Not so much awful writing as uncharacteristically careless thinking. Having read the first four and now chewing through Seasons in the Sun (1974-9), I look forward c. 2050 to Volume 11 of Mr Sandbrook’s postwar Britain series – ‘Cake and Eat It: the UK 2016-22’? – when he’ll have to deal with the farcical and ruinous two year Covid panic with the objectivity of 30 years detachment.
It’s quite a use of words too. ‘Miracle?’ Really? Even if you accept the safety and efficacy claims (cough cough) and ignore the infrastructure of suppression that surrounds them, they’re still not a ‘miracle.’ They’re the product of a big drug company doing what it does.
Dear me. If one is being extremely generous, the Covid treatments (they are hardly vaccines, or at least wouldn’t have been defined as such pre-2020) are an imperfect “solution” to an over-exaggerated problem. A very black mark against Mr Sandbrook, I credited him with more of an enquiring mind.
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
Did Elliott “do the right thing” by facilitating ET’s escape? Wouldn’t his capture and dissection by all the clever scientists help “keep everyone safe” from what could be a potentially existential external threat to humanity? Surely the US government knows better than some suburban kid? Why didn’t Elliott just “stay in his lane” and let the government agents do their work, for the common good?
The answers to these questions are obvious, and intuitive, at least to those in mid-late adulthood in the western world (and, I suspect, children everywhere). So why did so many of those in a generation weened on stories like ET, which tell us about the power of human connection, empathy, and above all the power of the individual, cavil to an inhumane, overpowering, collectivist authoritarianism which demands the submission of individual bodily and conscientious autonomy to the common good, as defined by the government, rather than think and act for themselves?
And why does a supposedly irreligious and secularised society seem to believe in miracles?
Your post exemplifies a society of narcissists.
You have the gall to write about “human connection” when demonizing duties to the collective that make societal flourishing possible.
Even worse you dismiss the notion of extraterrestrials as an existential threat because some cloying fictional account manipulated you emotionally.
The problem with most COVID restrictions to which you clearly allude is they generally ignored the evidence. It was performative, often laughable irrational safetyism, not rational collectivism.
Um, not sure I demonised duties to “the collective”, as you describe it, in general. That certainly wasn’t my intention. Certainly, a major part of personal responsibility is social responsibility. What I was picking at was the unthinking, unquestioning, naive compliance with the laughably irrational safetyism that you describe. And that includes the irrational attempt, at the behest of powerful corporate and political interests, to panic-jab the entire population, regardless of their age, health conditions, or susceptibility to serious respiratory illness; and the willingness of large numbers of people to attempt to bully or ostracise those who refused to affirm the false paradigm of fear that had been imposed on them by dysfunctional authorities.
And I did not “dismiss the notion of extraterrestrials as an existential threat”. Actually what I was saying was the opposite: that the human emotional response to Spielberg’s film is to side with Elliott and ET over authorities who would have very good reason indeed to attempt to capture and investigate ET as a specimen of an alien species that could theoretically pose an existential threat. Were you cursing the loss to human scientific knowledge as ET’s spaceship took off for home rather than reaching for the tissue box?
Our exchange here exemplifies the need for a proper truth and reconciliation commission to really get to the bottom of what happened and to heal the societal wounds that the calamitous Covid response opened up.
George Kushner
1 year ago
As they say, — Future is not what it used to be
It does look like the 60s were the last spark of creativity, however even Blade Runner kept the romantic spirit and optimism of an individual asserting himself against all odds. I’m afraid we just don’t care about our future anymore in any real sense
We had everything to live for in the 60’s despite “the four minute warning” and such fabulous films as ‘Dr Strangelove’ to remind us just how precarious our existence really was.
Yes, the whole reason we feared nuclear attack in the 60s was that we saw some point in the world not being wiped out. Some of my friends iare now so despairing they actually talk about a nuclear “reboot” being a good thing for the planet
I thought Dr Strangelove was the greatest comedy around. It didn’t worry me. But then neither did the threat of the 4 minute warning. I took it for granted that leaders who had personal experience of war would not press the suicide button. Now, I am not so sure
Exactly, and as the Cuban Missile Crisis so aptly demonstrated.
