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Watching Sky Captain and reading the musings on nostalgia in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pentomino's journal got me thinking again about old futures, and whether there is a characteristic age at which we absorb techno-optimism. A little while ago I read some stuff my grandfather wrote about how the 1933-34 Century of Progress exhibition was the only good thing about living in Chicago at the time; he remembered seeing television and other cool futuristic stuff—he'd have been in his teens. But in an age saturated with electronic mass media I think we start thinking about the future earlier than that.
The only World's Fair I ever went to was the 1982 one in Knoxville. It was interesting enough, but too late to be formative (and I remember thinking that having the theme be energy was, in 1982, just a little too depressing and fake-responsible). No, I got my big dose of The Amazing World And The Amazing Future in 1976.
1976, you may say? The year before disco, punk and Star Wars all broke simultaneously? Was there anything cool that year other than some sort of oddly defensive patriotic celebration, and an election involving those twin titans of charisma and statecraft, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford?
Well, a bunch of things happened that might not have been earth-shattering in themselves, except that I was eight years old and first capable of taking note of them. Years divisible by four were both the Olympiad years (in those days, the Winter Olympics were in the same years as the Summer) and the presidential election years. The previous such year, 1972, had been a significant year for me, but I had been four and only dimly aware of events in the news; the big things that happened that year were that I got a baby sister and moved to a new home. I certainly didn't know what year it was. In '76, on the other hand, I figured out myself that it was a special year... and even bigger by virtue of being (by an only mildly arbitrary count) the US Bicentennial.
See, when you're eight you don't notice that patriotic celebrations are oddly defensive. The thing that absolutely flabbergasts me now is that, were I an adult, I'd have regarded the Vietnam War as recent news right through the 1980s, and in '76 it was really recent. The JFK assassination was more recent news than the fall of the USSR is now. I had no sense of that whatsoever. I just knew that there was this big fabulous celebration going on all over the country, celebrating the anniversary of its birth, and I was fortunate to be alive to see it even if it involved scary scary fireworks.
I did know that Richard Nixon had gotten in some kind of inexplicable trouble involving tape recordings and had resigned, but I had no clue what that was all about, except that the idea that nobody I knew regarded the former President as a good guy baffled me; he'd been the President, right? I considered myself a Republican because President Ford was a Republican and that was good enough for me. My parents, who were definitely not Republicans, were kind enough to explain to me that, whatever differences we had over Nixon, they didn't think either of the 1976 candidates was a bad man. A school friend of mine, though, told me that "the Republicans are the party of big business and the Democrats are the party of the little guy", and I wondered whether there might be any truth to that. It was the first time I thought about politics in any sustained way.
And, then, I've talked many times before about how significant the Viking Mars landings were to me. While I have it on good authority that I saw Neil Armstrong's big step on TV, I'd been too young to have any firm idea of what was going on with the Apollo Moon program until it was almost over, and even then I had no idea that people hadn't been visiting the Moon since time immemorial (I suppose they literally had been, for me). But Viking 1 was history that I could understand happening before my eyes.
And then there was the day that the first Concordes came into Dulles Airport, and they flew right over my school and we went outside to see it. All that contributed to a gathering notion that I was living in a special time when unprecedented, important, and usually good things happened.
Which brings up something else, probably even more significant. 1976 was the year that I escaped from Horrible Unpleasant School. I'd adored my first-grade teacher, but the second-grade class I was in when the Concorde flew over had more than its share of junior delinquents, and a neurotic, bellowing ogre of a teacher whose concept of pedagogy was to yell really, really loudly when the delinquents drove her up the wall, which was essentially all the time.
One day, some people mysteriously pulled me out of class and gave me a Stanford-Binet IQ test. I never found out what the results were, or whether the test score even mattered, but by some occult formula I was found eligible for the county Gifted and Talented Students' Program. If I wanted to take advantage of this, there were two possibilities. I could stay at my current school and go to enrichment classes for part of the day. Or I could choose the "center-based" alternative, which, and this was the key, involved going to a different school at the complete opposite end of the county.
I found this prospect indescribably attractive.
The decision, I'll admit, was not entirely rational. Even if I'd stayed, there was no way I was getting that same teacher the next year, and it was unlikely I'd be with all the same students. But I just...wanted...OUT. My parents (especially my mother, who was a psychologist) were uncertain about it, but they let me call the shots.
As it turned out, it wasn't all roses. I generally liked my new classmates, who were a mixture of strange geeky misfits like me, and a few junior aristocrats whose parents had taken the gamble on public school (one of them was Chuck Robb's daughter and Lyndon Johnson's granddaughter). But the classes were much harder than I'd been used to, and the curriculum started out ahead of where we'd gotten in my chaotic second-grade class; I'd missed being taught most of the multiplication table and about half of the cursive alphabet, problems that would dog me for years. And while I remember the long bus ride as a sort of Algonquin Round Table of fart jokes (I forget whetherpartiallyclips rode on it that year or the next), I soon learned that back in my old neighborhood there was a stigma associated with riding the short bus.
