When were our simpler times? Oh, you mean right after 9/11? Where was the innocence? Oh, you mean Jasper, Texas, where having fun with the boys meant chaining a Black man to a pickup truck and dragging him to his death and beyond for miles along East Texas rural roads.
Nope. All a useless fantasy. These evil times have been in the hearts of those who live around and among us for many generations.
I used to ask people who longed for A Simpler America which one they wanted? The separate water fountain ones? The one where women couldn’t leave the men who beat them one? Perhaps the one where public executions were the best entertainment? Or just the one where half the women died in childbirth and everyone had intestinal parasites?
I loved field of dreams but was appalled that anyone would try to create one in the flesh.
I have my own feelings of nostalgia for playing baseball in the Summer and remember the fields of my childhood where I could never hit or field.
One note re working women, in fact white women worked in cotton mills, shirt factories... as waitresses and so on. It was only in middle class jobs where women did not work after marriage. So my grandmother sewed shirts. And many women too in washing - so worked in the home but for money.
My paternal grandmother delivered papers and took in washing and ironing to help support the family. I remember that she still used a wringer washer in the 1960s.
Does anyone else feel like it’s mostly cis white men who long for the days of old? I don’t know many women/minorities/children (notable exception trad wife influencers) who would want to go back? We are fighting the same old structures that kept us out of health, wealth and happiness. Why would we want to go back to a WORSE time? Sigh.
The funny thing is I don’t think a lot of them would like it, either. Being sole breadwinner is actually very stressful! I grew up in a “traditional” household and my dad worked a lot. Not sure he loved it
Speaking as an old, under-educated, overfed white guy
(who happens to be a liberal and Ally of LGBTQ+), it's too easy to recall good things and forget the bad. Technology, for example, overwhelms a person like me, brought up on black and white TVs with three channels and slide rules.
I'm always amused when people think the 50s were so fabulous. You went to school, ready for a nuclear bomb to vaporize you. Remember people getting polio? How awful.
It's fine to look to the past and see what we did right and what we did wrong. Just don't live there in your head. Think more of the future, not the past. (Still waiting for my jetpack, though. We were promised we would all have one.)
My husband (who is 10 years my senior) and I were having this exact conversation last night. We both remembered several drunk driving accidents killing kids in our high school and he remembered bomb drills during the end of the Cold War. Nostalgia is a welcome escape sometimes and I agree that we can go back and learn from what wasn't so rosy. Thanks so much for engaging with me and sharing your thoughts!
I was at an International Women's Day event for my office about 15 years ago with Michele Landsberg, a prominent Canadian feminist writer, who was a longtime columnist for the Toronto Star. (For the younger generation, she's Naomi Klein's mother-in-law!) One thing I remember her saying was "Don't believe that "Happy Days' crap -- I grew up in the 1950s -- it was AWFUL," lol.
This is how I feel about having nostalgia for a sense of place. I think the nostalgia for the past is about power, and what is incredibly ironic, that power was still not available to everyone - including whole swaths of cis white men. One of my favorite novels is Yonnondio: From the Thirties by Tillie Olsen. It's a good antidote to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which depicts things but romanticizes them as well. Olsen speaks more to women's oppression as a direct result of the oppression of men.
These Wednesday essays are fantastic, some of my favorite reading every week.
“…what we are grieving isn’t a lost America. It’s a lost ignorance.”
Exactly. I spent most of my life distracting myself with achievement to mask this truth or, worse, numbing myself with pleasure so as to not face the uncomfortable pain of childhood and religious trauma, trauma deeply connected to the darker history of America.
A fitting coda: following a meeting with Donand Trump, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred recently removed the permanent bans on the Black Sox, including Shoeless Joe, and on Pete Rose, paving the way for their enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.
Re: lost ignorance, it is a bummer that phenomenons like professional sports cannot function as a distraction from institutional, well, everything and current events. They of course function as prime examples of both. Major League Baseball is a plantation fantasy in tangible form underwritten by public subsidies, welfare for billionaires, and purposeful stiff-arming every opportunity for half the population to participate. In 1989, when Field Of Dreams was released, Pam Postema was being touted as the first woman umpire. 36 years later... right, good thing Ms Postema didn't hold her breath. To double down on disappearing that experience, MLB can't automate its umpires fast enough, all to entice an even bigger market for gamblers and to pull itself tighter into financial close quarters with "gaming partners". Message received, MLB. You are the American dream come true. We get it.
As for the movie itself, re-watching as an adult is a fascinating exercise for all the reasons Lyz states. This sad white man-boy with daddy issues is the least interesting character in the narrative yet sucks all the oxygen out of every scene. FOD also deflates a lot of boomer nostalgia about how "cool" and contrary hippies were. The premise of their happy marriage is that Annie gave up her agency to drive around with Ray and bolster his every indulgence. Super duper. The scene where Annie throws down with the Nazi cow is a tease of the life she gave up to be in thrall to Ray's personality cult. What a waste of a perfectly good Amy Madigan appearance...