Norman Powers
1 year ago
I wonder how much of this can be traced to the conversion of climatology in the mid-70s from global cooling to global warming, and the subsequent decades of relentless messaging that there’s no point in being optimistic about the future because everything modern and high-tech is actually dooming humanity to live in Waterworld.
The general trend towards dystopian sci-fi is pretty clear when you review the sci-fi hits of the 50s and 60s. Even in the early 90s there was Star Trek TNG, which was pretty relentlessly optimistic about the future. Who makes shows like that now? The most notable example is Foundation, which is of course (a) not all that optimistic, being another case of Rome In Space, and (b) a product of the optimistic era being converted badly into a TV show because entertainment companies are apparently terrified of creating optimistic sci-fi storylines themselves, presumably lest they be accused of not 100% supporting the climate apocalypse scenario.
My guess is that we’re drastically underestimating the psychological damage being inflicted on humanity by climatologists and their allies in the media. Our society has adopted a kind of unwritten rule that you can either ignore the future, or you can loudly proclaim we’re all doomed, but if you say the future is going to be pretty great and something to look forward to then you’re a terrible right-wing science denier. Which is garbage, climatology is just as corrupt as COVID science is, but good luck getting that view across in mainstream culture.
Also – miracle vaccines lol. Tell that to all the friends we have who were made far sicker by the vaccines than COVID itself. Some miracle! The future is bright but it’s not going to be government-driven science that makes it so.
Well at least the centenarian James Lovelock*, author of the fabled “Gaia hypothesis” has recanted, and now embraces Nuclear power, despite the hysterical screams of the Green Climate Nutters. So all is not lost.
(*Born 1919)
Allison Barrows
1 year ago
My husband and I were newlyweds in the first years of the 80s (we, too, sobbed through “E.T.” at the 2nd Avenue theater in NYC). Just wanted to clarify something, as we were living it in real time: the “child abuse panic” you cite was utterly and completely made up. It was as real as the hysterical teens screaming “witch!” in “The Crucible”. The psychology industry cooked up the idea of repressed memories and hand-walked children into making false, obviously impossible, clearly fantastical claims against innocent people, most infamously the Amirault family of Massachusetts.
And did you actually say, in all seriousness, “the miracle of Covid vaccines”? You mean the ones that don’t prevent the contracting or spreading of the virus? The new myocarditis delivery system? Wow, you do live in a fantasy world.
polidori redux
1 year ago
“Her father might have loved marzipan, Mary said, but he had enjoyed E.T. so much that he never wanted to eat it.” He kept it because his daughter had given it to him. I haven’t seen E.T., but I would still keep a daughter’s present.
As for nostalgia: I can be nostalgic about the seventies – I was young then and I’m not now.
Last edited 1 year ago by polidori redux
Steve Murray
1 year ago
I simply don’t accept the premise behind the article at all. My view (having lived through all the eras cited) is that on the whole, we’re neither more nor less optimistic than we ever were. What we do seem to have more of these days, probably due to the heightened media agendas at play, is a greater awareness of all the troubles of the world which then APPEAR to make the future seem irredeemably less attractive when in fact all it is, is rather more complex than we could previously imagine. It’s a failure to catch up in an imaginative sense that’s lacking.
Programmes such as Tomorrow’s World in the late 60s/early 70s seemed to offer a glimpse of what was to come, but turned out to be totally wide of the mark. Life for most people in the West, whilst perhaps more hectic, is in many respects far more comfortable and I for one want to live to a very, very old age to see how things transpire; for good and for bad – as it always was.
Agreed – tho the young, with less years actually lived and the natural angst of that age , DO believe a bleak future – and that is a tragedy for all of us. Good to have been born in 1957 and to have made the occasional good decision !
