Unwarranted nostalgia. Two instances, one which isn't.

The Arming and Departure of the Knights (of the Round Table), a tapestry.  I feared Uncle Mike was going into the Kennedy at Camelot point of view of things, but he didn't.  This tapestry, as idealized as it is, might serve as a pretty good reflection of the 60s and of the Arthurian legend, which features adultery, armed conflict, and defeat.  Not cheery.

1963: The Last Summer, Part I

I really like Uncle Mike's blog.  It's one of two I have up here by New Yorkers (the other being City Father), and on a website like this you're going to get some nostalgia, like it or not, but it can serve to really reflect how our recollections of the past are pretty messed up in some instances.

Uncle Mike's essay starts off:

The Summer of 1963 was a beginning for some, and an ending for many more. America would never quite be so young again as it was that year.

The essay goes on from there to note a bunch of stuff that happened in 1963, and does a really nice job of it.  I was prepared to condemn it, but I can't upon reading it.  The part I'd still object to is the opening line.  "Never quite be so young again"?

Well, maybe, but in part because 1963 was on the cusp of the real 1960s.  1963, quite frankly, was in the late 1950s, era was.  The 1960s, as I've written here before, actually started in 1964 or 1965.  I guess that means I'm placing myself as being born in the cultural 50s, but I'd also note that the real 1950s featured the Korean War, the Cold War, conscription, and a host of other bad stuff.

A lot of which were going on in the early part of the calendar 60s, some of which Uncle Mike notes.

So the post wasn't nostalgic delusion.

This is political nostalgic delusion:

Nikki Haley

@NikkiHaley

·

Jun 24

Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out. #RTM2023

Eh?

The view of the world that seemingly many people have about the past.  Even as this great Rockwell was being painted, the greatest war the world has ever fought was raging, which was part of Rockwell's "why we fight" point.  We'd win, but bring it to an end by using an atomic bomb, something that stained our morality in the cause and which has been a burden on the world every since.  And at the time that this was painted, there was no freedom to sit where you wanted, if you were black, in much of the US.  The "innocence" of our past is never as innocent as we might suppose.

I remember growing up that we were losing the Vietnam War and inflation was destroying my parent's savings. 

I don't like a lot of the way things are headed now, but we weren't living in a Normal Rockwell painting at any point in the past.

Nikki Haley was born in 1972, which means that she's a decade younger than me (thank goodness the GOP has some candidates that aren't 120 years old).  That means that she grew up in the 70s and 80s.

I can recall the 70s and 80s.  Indeed, I've done so here in a series of post on that topic, Growing up in the 1970s, Growing up in the 1980s .

I don't know if I have a more accurate recollection of being young than other people seemingly do, or if I lack a gene which causes us to romanticize the period of our youth.  Either way, the 1970s weren't exactly all skittles and beer, or whatever the proper analogy was.  Inflation was rampant, we lost the Vietnam War, Iran took our embassy staff hostage. . . you recall all that, Nikki?

Life wasn't actually all that simple if your parents were constantly worried about the price of absolutely everything.  The cost of gasoline was a weekly topic.  Watergate's investigations were on the news.

Do I remember how simple life was?

Yes, because I was a kid.  For most kids, life is a joy because you are a kid. Same with being a teenager, really.

I was in my late teens and early 20s in the early 80s.  For part of that time I lived at home, and I hunted and fished as I would.  Sure, life was simple, because I had no financial worries, being a single guy with no responsibilities whatsoever.

Even at that stage, however, your DNA will come in and pull the brakes and levers. Pretty soon you are worrying, or should be, about your future, including your economic future. And you'll start to look for what modern boneheaded lexiconites call "a partner", meaning a spouse.  It's the way of the world.

None of that is simple.

So was that time about faith, family, and country?  Maybe where Nikki lived, but where I lived, probably less so.  Everyone, pretty much, where I lived at the time, and where I still do, was a cultural Christian, and the mainline Protestant churches were still strong.  This was before the onset of Southern Populism brought about by that great Republican hero, Ronald Reagan.  I'm Catholic, of course, but the shift was notable.  To people just a little older than me there was disruption in the Catholic Church as reformers came in and took out the altar rails, etc., but I didn't hear much about that at home really, probably as I was a kid.  Now that I'm far past being a kid, I don't really appreciate a lot that was done to the Church in that period, by which I do not mean Vatican II.

Anyhow, people were at least culturally Christian here, and this is the least religious state in the United States.  People who weren't Christians were likely Mormons.  So I suppose she has a point there.

On family, I suppose, at that time, most families were intact.  Roe v. Wade and Hugh Hefner had started the march to Obergefell, so there were things occurring that were destructive going all the way back to the 1950s, if not before.  The 70s was the real heyday of the Sexual Revolution, and it permitted the entire atmosphere of the culture.  Playboy was sold at the grocery stores in the checkout lines, with the rack designed to camouflage most of the girl on the cover.  Moral decay hadn't set in, in the really perverse ways that would take off in the 1990s, but it had started.

What about "country".

Well, amongst the young, in the 70s, not so much, and yes.  I was in the National Guard for most of the 1980s, but frankly we didn't wear our uniforms off duty if we could avoid it, and we didn't bring it up in casual conversation. Part of that was to avoid getting a lecture from somebody our own age, a lingering aspect of the Vietnam War.  The military recovered under Reagan, but social attitudes weren't what they became later, where everyone was thanking you for your service.  More likely, somebody was going to ask "why?" if you were in the service, or maybe even give you a lecture.

None of which is to say that we don't have a moral dumpster fire going on in our society right now.  But what led us to that was long in coming and will take real work to address.  It isn't as if Joe Biden came in, and it was like electing Caligula.  Our prior President, after all, has a history of behavior that the late Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

The point?

Well, Haley brings up some valid things about the current reprehensible state of affairs.  But it would require a lot more work than voting Joe Biden out.  It's a pretty deep cultural operation, really.