Packaging history is a natural instinct, particularly today when so much that comes at us is fragmentary and disjointed. Humans have to wrangle time, to organize it into containers that make sense of life.
But packaging some things means leaving important others behind. We can, in effect, choose our 1960s from a buffet of cultural fragments. And each depends upon what the package is trying to sell.
If you're Nostalgiaville USA, the 20th-century trinket emporium along I-70 in Kingdom City, Mo., PEZ dispensers and "Laugh-In" photos and other pop iconography are your bread and butter. You're not really focusing on the poor Appalachians that LBJ and RFK tried to help.
If you're the chain store Party City, you traffic in costumes that evoke the "fun" 1960s, not James Meredith desegregating Ole Miss. If you're producing "The Wonder Years," you gin up grainy home movies for your opening credits and overlay a snippet of Joe Cocker singing at Woodstock.
But as time goes by, these anecdotal stand-ins shift to the front row. Instead of just evoking a decade, they become how we think about it. Then we start misremembering the past.
Worse, we don't even realize we're doing it.
Here's an odd example, taken from an article about New York's decaying Floyd Bennett Field:
At a well-attended public hearing in September, the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, who is also a panel member, suggested bringing major trade shows to Floyd Bennett, starting a high-end antique fair — similar to the Brimfield Antique Show and Flea Market in Massachusetts — and building a drive-in movie theater.
I used to think this phenomenon was the result of selective memory - the fact that most people want to remember good things and big accomplishments, and human nature is often eager to slough off the painful events of the past.
ReplyDeleteAs I get older, though, I've come to believe that more and more what you describe above is the result of advertisers deliberately creating a illusory monolithic culture - be it the Roaring '20s, the Booming '50s or the Peace Generation of the '60s - in order to sell, even if these never existed, or ever came close to existing.
The drawback being, besides the fact that the whole presentation is a charade, that people alive during those and other marketing-created illusory eras not only don't remember what they see presented as fact, they may begin to question their own worth in a society they begin to feel they played little to no role in creating.
Corrupting history is a steep price to pay to grab an little bigger piece of the soft drink market or to peddle a few more Chevy trucks.
I believe there's a good bit of selective memory at work in the political sphere still- conservatives keep trying to drag us back into a highly regulated, imaginary 1950s where they ruled the roost.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's just me but the big difference I identify between Goldwater and Wallace is that Wallace told the unvarnished truth whereas G-water obfuscated. Wallace was capable of learning; I'm not sure G-water was. I didn't like either man but I always thought Wallace the more honest of the two and probably a better man at his center.
ReplyDeleteJay in N.C.