Russell Hamilton
1 year ago
A couple of contributors that led to that optimism of the 50s, 60s and into the 70s were the expanding economies, and the post-war baby boom. You can still find the same feeling in some countries today – those countries with expanding economies and lots of children around.
Peter Imeson
1 year ago
I’m not convinced that picking a couple of films which support the points really tells us much about people’s views at the time, particularly with regard to technology e.g. “Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence”. Technology gone wrong has been a theme in fiction for a long time: HAL predates ET and Star Wars and the hugely popular Terminator franchise started in 1984. I find it difficult to believe people had more faith in the future during the Cold War; my own memory of being a child in the 1980s was a sense that there was a very real possibility of the world ending in a nuclear war at any moment.
True, but still there was a hope for the Future as a Salvation project. At the very least The Future was a real category, bad or good. It could be an individual Salvation against an anti-utopian reality (blade runner) or a mass Salvation. But I’m afraid the Future just doesn’t exist anymore except for inane Gates’ imagination or Musk’s vacuous tech paradise
Paul Rodolf
1 year ago
It appears to be human nature to pine for the “good ole days”. 20 years seems to be about the mark at which writers and producers are now influential enough to get their material onto screen and often reflect back on their teens and twenties. I remember American Graffiti and Happy Days were all the rage in the late seventies as my father’s generation pined for their lost youth and relevance. I do acknowledge and am sorry to see their is a great lack of optimism in the western world. How people feel about the future is important.
Jason Highley
1 year ago
I remember “80’s days” in high school, where everyone wore bleached jeans and tie dye shirts and headbands and whatever the hell else they saw in so-called “80’s movies”. That was 20 years ago. So the 80’s nostalgia wave is long in the tooth and overwrought. It also appears to be waning in response to the 90’s nostalgia incursion.
Have Doris Day movies ever been shown on Russian or Iranian national television? Back in the sobering 60s and 70s? Does the cinema industry in China do comedy? Might Buster Keaton’s comic thrills and spills ever be shown on a BBC main channel on a Sunday evening? Instead of the usual grim and gritty stuff? Desperate newcomers to western shores, unaware of the simple entertainments, might appreciate the good old stuff. The Muppet Show used to be shown on a Sunday evening back in the early 80s, just to recap.
When technology brought entertainment, at first in the very early days of cinema, it was good. The magnificent delay, however, of a good thirty years before sound could be matched to the moving image meant the western world of the arts and entertainments could hone its skills in, and increase its panache for, comedy: such was the realm of the Silent Era what with Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy among others. Perhaps the world would have ended up in a much worse and debilitating state had, say, sound been matched to the moving image when the Wright brothers had invented the aeroplane – an amazing twenty odd years before the Talkies arrived. So three cheers for the Silent Era!
No quick comedy bypass materialised! The comic gestures, the comic takes were honed by the time the Talkies arrived. And their influence rolled on into the Thirties and beyond. But technology, that had been so helpful in the beginning, has supplanted entertainment. The joy of getting from A to B, the Sunday afternoon drive, is now all about being dazzled and swallowed up by the fancy car. The western world has lost the ability to entertain and be entertained. People either want to be fussed over or be enabled to pry into. There’s no stopping them in the ridiculously tiny tyrannical screen age.
Guess what was the biggest box office hit at the cinema in West Germany in 1982?
Tootsie! Actually, I think it was E.T.. But certainly Tootsie was second. In the old West Germany. Forty years ago! And if the East Germans had craved for Tootsie, and they might well have, they might have added another ounce to their belief that the wall must come down.
Go … Tootsie … go! Ba ba, bah ba.
I can recall watching the D-Day commemorations on TV in 1984: the fortieth anniversary.
And now Tootsie and E.T. are forty years old. Crikey.
Disney’s posters on buses and at train stations are these days a parade of grim and cheerless countenances. Like what’s the world coming to! The West is truly shooting itself in the foot.
