The present certainly has its discontents. As my veneer of magnanimity and tolerance wears molecule-thin, even I must concede that it is too mean, ugly, and noisy for endurance. It’s cheap in terms of quality and expensive with regard to cost. Shrinkflation irritates me so much, I should see a shrink—though he would probably be short with me. A 45-minute hour is the new economy-sized session. Think of the time and money you’ll save as you spend more for less!
Both sides in the quadrennial electoral struggle have a beef with the present day, and both have a vision for the future that is oddly reminiscent of a vision of the past. In each instance, they seem to have mistaken their rear-view mirror for a crystal ball.
One side has blurry memories of martinis and highballs slugged down while wearing white sport coats at exclusive country clubs where Robert Young was chosen Father of the Year. God Himself held a cabinet position and it was all just so gracious and lovely.
The other side yearns vaguely for the days when those who were denied membership to those clubs began to be seen as human beings in their own right. The nostalgia is for the dimly-remembered struggle of Happy Warriors breaking down the barricades and cutting through the barbed wire preventing access to those sacred places by the insufficiently pale and male and wealthy. They keep going on about something called “hope” (a concept which, owing to its murky antiquity, I find myself quite unable to define).
It appears, then, that everyone wants to turn back the clock in the guise of moving it forward. The fistfights arise over how far back (or “forward”) it should be set. To quell the discord in this fraught nation, may I humbly suggest that neither side wants to set it back far enough. We must turn it way, way back, where no one with an ulterior agenda may lay hands upon their figurative cudgel. We must look back (ahead) toward Eden; a Garden Utopia unspoiled by strife—which is to say politics.
Unless one is a literalist (and my apologies in advance if you are), the story of the Garden of Eden may be regarded as a folk tale. Like most folk tales, however, it is metaphorically true. There must have been a time of innocence in our prehistory before it all went wrong. Now we are painting our states different colors. (Perhaps every American should be issued a Mood Ring to indicate where we best belong. Ideally, we should not clash with our surroundings.)
Consider, then, the Stone Age—that idyllic epoch where we might enjoy a healing unity. The cudgels there were real—nor were they clubs in name only. Seeing that no one alive remembers the Paleolithic Era (not even our most prominent government officials), we are required to engage in a bit of paleonostalgia. We might first consult the archaeologists and anthropologists, but all they can point to are some bone fragments and cave paintings. They may mention Neolithic holdovers in customs observed in isolated tribes, but that feels specious.
(Also, anthropologists are notably wily and will make stuff up just to get on the cover of National Geographic. That actually happened in 1971, when a tribe called the Tasaday were “discovered” on the island of Mindanao. They were a peaceful people who supposedly used stone tools and had had no contact with the outside world for a thousand years. Sad to say, it was all a hoax.)
But there is a more readily accessible window into humanity’s past, one each of us may have peered through, and certainly as reliable as sources informing the present nostalgia. I refer, of course, to The Flintstones. Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Barney and Betty Rubble impart as warm a feeling as their 1950s counterparts the Andersons and the Cleavers, without inconveniently-remembered reality dispelling the glow. There are those drawn to the happiest part of that televised past who wish to re-create it; others will point out the problems and discrepancies of such a scheme. Contention will naturally ensue.
The Flintstones are not so problematic, except for that time in the early 1960s when Fred and Barney advertised Winston cigarettes. You have to go to YouTube to subject yourself to that horror. Those of us who were children in the mid-to-late ’60s and early ’70s and saw the show in syndication were not corrupted—unless we were foolish enough to regard our chain-smoking parents as role models.
The Flintstones had a much better life than those who scrawled on the walls of caves. They neither hunted nor gathered. They had stone televisions, bird-beak phonographs, and cars that would now be considered eco-friendly despite steering issues. Of course they didn’t actually have pet dinosaurs, but we may someday enjoy them, thanks to gene splicing, robotics, AI, or what you will. Most importantly, they always managed to resolve their conflicts within thirty minutes—with commercials.
I don’t have a dog (or a dinosaur) in this fight. Rather than looking forward or backward, I have to focus on what is directly in front of me. I admit that my plea for unity is entirely selfish. I merely want the irreconcilable political yacking to quiet down so I can concentrate on what I am doing. The paper at hand, my first attempt at a full-color publication, was edited and laid out to the constant accompaniment of election news, speeches, and in-house commentary. Talk about static!
I need you guys to work it out. I can’t go on like this, with all your shouting and sniping and bickering. Turn the clock backward, forward, sideways, or whatever. Just yabba-dabba-doo it!