I'm old enough to remember the cognitive dissonance b/t the popularity of FoD when it came out, and the articles that were also coming out at the time about the farmer suicide epidemic that Reagan engineered. The movie never did much for me -- a little too High Fantasy in all the wrong ways for my tastes -- although I recognize that it was well-made and why it was so popular. I think you captured the distaste I have for it pretty well.
Speaking of baseball (and great work again on this post, as always)... My husband, daughter, and I went to a CWS game last night. It was 7th inning stretch time, so bring on the baseball song! We were instructed to stand and honor our country while "God Bless America" was played. Wut? Now we have two national anthems? I got a little angrier over the required performance of national love.
We were at a Rockies game a week and a half ago, and they did the same thing, but we were not commanded to stand and honor. I was irked, but then meh when I finally got to the baseball song.
I'm rambling, but back in 2017, at the NLCS with Cubs v. Dodgers(?), we sat next to a young man who started a conversation with us about MLB being paid by the military to promote the military. We were a little annoyed by it.
I enjoyed the Canadians booing our national anthem during the Four Nations Cup, most likely because of the steady drumbeat of performative patriotism increasing, and my anxiety over the authoritarianism and fascism being turned to eleven now.
What i am nostalgic for is the days of no drama Obama was president. He did a lot of bad stuff to be sure. But you could skip the news for a while and know that not much had changed, that we weren’t saber rattling with nuclear powers. He knew how to offer condolences, he knew how to smile.
I hear what you're saying... at the same time I think about the families I knew at the time who'd had parents deported after routine traffic stops, several of them, all during the Obama presidency. Obama did a LOT of deportations and those choices were still really really harmful. so those of us who were not harmed by those actions got to ignore it but for those who lived it, it was still devastating and literally ruined people's lives and families. I think it's important to be aware of that history so we don't fall prey to the lure of nostalgia like Lyz has pointed out.
I’m curious to know the subject matter of the Register story (behind paywall.) Whatever it is, I’m not surprised that it’s not being preserved!
That moment when Annie yells at the fascist pigs at the school board meeting was one of my favorite film moments of all time growing up! I’d say it still is, but I can’t, because you’re right… fantasy. (It’s too sad to think about how many current day Iowans are on the board’s side, not Annie’s.)
And finally, this post made me think of “Fried Green Tomatoes”— more specifically, about how a professor I had in graduate school went to great lengths to introduce the book as being “about the way we wish things would have happened, not about they way things actually were.” I had loved that book, and still do (as i also loved first seeing “Field of Dreams” as a kid), but unfortunately, I think we do have to make sure to introduce these to younger generations as fantasies.
(Edit— “Nazi cow” is what Annie says, not “fascist pig.” How could I forget!?)
On the movie: In one of the early scenes, Ray describes how that the last time he spoke to his father was the morning he left for Stanford. That bit enraged me in the theater and I ignored the rest of the movie. Unless Dad died during his first semester, Ray let Dad pay for his education at one of the most expensive elite institutions in the country while never calling, writing, or coming home between semesters, which makes Ray look like a real shit. If Dad did die during Ray’s first semester, then who took care of the farm until he graduated? Elves and pixies? When Ray was in college, legal contract age was 21, so for two or three years Ray wasn’t old enough to sign a lease, so even leasing the property wasn’t an option.
I realize it’s a move, suspend disbelief and all, but some disbeliefs can’t be suspended, and this is one of them. I get that Ray and Dad didn’t get along, but that whole movie was nothing but Boomer white male ‘now that I’m past 40 I really regret calling Dad a racist when he used the N-word’ energy. Get therapy, don’t build a fucking baseball stadium because you’re having hallucinations.
The alternative is to own all the shit that's been done to make this nation what it is. I'm pretty sure that's too much cognitive dissonance for the majority.
The size of the original field of dreams was significantly smaller than an actual baseball field! I remember feeling so let down when I walked on to what seemed like a toddler's t-ball field. And the $millions$ poured into it! I'm guessing the Gov/State did that cuz in Iowa we don't have a professional sports team and this was the closest thing to getting that recognition?? so.dumb.
The past does not offer salvation, but it needs must be accurately documented lest it damage the present, and distort the future.
When were our simpler times? Oh, you mean right after 9/11? Where was the innocence? Oh, you mean Jasper, Texas, where having fun with the boys meant chaining a Black man to a pickup truck and dragging him to his death and beyond for miles along East Texas rural roads.
Nope. All a useless fantasy. These evil times have been in the hearts of those who live around and among us for many generations.
