the scars of high school, never mind become wistful about them? My ten year was bad enough I can't imagine how much a five year would have sucked.

My twenty-year reunion has come and gone now. I didn't go. Everybody from high school that I want anything to do with, I'm still hanging around with. Besides, I'm not setting foot in Spokane again if it's the last bastion of civilization after the zombie apocalypse.

People who think of high school as the best years of their lives should kill themselves.

I went to a place where it seems the term "peaked in high school" was the motto. It's very weird to go back to my home town and run into people who just want to relive those days (Springsteen was dead-on about small town high school). Despite the fact that I wasn't an outcast I have no desire to look back on those three years as anything other than awkward and embarrassing. I have become a much more interesting person since then and accomplished so much more then my teenage self would have ever dreamed that I can't imagine holding up those years as my best.

BTW, Rath, the fact that you finished a film is amazing. You should be ready to pimp the hell out of your third for your ten year!

I think you are all forgetting that you had to do fuck-all in high school.

Speak for yourself.