03-13-2020, 12:29 PM
Some things will change because their constituencies die off.
I think of a restaurant chain in the Midwest that has a farmhouse motif. The chain evokes a nostalgia for farm life even down to the menu. Its appeal was largely to the Silent, who loved their culinary experiences bland and even hokey. It offers lots of egg-based dishes... Never mind that these restaurants are typically off the exits of Interstate highways in places that might have been rural to the extent of being honest-to-God farms complete with windmills, chicken coops, a milk barn, a water tank, and a grain field... it might not quite have been paradise, but they certainly paved it and put up a parking lot.
Except for science fiction and (more so) blatant drivel popular for all the wrong reasons, little ages faster than nostalgia. Unless the objects of nostalgia really are good the age groups that fall for it leave the commercial market due to death and debility and are not replaced. The constituency disappears, and so does the market.
OK, I can imagine people wanting to "go back to the farm" when over-stressed in the Big City... but I can hardly imagine anyone who knew farm life to want to have a milk pail on his arm. The rooster that wakes you up at 4 AM is something that you might want to strangle, especially on a chilly winter morning when you are nice and warm in bed. Maybe the people are less dissimilar than those in New York City in 1914. I assume that Irving Berlin spent rather little time in Michigan -- OK, maybe he got the irony well, and of course "wish again" and "Michigan" rhyme.
I think of a restaurant chain in the Midwest that has a farmhouse motif. The chain evokes a nostalgia for farm life even down to the menu. Its appeal was largely to the Silent, who loved their culinary experiences bland and even hokey. It offers lots of egg-based dishes... Never mind that these restaurants are typically off the exits of Interstate highways in places that might have been rural to the extent of being honest-to-God farms complete with windmills, chicken coops, a milk barn, a water tank, and a grain field... it might not quite have been paradise, but they certainly paved it and put up a parking lot.
Except for science fiction and (more so) blatant drivel popular for all the wrong reasons, little ages faster than nostalgia. Unless the objects of nostalgia really are good the age groups that fall for it leave the commercial market due to death and debility and are not replaced. The constituency disappears, and so does the market.
OK, I can imagine people wanting to "go back to the farm" when over-stressed in the Big City... but I can hardly imagine anyone who knew farm life to want to have a milk pail on his arm. The rooster that wakes you up at 4 AM is something that you might want to strangle, especially on a chilly winter morning when you are nice and warm in bed. Maybe the people are less dissimilar than those in New York City in 1914. I assume that Irving Berlin spent rather little time in Michigan -- OK, maybe he got the irony well, and of course "wish again" and "Michigan" rhyme.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.