I used to ask people who longed for A Simpler America which one they wanted? The separate water fountain ones? The one where women couldn’t leave the men who beat them one? Perhaps the one where public executions were the best entertainment? Or just the one where half the women died in childbirth and everyone had intestinal parasites?
I loved field of dreams but was appalled that anyone would try to create one in the flesh.
I have my own feelings of nostalgia for playing baseball in the Summer and remember the fields of my childhood where I could never hit or field.
One note re working women, in fact white women worked in cotton mills, shirt factories... as waitresses and so on. It was only in middle class jobs where women did not work after marriage. So my grandmother sewed shirts. And many women too in washing - so worked in the home but for money.
i grew up in NYC, not far from the site of the triangle shirtwaist factory fire. the entire lower east side was filled with working women! so, yeah.
Yep. Both of my Midwestern grandmothers worked outside the home, while raising children in the 1940s and 1950s.
My paternal grandmother delivered papers and took in washing and ironing to help support the family. I remember that she still used a wringer washer in the 1960s.
Does anyone else feel like it’s mostly cis white men who long for the days of old? I don’t know many women/minorities/children (notable exception trad wife influencers) who would want to go back? We are fighting the same old structures that kept us out of health, wealth and happiness. Why would we want to go back to a WORSE time? Sigh.
I don’t think most of those trad wives want to go back, either. It would mean going back to a time without social media! 😆
The funny thing is I don’t think a lot of them would like it, either. Being sole breadwinner is actually very stressful! I grew up in a “traditional” household and my dad worked a lot. Not sure he loved it
Such a good point!
Speaking as an old, under-educated, overfed white guy
(who happens to be a liberal and Ally of LGBTQ+), it's too easy to recall good things and forget the bad. Technology, for example, overwhelms a person like me, brought up on black and white TVs with three channels and slide rules.
I'm always amused when people think the 50s were so fabulous. You went to school, ready for a nuclear bomb to vaporize you. Remember people getting polio? How awful.
It's fine to look to the past and see what we did right and what we did wrong. Just don't live there in your head. Think more of the future, not the past. (Still waiting for my jetpack, though. We were promised we would all have one.)
My husband (who is 10 years my senior) and I were having this exact conversation last night. We both remembered several drunk driving accidents killing kids in our high school and he remembered bomb drills during the end of the Cold War. Nostalgia is a welcome escape sometimes and I agree that we can go back and learn from what wasn't so rosy. Thanks so much for engaging with me and sharing your thoughts!
I was at an International Women's Day event for my office about 15 years ago with Michele Landsberg, a prominent Canadian feminist writer, who was a longtime columnist for the Toronto Star. (For the younger generation, she's Naomi Klein's mother-in-law!) One thing I remember her saying was "Don't believe that "Happy Days' crap -- I grew up in the 1950s -- it was AWFUL," lol.
This is how I feel about having nostalgia for a sense of place. I think the nostalgia for the past is about power, and what is incredibly ironic, that power was still not available to everyone - including whole swaths of cis white men. One of my favorite novels is Yonnondio: From the Thirties by Tillie Olsen. It's a good antidote to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which depicts things but romanticizes them as well. Olsen speaks more to women's oppression as a direct result of the oppression of men.
These Wednesday essays are fantastic, some of my favorite reading every week.
“…what we are grieving isn’t a lost America. It’s a lost ignorance.”
Exactly. I spent most of my life distracting myself with achievement to mask this truth or, worse, numbing myself with pleasure so as to not face the uncomfortable pain of childhood and religious trauma, trauma deeply connected to the darker history of America.
"Often the cost of creating such an elaborated fiction is more than it’s worth" - omfg this sentence. also cheers to cyclone fanatic! love them
A fitting coda: following a meeting with Donand Trump, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred recently removed the permanent bans on the Black Sox, including Shoeless Joe, and on Pete Rose, paving the way for their enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.
Re: lost ignorance, it is a bummer that phenomenons like professional sports cannot function as a distraction from institutional, well, everything and current events. They of course function as prime examples of both. Major League Baseball is a plantation fantasy in tangible form underwritten by public subsidies, welfare for billionaires, and purposeful stiff-arming every opportunity for half the population to participate. In 1989, when Field Of Dreams was released, Pam Postema was being touted as the first woman umpire. 36 years later... right, good thing Ms Postema didn't hold her breath. To double down on disappearing that experience, MLB can't automate its umpires fast enough, all to entice an even bigger market for gamblers and to pull itself tighter into financial close quarters with "gaming partners". Message received, MLB. You are the American dream come true. We get it.