It’s as if the West cannot be immune to all the suffering in the world and must be forever in acknowledgement of its own guilt, too. The world of the arts and entertainments cannot ignore this! Hence this constant parade of the grim and vexed and indignant. Don’t Bollywood film posters cheer up the hard-pressed commuters in India much better? The West has lost its mojo.
Just to add, the nostalgia that’s out there at the moment is just the last gasp of a gentler West. Unless the creators and entertainers and artists all change their tune.
As for Abba, that band has spoiled the precious memory of itself of a band that had very quickly and impressively matured from 1973 to 1977 only to later go down the silly stage musical route. The Swedes were proud in the late Seventies to have warded away the hoity-toity rock critics by showing that they don’t do bubblegum pop, only for the mass of people under 50 today to equate the band with bubblegum pop thanks to the Mamma Mia phenomenon of awful-sounding film stars stretching their vocal cords to the limit – yes, the Mamma Mia phenomenon which is probably how the band are referred to these days.
Elizabeth dSJ
1 year ago
The way this essay invokes the Holocaust is precisely the reason ‘we have no future.’
You can’t have a healthy society fixated on a given atrocity as it’s core shared consciousness.
And that obsessive moralism surrounding the Holocaust did not become a widespread phenomenon until the 1960’s when the New Left gained ascendency, which is exactly when innovation, social trust, and other positive measures of our civilization went into decline.
Last edited 1 year ago by Elizabeth dSJ
Mark Duffett
1 year ago
Despite being a child of similar age to the author, I retain that techno-optimism and faith in progress. But yes, it’s lonely.
Mark Kennedy
1 year ago
Even for a historian, I think disentangling one’s own personal journey from youthful optimism to adult skepticism and cynicism from the supposedly analogous spiritual darkening of the times one lives through is a challenge. My grandchildren have their own uplifting versions of ET, and doubtless when they’re Mr. Sandbrook’s age will look back with nostalgia at the lost optimism of 2022. Of course, what they consider relevant criteria for evaluating and distinguishing between the eras they’ve traversed will differ from mine and Mr. Sandbrook’s.
The assumption underpinning the above phrase I believe is the key to our current ‘cynicism and disillusionment’
Why bury this nonsense in this otherwise interesting article.
It is even being touted as the other ‘miracle’ Boris achieved along with Brexit.
The subjective claim and expected acceptance, as fact, that these treatments are miraculous is some godawful writing.
Not so much awful writing as uncharacteristically careless thinking. Having read the first four and now chewing through Seasons in the Sun (1974-9), I look forward c. 2050 to Volume 11 of Mr Sandbrook’s postwar Britain series – ‘Cake and Eat It: the UK 2016-22’? – when he’ll have to deal with the farcical and ruinous two year Covid panic with the objectivity of 30 years detachment.
It’s quite a use of words too. ‘Miracle?’ Really? Even if you accept the safety and efficacy claims (cough cough) and ignore the infrastructure of suppression that surrounds them, they’re still not a ‘miracle.’ They’re the product of a big drug company doing what it does.
Dear me. If one is being extremely generous, the Covid treatments (they are hardly vaccines, or at least wouldn’t have been defined as such pre-2020) are an imperfect “solution” to an over-exaggerated problem. A very black mark against Mr Sandbrook, I credited him with more of an enquiring mind.
Did Elliott “do the right thing” by facilitating ET’s escape? Wouldn’t his capture and dissection by all the clever scientists help “keep everyone safe” from what could be a potentially existential external threat to humanity? Surely the US government knows better than some suburban kid? Why didn’t Elliott just “stay in his lane” and let the government agents do their work, for the common good?
The answers to these questions are obvious, and intuitive, at least to those in mid-late adulthood in the western world (and, I suspect, children everywhere). So why did so many of those in a generation weened on stories like ET, which tell us about the power of human connection, empathy, and above all the power of the individual, cavil to an inhumane, overpowering, collectivist authoritarianism which demands the submission of individual bodily and conscientious autonomy to the common good, as defined by the government, rather than think and act for themselves?