But over summer vacation, all that was still in the future. That Bicentennial Martian Olympic election summer of '76 wasn't just a time of great things happening, it was also a summer that held the promise of escape.
pentomino's journal got me thinking again about old futures, and whether there is a characteristic age at which we absorb techno-optimism. A little while ago I read some stuff my grandfather wrote about how the 1933-34 Century of Progress exhibition was the only good thing about living in Chicago at the time; he remembered seeing television and other cool futuristic stuff—he'd have been in his teens. But in an age saturated with electronic mass media I think we start thinking about the future earlier than that.The only World's Fair I ever went to was the 1982 one in Knoxville. It was interesting enough, but too late to be formative (and I remember thinking that having the theme be energy was, in 1982, just a little too depressing and fake-responsible). No, I got my big dose of The Amazing World And The Amazing Future in 1976.
1976, you may say? The year before disco, punk and Star Wars all broke simultaneously? Was there anything cool that year other than some sort of oddly defensive patriotic celebration, and an election involving those twin titans of charisma and statecraft, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford?
Well, a bunch of things happened that might not have been earth-shattering in themselves, except that I was eight years old and first capable of taking note of them. Years divisible by four were both the Olympiad years (in those days, the Winter Olympics were in the same years as the Summer) and the presidential election years. The previous such year, 1972, had been a significant year for me, but I had been four and only dimly aware of events in the news; the big things that happened that year were that I got a baby sister and moved to a new home. I certainly didn't know what year it was. In '76, on the other hand, I figured out myself that it was a special year... and even bigger by virtue of being (by an only mildly arbitrary count) the US Bicentennial.
See, when you're eight you don't notice that patriotic celebrations are oddly defensive. The thing that absolutely flabbergasts me now is that, were I an adult, I'd have regarded the Vietnam War as recent news right through the 1980s, and in '76 it was really recent. The JFK assassination was more recent news than the fall of the USSR is now. I had no sense of that whatsoever. I just knew that there was this big fabulous celebration going on all over the country, celebrating the anniversary of its birth, and I was fortunate to be alive to see it even if it involved scary scary fireworks.
I did know that Richard Nixon had gotten in some kind of inexplicable trouble involving tape recordings and had resigned, but I had no clue what that was all about, except that the idea that nobody I knew regarded the former President as a good guy baffled me; he'd been the President, right? I considered myself a Republican because President Ford was a Republican and that was good enough for me. My parents, who were definitely not Republicans, were kind enough to explain to me that, whatever differences we had over Nixon, they didn't think either of the 1976 candidates was a bad man. A school friend of mine, though, told me that "the Republicans are the party of big business and the Democrats are the party of the little guy", and I wondered whether there might be any truth to that. It was the first time I thought about politics in any sustained way.
And, then, I've talked many times before about how significant the Viking Mars landings were to me. While I have it on good authority that I saw Neil Armstrong's big step on TV, I'd been too young to have any firm idea of what was going on with the Apollo Moon program until it was almost over, and even then I had no idea that people hadn't been visiting the Moon since time immemorial (I suppose they literally had been, for me). But Viking 1 was history that I could understand happening before my eyes.
And then there was the day that the first Concordes came into Dulles Airport, and they flew right over my school and we went outside to see it. All that contributed to a gathering notion that I was living in a special time when unprecedented, important, and usually good things happened.
Which brings up something else, probably even more significant. 1976 was the year that I escaped from Horrible Unpleasant School. I'd adored my first-grade teacher, but the second-grade class I was in when the Concorde flew over had more than its share of junior delinquents, and a neurotic, bellowing ogre of a teacher whose concept of pedagogy was to yell really, really loudly when the delinquents drove her up the wall, which was essentially all the time.
One day, some people mysteriously pulled me out of class and gave me a Stanford-Binet IQ test. I never found out what the results were, or whether the test score even mattered, but by some occult formula I was found eligible for the county Gifted and Talented Students' Program. If I wanted to take advantage of this, there were two possibilities. I could stay at my current school and go to enrichment classes for part of the day. Or I could choose the "center-based" alternative, which, and this was the key, involved going to a different school at the complete opposite end of the county.
I found this prospect indescribably attractive.
The decision, I'll admit, was not entirely rational. Even if I'd stayed, there was no way I was getting that same teacher the next year, and it was unlikely I'd be with all the same students. But I just...wanted...OUT. My parents (especially my mother, who was a psychologist) were uncertain about it, but they let me call the shots.
As it turned out, it wasn't all roses. I generally liked my new classmates, who were a mixture of strange geeky misfits like me, and a few junior aristocrats whose parents had taken the gamble on public school (one of them was Chuck Robb's daughter and Lyndon Johnson's granddaughter). But the classes were much harder than I'd been used to, and the curriculum started out ahead of where we'd gotten in my chaotic second-grade class; I'd missed being taught most of the multiplication table and about half of the cursive alphabet, problems that would dog me for years. And while I remember the long bus ride as a sort of Algonquin Round Table of fart jokes (I forget whether
partiallyclips rode on it that year or the next), I soon learned that back in my old neighborhood there was a stigma associated with riding the short bus.But over summer vacation, all that was still in the future. That Bicentennial Martian Olympic election summer of '76 wasn't just a time of great things happening, it was also a summer that held the promise of escape.