![]() “The Big Chill,” “Grand Canyon,” “Thirtysomething,” “Reality Bites,” “American Beauty,” “Singles” and “Fight Club” were premised on the idea that life was unsatisfying because it lacked purpose - or something. Indeed, in the ’80s and ’90s, popular culture was shot through with baby boomer and Gen X angst about contemporary society. The 2021 reboot of “The Wonder Years” is also set in the 1960s, which is now nearly 60 years ago. I grew up on “Happy Days” and, later, “Back to the Future.” In the early 1990s, it was “The Wonder Years,” which was set in the 1960s. She found that in recent surveys, the 1980s and 1990s are starting to supplant the 1950s as the new “good old days.” You can see evidence for this all over the place in popular culture, from the remakes of old sitcoms to original offerings such as “Stranger Things” that cast those years as a lost time of innocence.īut take it from someone who was there, Americans were pining for the good old days back then, too. Karlyn Bowman studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. It often seems to be about five decades earlier from right now. Indeed, Americans have always had a thing for the “good old days.” The problem is that what - or when - constitutes the “good old days” is a constantly moving target. In 1939, Gallup found that 62% of Americans thought people were better off in the horse-and-buggy era (though only 25% said they’d actually want to live then). This is bad - but not for the reasons you might think. For Republican and Republican-leaning respondents, nostalgia for the early 1970s reached 72%. An April Pew survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 (58%) Americans think the country was better off for people like them 50 years ago. Nostalgia, a term that originated as a medical diagnosis for Swiss mercenaries suffering from homesickness, is the sorrowful longing for a lost past. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” - Marcel Proust ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |