Living in the Past

I'm sitting at my desk listening to XM Satellite Radio. I'm tuned in to Channel 7 and a repeat of Kasey Kasem's Top 40 program from December of 1979 is playing.

It got me thinking how easy it is in 2006 to live in the past. I like this about our present. It is jam-packed with cable television programming, compact disks, DVD's, radio programming, and retro clothes, ebay lunch boxes, Pepsi bottles, Burger King Superhero drink containers, etc., not to mention sports and entertainment memorabilia stores, that the present has really become greatly expanded to include what we used to call the past.

It's not just those of us who lived in those past decades that are into this stuff. Just Thursday, I was sitting at a classroom table with students who were arguing about the different actors who have played James Bond. But they weren't arguing as if Sean Connery played Bond forty years ago. No. They argued about Sean Connery as if he was their James Bond. Those who were all for Pierce Bronson did the same. The idea that these were "old" James Bond's never came up.

They all lived in the present. Sean Connery may as well have made his Bond pictures last week.

Likewise, music. I play small roles each year in our college's annual Shakespeare production. The young actors all have mp3 players or IPods. I always think of Aaron who played Puck two years ago. Making himself up took about an hour and a half to two hours. He went under the headphones and sang while he put on his make up: "Brown Sugar", "Start Me Up" and other Rolling Stones hits along with the Temptations and the Supremes.

He wasn't living in the past. He was born in about 1986. He nothing to connect this music to. It was in his present.

This makes me think back to 1962. Seattle held a world's fair. It was called Century 21. The year 2000 seemed way far away and the exposition imagined the kind of Joe Jetson life we might have in the 21st century. The 1962 World's Fair envisioned a shiny, sleek future.

I can't imagine a World's Fair in the first decade of the 21st century looking ahead with anything but despair: poverty, AIDs, climage change, population growth, disparity of wealth, fundamentalism, and so on. But, in 1962, hope prevailed. Progress was a positive word. Positive progress was assumed to be inevitable.

Futuristic movies reflect this darkness. My favorite example is Blade Runner. The world of Blade Runner is a highly stratified, dirty, polluted world of heavy surveillance and deep mutual distrust between all those who populate this world.

It's no wonder we expand our present with the past. It's no wonder at any one moment we can flip on our televisions and choose between The Brady Bunch, Perry Mason, Ali/Wepner, The Rockford Files, Three's Company, Sienfield, highlights of the 1966 Green Bay Packers season, All in the Family, or Golden Girls on Nickelodeaon, TVLand, TNT, USA, ESPN Classics, ESPN, ESPN2, Lifetime, TBS, not to mention the past-looking local television channels with their steady diet of MASH, Cheers, Frazier, and Friends.

It's amazing to me how current the past remains for me in my memory. It's because all the pop culture events that remind me of the past are always with me. I can listen to the sixties, seventies, and eighties on XM radio; on my car radio I can choose between Classic Rock or a Golden Oldies station; when my step-daughters are home, they sing Beatles and Crosby, Stills, and Nash with the Deke. It expands the present.

We tend to see technological advances as pushing us forward into the future. But no. They all expand the present by bringing the past to us: digital photos, easy reproduction of old family pictures, music of all ages at our finger tips, DVD reproduction of movies and TV programs of all ages; we have all kinds of space on our computers to store our past. I can carry scores of photos on a flash drive the size of fingernail clippers.

I enjoy this expanded present, especially with my students who sometimes know the popular culture of my youth as well, or better, than I do. It's amazing how technological advances have enlarged time while making the world smaller.

It reminds me of standing in front of the television when I was four or five years old. Romper Room was on and I'd sing along with Miss Florence: bend and stretch/Reach for the stars.

We do reach still reach for the stars, but we also reach so easily to the past so easily and readily that it has become our present.