Nostalgia

Okay what this guy is talking about I'm guessing is nestled in some deeply embedded racist nationalist shit, but it does bring up a good question about our need for nostalgia that we weren't actually a part of.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you rather brilliantly point this phenomenon out over a dozen years ago?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:

I've always thought that we feel "nostalgic" for those moments juuuuust before we were fully aware of being able to revel in them. For example, I romanticize the Amerindie/Minneapolis early-mid 80s scene, and harken back for those glory days, but in reality I was JUST too young to really be a part of it, or to enjoy it in real time. Meanwhile, I feel no real longing or nostalgia for the Grunge Era, and yet any cultural historian would point to it as being the defining musical genre of my particular segment of a generation. I think we tend to kind of pooh-pooh the moments we actually live through, and romanticize the ones we've just missed - particularly if you have older brothers/sisters, or friends with older siblings et al. We look back at the CBGB's scene in NYC and assume those bands sat around soaking in how much of a "scene" and "history" they were a part of, yet they surely did no such thing, and in fact probably bitched and moaned that there's wasn't something magical like whatever scene had come before their own. And on and on.