William Holden Was No Slouch...

Whatever became of those fabulous 1940’s…? The Swing Era…..the Silver Screen…..Bob Hope and Dinah Shore on the radio….Drugstore counter lunches….Malt Shops…..Subway rides for a nickel……? As commonly heard recollections go, it was a great, great time to behold.  To many of us, those of a certain middle-age now, something’s long, long been missing in our everyday miasma.  And somehow, only recently in our deep oceans of social media, I’ve navigated to discover just what that massive deficiency in our diet is:

We’re not recalling them anymore.

We certainly can, anytime we wish. But of course, us contemporaries are not really the ones qualified to do so voluntarily. What we’re actually missing radically is the presence of those who constantly, and in many cases poetically, were, and did.  Our parents, grandparents, aunts & uncles. In short, our Wise Olde Elders.  I don’t think too many children or adolescents will bear much daily craving for an endless story-thon of how “we used to go to the Paramount for a dime and we’d see the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra before the movie…”  Certainly not back then.  Nor would they likely care to hear much today about the night their grandpa hung with his friends in the parking lot behind the van during the Eagles concert they couldn’t get into in 1974.  But as the invariable magnetic pull of nostalgia in middle age will command, in our inner struggle to find the personal identity of our own vintage, we channel the image of our parents and respected elders.  The aunts in the housedresses, uncles on Sundays at home anticipating the family visit, donned in dress trousers and cardigan sweaters, in ties, gazing at the Bowery Boys on Channel 5.  If nothing else, regardless of our personal or professional accomplishments, we’ve accrued the dignity of age held by these once mortal humans.  What was the recipe of their distinguished composition..?

To put it to study, one has to kind of live in their time.  The time of their American Youth, the lexicon in which these people were cultivated is, like it or not, no longer the stuff of daily personal nostalgia.  It was theirs, and by default in much of our childhoods, it became ours. The world in which we live however has since been thoroughly inherited by us.  The backdrop before which we lived each day is no longer nostalgia.  It’s now moved into industrial storage as what’s called history.

In today’s fairly holographic, or what we like to call virtual environment, existing vicariously in another era entirely is probably easier and more applicable than ever.  In fact, by now, technology has permitted, heck, encouraged folks to indulge in the comfort of cultivating and existing in their own confederacy of the era of their choice.  To walk around like a 70s hipster, mullet, sideburns and hip-huggers, is no less conspicuous down a busy avenue than shearing all of one’s facial hair, cropping the ‘do, suiting up in a slender little suit matchup from H&M with a pencil tie and strut down the block like a ’65 “Mad Man”.  Maybe both on the same day.  Funky morning, conservative afternoon.

But a true appreciation and allegiance is not by any means a costume party.  In the time we wistfully recall, as clumsy little kittens gazing up at the elder, slower, methodical cats who led the litter, the social order was of some fixed design.  People lived by it and respected it.  Sure, in the time of my own upbringing, the early 1970s, matters of fashion and social acceptance were forcing into the culture like a turbo racer.  But even those movements bore definition, and a sort of purpose.  It wasn’t costumes for costume sake.  What we see and take lightly today as some kind of pop-culture schizophrenia could well be one of the undeniable ills of “virtual reality”, and if nothing else, has sent the likes of my contemporary self, with the remains of what I believe to be my right recollective mind, high-tailing into some holographic quest to attain the environment that made the earliest sense to me. They were the walls and beams of the early 1970s and my aunt’s kitchen.  It was my sweater-clad uncle at the stove on a Sunday morning, scrambling up a special breakfast for us two early risers, and a discussion show on the Zenith table radio between two CBS Radio News correspondents on the developments of Watergate.  Hardly a time of any rational order in American history.  And yet, it seems what managed to keep the Jell-O proverbially in the mold was in fact a directive mentality of personal place and image, one that somehow has fallen to some odd abandonment in this day and age.