And why does a supposedly irreligious and secularised society seem to believe in miracles?
Your post exemplifies a society of narcissists.
You have the gall to write about “human connection” when demonizing duties to the collective that make societal flourishing possible.
Even worse you dismiss the notion of extraterrestrials as an existential threat because some cloying fictional account manipulated you emotionally.
The problem with most COVID restrictions to which you clearly allude is they generally ignored the evidence. It was performative, often laughable irrational safetyism, not rational collectivism.
Um, not sure I demonised duties to “the collective”, as you describe it, in general. That certainly wasn’t my intention. Certainly, a major part of personal responsibility is social responsibility. What I was picking at was the unthinking, unquestioning, naive compliance with the laughably irrational safetyism that you describe. And that includes the irrational attempt, at the behest of powerful corporate and political interests, to panic-jab the entire population, regardless of their age, health conditions, or susceptibility to serious respiratory illness; and the willingness of large numbers of people to attempt to bully or ostracise those who refused to affirm the false paradigm of fear that had been imposed on them by dysfunctional authorities.
And I did not “dismiss the notion of extraterrestrials as an existential threat”. Actually what I was saying was the opposite: that the human emotional response to Spielberg’s film is to side with Elliott and ET over authorities who would have very good reason indeed to attempt to capture and investigate ET as a specimen of an alien species that could theoretically pose an existential threat. Were you cursing the loss to human scientific knowledge as ET’s spaceship took off for home rather than reaching for the tissue box?
Our exchange here exemplifies the need for a proper truth and reconciliation commission to really get to the bottom of what happened and to heal the societal wounds that the calamitous Covid response opened up.
As they say, — Future is not what it used to be
It does look like the 60s were the last spark of creativity, however even Blade Runner kept the romantic spirit and optimism of an individual asserting himself against all odds. I’m afraid we just don’t care about our future anymore in any real sense
We had everything to live for in the 60’s despite “the four minute warning” and such fabulous films as ‘Dr Strangelove’ to remind us just how precarious our existence really was.
Yes, the whole reason we feared nuclear attack in the 60s was that we saw some point in the world not being wiped out. Some of my friends iare now so despairing they actually talk about a nuclear “reboot” being a good thing for the planet
I thought Dr Strangelove was the greatest comedy around. It didn’t worry me. But then neither did the threat of the 4 minute warning. I took it for granted that leaders who had personal experience of war would not press the suicide button. Now, I am not so sure
Exactly, and as the Cuban Missile Crisis so aptly demonstrated.
I wonder how much of this can be traced to the conversion of climatology in the mid-70s from global cooling to global warming, and the subsequent decades of relentless messaging that there’s no point in being optimistic about the future because everything modern and high-tech is actually dooming humanity to live in Waterworld.
The general trend towards dystopian sci-fi is pretty clear when you review the sci-fi hits of the 50s and 60s. Even in the early 90s there was Star Trek TNG, which was pretty relentlessly optimistic about the future. Who makes shows like that now? The most notable example is Foundation, which is of course (a) not all that optimistic, being another case of Rome In Space, and (b) a product of the optimistic era being converted badly into a TV show because entertainment companies are apparently terrified of creating optimistic sci-fi storylines themselves, presumably lest they be accused of not 100% supporting the climate apocalypse scenario.
My guess is that we’re drastically underestimating the psychological damage being inflicted on humanity by climatologists and their allies in the media. Our society has adopted a kind of unwritten rule that you can either ignore the future, or you can loudly proclaim we’re all doomed, but if you say the future is going to be pretty great and something to look forward to then you’re a terrible right-wing science denier. Which is garbage, climatology is just as corrupt as COVID science is, but good luck getting that view across in mainstream culture.
Also – miracle vaccines lol. Tell that to all the friends we have who were made far sicker by the vaccines than COVID itself. Some miracle! The future is bright but it’s not going to be government-driven science that makes it so.
