The world is not too much with me

by M. Stewart
One of the biggest challenges of getting old in these modern, accelerated times is to avoid becoming a nostalgic crank. As many of you know, it ain’t easy.

I think everyone who has survived the mid-life crisis gets infected with the disease of nostalgia (not to be confused with history). The problem with an unhealthy dose of nostalgia is that it prevents the victim from feeling comfortable in the present. Instead, he insists that the past—specifically, his own personal experience of the past—is superior to the present. The nostalgia victim, therefore, spends a great deal of time and energy condemning the present and future, insisting that the world is going to Hell in a hand basket.

You’ve heard it before:

When I was a kid, we didn’t have all the crime, drugs, child abuse, violence, divorce, and vidya games. People were smarter then, and they knew their place. Nowadays, if it’s not the blacks, it’s the gays. Everybody wants something. It never stops.

Occasional attacks of nostalgia are normal. Indeed, they are a benefit of living long enough to see one world supplanted by another. The young, of course, are immune to such attacks. With little or no past, they focus on the future. If anything, they have a kind of reverse nostalgia—that is, they become fixated on the future as the only reality. Our society strongly reinforces that preoccupation.

Nostalgia becomes a disease when one’s ability to appreciate the present is impeded or prohibited by an irrational longing for the past or the future. Both are forms of Utopia: one has yet to occur; the other is a highly edited, personal reverie of what has been.

But because time only moves forward, the past does not exist outside the mind. Yes, evidence of the past is all around us, but future-obsessed Americans tend not to respect it. If it’s not new, it’s not “nice.” About the only way the American masses can appreciate the past is if it’s presented in a completely artificial package that requires no effort or imagination—a theme park, for instance.

In that light, have a look at Florida’s Holy Land Experience. Before you read on, click the Web site and watch the video that plays on the home page. (If you turned on your ad-blocker to avoid those nasty video ads on certain newspaper Web sites, you’ll have to turn it back off to see the video.)

Holy Land Experience is a Bible theme park constructed by a televangelist operation known as the Trinity Broadcasting Network. In fact, I found out about HLE while watching a TBN talk show hosted by a guy wearing a wig and dressed like a 1950s country music star. He was “interviewing” a Holy Land Experience public relations man whose main purpose was to announce that HLE is now open on Sundays.

Having studied for many years what academics call postmodernism, I have come to the conclusion that true understanding of PoMo doesn’t come from books, lectures, and discussions. It comes from watching cable television. There is no more perfect example of postmodernism than the Holy Land Experience.

I know about the theme park only through the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which I recently purchased unknowingly as part of what Comcast calls its “sports package.” Along with the NFL Network, stations that play nothing but European soccer matches, a horse-racing station, and other sports, the package includes several religious channels that broadcast televangelists 24 hours per day. In Comcastland, southern religion must be a sport.

I so much want to resist being a nostalgic old coot. I want to embrace the NOW. I want to be a person who can face what IS. We don’t need no stinking Bible. We don’t need to read or think. We don't need no reality. Instead give us special effects, smoke and mirrors, the completely fake "experience." Where do I buy tickets?

I leave you with a poem written in 1806 by English poet William Wordsworth--a crank if I've ever seen one.

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.