While it may be considered advanced to live in a popular culture where “anything goes”, the question becomes, what does that do for one’s identity..?  I distinctly recall an elective course I enrolled in during a very mentally distracted collegiate time.  But this course ended up captivating me .  It was an Introduction to Jewish Studies.  The instructor explained at one point at how since the Jews, historically, were forced into a mostly Nomadic existence, always re-locating geographically, they marked their existence not so much by place but by time.  This served to explain so many of the hard-kept traditions.  Practices that would never be overlooked or taken for granted.

It remains to be seen as to whether the unity of the Home Front War Effort of the 1940s, or the anti-war movements of the late 1960s, the protests and uprisings of interest groups in the early 1970s had anything to do with the lack of any kind of “virtual” playground, one which offers any given citizen enough distraction from a common cause or effort.  But I’m not about to cite the worldwide web and virtual technology as some underhanded, corporate plot to dismantle and conquer our misguided, resigned population.  

My own ascendance into adulthood in 1990 was pockmarked by an extremely popularized youth backlash against those rah-rah Reagan-era 1980s.  It was not a hostile, active or violent movement that responded to the nation's economic job-strapped crisis, but rather one of designed resignation, the insistence upon "chucking it all", even if you've basically nothing to "chuck".  It was an outward, and somewhat proud display of what came to be known as the "Slacker" movement.  It was defined not nearly as much as a protest against the government, or against the elder culture, as it was the discarding of one's own self-respect.  It made for some kind of proud pastime over which young people would quickly bond and relate. Indeed it embraced a definitive physical style as well.  One did not strut proudly with chest outward, like the polyester-clad Travolta during the titles of Saturday Night Fever. This was all about the slouch.  If you maintained any kind of healthy posture at all, you were doing it all wrong.  This movement was a glorified monument to medically confirmed depression.  For some reason, flaunting one's basic right to be cripplingly depressed became some sort of respectable trend.  When a young columnist named Elizabeth Wurtzel authored a memoir about her misguided struggle with clinical depression, an advantageous publisher slapped a cool Nirvana-ish title on it, and Prozac Nation was suddenly the anthem of the generation. Acclaimed as it was, Dante's Inferno it wasn't.

Take a stroll down the spiral staircase of Global History, and recognize that the "Slacker" movement is only the oldest one in the World Book.  Post-Revolutionary France, Post-Revolutionary Spain, basically any culture beset by war and economic handicap has been decorated with cafe tables full of black-crewnecked youth lamenting their lives and planning their deaths.  Many graduates of the Slacker movement are the U.S. parents of adolescents today, youth at a grasping loss for some kind of compass in personal directive, a search way more intelligent than that which their sheepish parents ever knew. 

I never could relate to the so-called Slacker trend full-throttle, genuinely.  Somehow despite all I didn't know, and despite all my existing hardships at the time, "pride" and "cop-out" were not a matching set.  "Suck It Up", if nothing else, was more my speed. I was not the only one, and while I admit to having hidden enjoyably within that 90's seduction myself, others bucked the trend way more successfully.  And indeed, they have something to show for it, that which the frustrated one-time followers of today do not.  But perhaps it's time nonetheless for a good many of us, the ambivalent, the resigned, the confused, to take advantage of the great historical perspective available to us now, and see if we can't build a new stencil of American self-image.  And history, past cultures, yes, perhaps those Silver Screen days of the 1940s is just where we might find it.   Not some Reaganomic Era shove-or-be-shoved, or some angered attempt at occupying a Wall Street park for no explicable reason. But a mature, well-postured self-image.

Now more than ever, it’s a time to indulge in a proper embrace of history, general history and our own relativity to it. In other words, if in fact I need to, for the first time, get absorbed in and digest every political science writing and newscast finally available, dating fifty years ago and going forward, I’ll do so in an eagerness to attain the core strength mentally and perhaps emotionally, just as daily drag-outs to the gym will provide physically. It’s the core strength that was held by the world we once as children knew. One that would dare never be questioned. One that no matter how badly in human error it might ever momentarily be, was never, ever wrong. Certainly William Holden never was.

-Noah F.