As for the movie itself, re-watching as an adult is a fascinating exercise for all the reasons Lyz states. This sad white man-boy with daddy issues is the least interesting character in the narrative yet sucks all the oxygen out of every scene. FOD also deflates a lot of boomer nostalgia about how "cool" and contrary hippies were. The premise of their happy marriage is that Annie gave up her agency to drive around with Ray and bolster his every indulgence. Super duper. The scene where Annie throws down with the Nazi cow is a tease of the life she gave up to be in thrall to Ray's personality cult. What a waste of a perfectly good Amy Madigan appearance...
This is so astute, thank you for clarifying this misty-eyed phenomenon.
I'm old enough to remember the cognitive dissonance b/t the popularity of FoD when it came out, and the articles that were also coming out at the time about the farmer suicide epidemic that Reagan engineered. The movie never did much for me -- a little too High Fantasy in all the wrong ways for my tastes -- although I recognize that it was well-made and why it was so popular. I think you captured the distaste I have for it pretty well.
Speaking of baseball (and great work again on this post, as always)... My husband, daughter, and I went to a CWS game last night. It was 7th inning stretch time, so bring on the baseball song! We were instructed to stand and honor our country while "God Bless America" was played. Wut? Now we have two national anthems? I got a little angrier over the required performance of national love.
We were at a Rockies game a week and a half ago, and they did the same thing, but we were not commanded to stand and honor. I was irked, but then meh when I finally got to the baseball song.
I'm rambling, but back in 2017, at the NLCS with Cubs v. Dodgers(?), we sat next to a young man who started a conversation with us about MLB being paid by the military to promote the military. We were a little annoyed by it.
I enjoyed the Canadians booing our national anthem during the Four Nations Cup, most likely because of the steady drumbeat of performative patriotism increasing, and my anxiety over the authoritarianism and fascism being turned to eleven now.
What i am nostalgic for is the days of no drama Obama was president. He did a lot of bad stuff to be sure. But you could skip the news for a while and know that not much had changed, that we weren’t saber rattling with nuclear powers. He knew how to offer condolences, he knew how to smile.
I hear what you're saying... at the same time I think about the families I knew at the time who'd had parents deported after routine traffic stops, several of them, all during the Obama presidency. Obama did a LOT of deportations and those choices were still really really harmful. so those of us who were not harmed by those actions got to ignore it but for those who lived it, it was still devastating and literally ruined people's lives and families. I think it's important to be aware of that history so we don't fall prey to the lure of nostalgia like Lyz has pointed out.
Oh I know. I agree. Things were bad for those folks outside my little privileged bubble. They always are. The people with the least get hurt the most.
I’m curious to know the subject matter of the Register story (behind paywall.) Whatever it is, I’m not surprised that it’s not being preserved!
That moment when Annie yells at the fascist pigs at the school board meeting was one of my favorite film moments of all time growing up! I’d say it still is, but I can’t, because you’re right… fantasy. (It’s too sad to think about how many current day Iowans are on the board’s side, not Annie’s.)
And finally, this post made me think of “Fried Green Tomatoes”— more specifically, about how a professor I had in graduate school went to great lengths to introduce the book as being “about the way we wish things would have happened, not about they way things actually were.” I had loved that book, and still do (as i also loved first seeing “Field of Dreams” as a kid), but unfortunately, I think we do have to make sure to introduce these to younger generations as fantasies.
(Edit— “Nazi cow” is what Annie says, not “fascist pig.” How could I forget!?)
https://archive.ph/InIps
On the movie: In one of the early scenes, Ray describes how that the last time he spoke to his father was the morning he left for Stanford. That bit enraged me in the theater and I ignored the rest of the movie. Unless Dad died during his first semester, Ray let Dad pay for his education at one of the most expensive elite institutions in the country while never calling, writing, or coming home between semesters, which makes Ray look like a real shit. If Dad did die during Ray’s first semester, then who took care of the farm until he graduated? Elves and pixies? When Ray was in college, legal contract age was 21, so for two or three years Ray wasn’t old enough to sign a lease, so even leasing the property wasn’t an option.
I realize it’s a move, suspend disbelief and all, but some disbeliefs can’t be suspended, and this is one of them. I get that Ray and Dad didn’t get along, but that whole movie was nothing but Boomer white male ‘now that I’m past 40 I really regret calling Dad a racist when he used the N-word’ energy. Get therapy, don’t build a fucking baseball stadium because you’re having hallucinations.
Again Lyz, right on.
America's addiction to an imagined history, a past that never was, is at the root of many issues in our nation.
Thank you.
The alternative is to own all the shit that's been done to make this nation what it is. I'm pretty sure that's too much cognitive dissonance for the majority.
The size of the original field of dreams was significantly smaller than an actual baseball field! I remember feeling so let down when I walked on to what seemed like a toddler's t-ball field. And the $millions$ poured into it! I'm guessing the Gov/State did that cuz in Iowa we don't have a professional sports team and this was the closest thing to getting that recognition?? so.dumb.