Eating Our Parents- Faux Nostalgia From a Faux Culture

Even cowboys are sometimes Indians. The double cliché is that on the one hand the cowboys who opened up the American west were as wasteful as they were courageous, littering the great plains with the rotting carcasses of buffalo. We, or so we are told, took the choicest cuts, and left the rest. Indians, on the other hand, are said to have been a rather resourceful lot, who found a use for everything in the buffalo, eating the meat, tanning the hides, even using the sinews and bones for sundry tools. The cowboys have now made it all the way to Hollywood, where they now likewise live lives filled with waste, creating trash culture that has as its defining quality it is consumable. Pop culture, Ken Myers sagely argues in All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: The Christian and Pop Culture is something to be used, and then to be discarded. Like the first two of the three little pigs, the purveyors of pop culture have no care for tomorrow, and live only for today.

Which is why it is so odd that they are so often mining yesterday. Pop culture, for all its lack of a sense of history, for all its lack of a sense of the future, is positively giddy about nostalgia. And often that nostalgia is directed at itself. Pop culture in our day is a bastard child consuming its inattentive parents. Like the Indians, every pop culture form is put to use in creating and marketing every other pop culture form. Our commercials have as their soundtrack the pop songs of the generation before. Our blockbuster movies are made from the comic books two generations back. We tune our televisions to the TVLand, and Boomerang, cable networks that thrive on bringing us again what we once watched as kids. We have magazines about television programs, television programs about pop music, and reality shows about the real lives of people who once starred on other reality shows. Pop culture, having served us a steady diet of the thin gruel of pop culture lies, now sells us the lie that we can go back home again.

And Christians may be pop culture’s best customers. Because the culture’s moral standards have been in freefall for decades, there is something quaint and reassuring about older pop culture. Surely it is more healthy to feed on Leave It to Beaver than those kids from South Park. Surely the Little House dvd set won’t be as destructive as keeping up to speed with NCIS. Which shows again how we are far too easily satisfied. A cleaner consumable culture is still a consumable culture. You are surely more likely to get sick eating a Twinky that has been dropped on the bathroom floor, but such doesn’t mean eating Twinky’s that are clean will make you healthy.

A sound understanding of culture will indeed include a healthy sense of nostalgia. That is, the opposite of eating our parents isn’t eating our children. It is instead honoring our parents. Neither folk culture nor high culture are formed by revolution, by despising the wisdom of our parents, but are instead driven and directed by our parents. We take what we are given culturally speaking, and we move forward with it, rather than kick against it. We practice, in other words, reformation. We keep the baby instead of recycling the bath water. If we want to encourage the building of things that will last, we have to buy things that will last. If we want a culture worth passing along, we need to see culture as something to be received, rather than something to be consumed.

Herein may be the difference. Those outside the kingdom of God move from evil to evil. That is, they are born sinners, but enjoy for a time a stronger hand of restraint. Small children can be selfish, but as a rule don’t have much opportunity to pillage and plunder. Thus for them, the younger they are the more relatively innocent. Looking backward for them means looking toward a time when they were better than they are now. We are in the opposite situation. We are getting better all the time. We are growing closer to what we were made to be. Every day in every way we are getting better and better. We ought then to be looking forward, even as we look back with gratitude toward those who went before us. We, according to our story, began in paradise, and will end in paradise. They, according to their story, began in a fortuitous collision of time, energy and chance, and end once again as dust. We look to better things, they look to annihilation.