The past is overrated

I'm going to do a subset of the Canonical Rant called a Cranky Diatribe. I won't explain why it's more specific than the general class of C-R. So, T.S.

Ben posted Quindlen: Hillary Is Wrong About Youth - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com on his blog, words because he was responding to the "the rat race is not all it's cracked up to be." I'll leave it to Trav to discuss whether the real reason there is so much middle-class discontentment is (a) the revolution of rising expectations and (b) crazy people stretching for a house jacks up prices on everyone. I want to go to one of my canonical rants:

The past is overrated. Quindlen tears into the notion (from our ancestors) that our ancestors were nobler then than we are now and that the good old days are gone. But I think Quindlen's focus on codgerims (her term) is wrong. It's not finding fault with the present that's wrong (that's a good thing to do); it's comparing the present with the past, which is overrated.

There is no such thing as the good old days, and our ancestors were not better than us. The past was bad, and we improved it. Some of these improvements helped the situation; some just caused new problems. Nevertheless, in the past, the (then) present-day people were a whole lot more honest about the fact that the (then) present needed a whole lot of fixing up, and the (then) modern-day contemporaries spent a whole lot of time and effort developing {technology X} and {medicine y} and fighting {evil historical figure Z} and on beyond Zebra.

Do you know that in the past, people had to get out of their chairs to change the channel on the TV, and in any case, it hardly mattered because there were basically only three channels, and all of them had virtually identical programming? And before that, people just listened to the radio? And before that, the one person who could read would merely read the latest installment of a serialized drama out loud to his illiterate family. Today, I don't even need to watch the show. TiVo will suggest something for me and record it for me; I can read the summary and flip through the good parts, and be done with it. I watched the movie "Emma" this way. I can tell you for certain that I would have hated the movie, hated the radio play, and hated having to listen to it being read by my dad in my drafty Victorian hovel. However, I liked the movie at 2x speed for the parts featuring Alan Cumming and 8x speed for everything else. I finished the movie in 3 minutes.

"But you don't know what it was about?"

I wouldn't have known what the heck they were going on about any better if I had been forced to suffer through one of those other delivery methods, but at least this way, I can tell you who was in the film and that it depicts the past, and as best I can tell: the past is overrated.