Well at least the centenarian James Lovelock*, author of the fabled “Gaia hypothesis” has recanted, and now embraces Nuclear power, despite the hysterical screams of the Green Climate Nutters. So all is not lost.
(*Born 1919)
My husband and I were newlyweds in the first years of the 80s (we, too, sobbed through “E.T.” at the 2nd Avenue theater in NYC). Just wanted to clarify something, as we were living it in real time: the “child abuse panic” you cite was utterly and completely made up. It was as real as the hysterical teens screaming “witch!” in “The Crucible”. The psychology industry cooked up the idea of repressed memories and hand-walked children into making false, obviously impossible, clearly fantastical claims against innocent people, most infamously the Amirault family of Massachusetts.
And did you actually say, in all seriousness, “the miracle of Covid vaccines”? You mean the ones that don’t prevent the contracting or spreading of the virus? The new myocarditis delivery system? Wow, you do live in a fantasy world.
“Her father might have loved marzipan, Mary said, but he had enjoyed E.T. so much that he never wanted to eat it.” He kept it because his daughter had given it to him. I haven’t seen E.T., but I would still keep a daughter’s present.
As for nostalgia: I can be nostalgic about the seventies – I was young then and I’m not now.
I simply don’t accept the premise behind the article at all. My view (having lived through all the eras cited) is that on the whole, we’re neither more nor less optimistic than we ever were. What we do seem to have more of these days, probably due to the heightened media agendas at play, is a greater awareness of all the troubles of the world which then APPEAR to make the future seem irredeemably less attractive when in fact all it is, is rather more complex than we could previously imagine. It’s a failure to catch up in an imaginative sense that’s lacking.
Programmes such as Tomorrow’s World in the late 60s/early 70s seemed to offer a glimpse of what was to come, but turned out to be totally wide of the mark. Life for most people in the West, whilst perhaps more hectic, is in many respects far more comfortable and I for one want to live to a very, very old age to see how things transpire; for good and for bad – as it always was.
Agreed – tho the young, with less years actually lived and the natural angst of that age , DO believe a bleak future – and that is a tragedy for all of us. Good to have been born in 1957 and to have made the occasional good decision !
A couple of contributors that led to that optimism of the 50s, 60s and into the 70s were the expanding economies, and the post-war baby boom. You can still find the same feeling in some countries today – those countries with expanding economies and lots of children around.
I’m not convinced that picking a couple of films which support the points really tells us much about people’s views at the time, particularly with regard to technology e.g. “Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence”. Technology gone wrong has been a theme in fiction for a long time: HAL predates ET and Star Wars and the hugely popular Terminator franchise started in 1984. I find it difficult to believe people had more faith in the future during the Cold War; my own memory of being a child in the 1980s was a sense that there was a very real possibility of the world ending in a nuclear war at any moment.
True, but still there was a hope for the Future as a Salvation project. At the very least The Future was a real category, bad or good. It could be an individual Salvation against an anti-utopian reality (blade runner) or a mass Salvation. But I’m afraid the Future just doesn’t exist anymore except for inane Gates’ imagination or Musk’s vacuous tech paradise
It appears to be human nature to pine for the “good ole days”. 20 years seems to be about the mark at which writers and producers are now influential enough to get their material onto screen and often reflect back on their teens and twenties. I remember American Graffiti and Happy Days were all the rage in the late seventies as my father’s generation pined for their lost youth and relevance. I do acknowledge and am sorry to see their is a great lack of optimism in the western world. How people feel about the future is important.
I remember “80’s days” in high school, where everyone wore bleached jeans and tie dye shirts and headbands and whatever the hell else they saw in so-called “80’s movies”. That was 20 years ago. So the 80’s nostalgia wave is long in the tooth and overwrought. It also appears to be waning in response to the 90’s nostalgia incursion.
80s fashion in back on trend, as is tie dye…
Oh no!!
I suspect the 80s will remain suitable for nostalgia because it was the last time pop music was really popular.
The best days of the 1980s were in the 1990s.
Have Doris Day movies ever been shown on Russian or Iranian national television? Back in the sobering 60s and 70s? Does the cinema industry in China do comedy? Might Buster Keaton’s comic thrills and spills ever be shown on a BBC main channel on a Sunday evening? Instead of the usual grim and gritty stuff? Desperate newcomers to western shores, unaware of the simple entertainments, might appreciate the good old stuff. The Muppet Show used to be shown on a Sunday evening back in the early 80s, just to recap.
When technology brought entertainment, at first in the very early days of cinema, it was good. The magnificent delay, however, of a good thirty years before sound could be matched to the moving image meant the western world of the arts and entertainments could hone its skills in, and increase its panache for, comedy: such was the realm of the Silent Era what with Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy among others. Perhaps the world would have ended up in a much worse and debilitating state had, say, sound been matched to the moving image when the Wright brothers had invented the aeroplane – an amazing twenty odd years before the Talkies arrived. So three cheers for the Silent Era!
No quick comedy bypass materialised! The comic gestures, the comic takes were honed by the time the Talkies arrived. And their influence rolled on into the Thirties and beyond. But technology, that had been so helpful in the beginning, has supplanted entertainment. The joy of getting from A to B, the Sunday afternoon drive, is now all about being dazzled and swallowed up by the fancy car. The western world has lost the ability to entertain and be entertained. People either want to be fussed over or be enabled to pry into. There’s no stopping them in the ridiculously tiny tyrannical screen age.
Guess what was the biggest box office hit at the cinema in West Germany in 1982?
Tootsie! Actually, I think it was E.T.. But certainly Tootsie was second. In the old West Germany. Forty years ago! And if the East Germans had craved for Tootsie, and they might well have, they might have added another ounce to their belief that the wall must come down.
Go … Tootsie … go! Ba ba, bah ba.
I can recall watching the D-Day commemorations on TV in 1984: the fortieth anniversary.
And now Tootsie and E.T. are forty years old. Crikey.
Disney’s posters on buses and at train stations are these days a parade of grim and cheerless countenances. Like what’s the world coming to! The West is truly shooting itself in the foot.
It’s as if the West cannot be immune to all the suffering in the world and must be forever in acknowledgement of its own guilt, too. The world of the arts and entertainments cannot ignore this! Hence this constant parade of the grim and vexed and indignant. Don’t Bollywood film posters cheer up the hard-pressed commuters in India much better? The West has lost its mojo.
Just to add, the nostalgia that’s out there at the moment is just the last gasp of a gentler West. Unless the creators and entertainers and artists all change their tune.
As for Abba, that band has spoiled the precious memory of itself of a band that had very quickly and impressively matured from 1973 to 1977 only to later go down the silly stage musical route. The Swedes were proud in the late Seventies to have warded away the hoity-toity rock critics by showing that they don’t do bubblegum pop, only for the mass of people under 50 today to equate the band with bubblegum pop thanks to the Mamma Mia phenomenon of awful-sounding film stars stretching their vocal cords to the limit – yes, the Mamma Mia phenomenon which is probably how the band are referred to these days.
The way this essay invokes the Holocaust is precisely the reason ‘we have no future.’
You can’t have a healthy society fixated on a given atrocity as it’s core shared consciousness.
And that obsessive moralism surrounding the Holocaust did not become a widespread phenomenon until the 1960’s when the New Left gained ascendency, which is exactly when innovation, social trust, and other positive measures of our civilization went into decline.
Despite being a child of similar age to the author, I retain that techno-optimism and faith in progress. But yes, it’s lonely.
Even for a historian, I think disentangling one’s own personal journey from youthful optimism to adult skepticism and cynicism from the supposedly analogous spiritual darkening of the times one lives through is a challenge. My grandchildren have their own uplifting versions of ET, and doubtless when they’re Mr. Sandbrook’s age will look back with nostalgia at the lost optimism of 2022. Of course, what they consider relevant criteria for evaluating and distinguishing between the eras they’ve traversed will differ from mine and Mr. Sandbrook’s.