In other words, when the past is over.
When does the present begin? For me, it was the B-29, which was larger, carried more payload, and had that distinctive bubble nose at its prow and was replacing the not quite antiquated bombers, the B-17 and the B-24. The present began with women in bunned and highly arranged hairdos and art moderne dress, with bold decorations adorning bold colors, rather than the drab colors and shapeless dresses of the Thirties. The present was Fred Allen and Jack Benny engaging in a mock feud across their radio programs. It was the movie poster saying “Clark is back and Greer has got him” which meant Gable was back from the War and how he would match up with Greer Garson, another superstar, was of interest to moviegoers. The present was moving into Queens and summering in the Catskills. It meant knowing that FDR was dead and the United Nations was the future along with atomic energy and space travel. The past, what was antiquated, were cars with running boards and a squared black sedan, and people who had not yet seen the War, as well as silent films, which I never saw before I was in college, which I discovered as hidden treasures though preferring the talky and well constructed dramatic arcs of the movies of the Forties. The latest news thing that marked the present, the new, when I was young, a pre-tyeener, was the advent of television, first through the windows in bars, then in the living rooms of families with early television arrivals, who after dinner lined up chairs in theatrical style so that the neighbors could come visit and see the new marvel, and then my family getting its own tv set,, an RCA, that enriched my life by providing, among other things, travelogs of G.I.’s returning to Japan to see the sights of the recently ended war.
When I was antiquated, which meant I was no longer current with social, cultural, and technological developments, I had difficulty adjusting to my Iphone, claiming I prefer the long lost rotary dial. But technology, I came to realize, is a quantity ever quite ready for prime time in that before it is perfected, made smoothly driven, it is replaced by a new technology to master during its early hiccups. I understand early radio meant tuning a hair filament and early television needed knobs to adjust horizontal and vertical aspects of the picture. Early computers meant I had to use codes to enter and engage word processing, just as printing documents meant using folded sheets of holed paper.
The cultural past, present and future are objective rather than those parameters set only by my own perceptions of what are living ideas and practices, those that are gone and those predicted, The Eighties, which is when my children were adolescents, saw the introduction of home computers and this was the future. Older academics resisted moving from pen and ink and typewriters and hired transcribers to enter their hard copy writings to the computer. My wife claimed that hers was it as something to like the oldest generation which would master excel flow charts, and she did, while other of her peers produced hard copy of their computer generated writings so as to edit them properly rather than edit the production on the screen.he time worked hard to appreciate Chippendale style furniture
I did an informal survey with friends and family to pick out what marked the present and the past. A woman friend of mine of a similar age to me remembers that crinoline slips were regarded as recently passe and Danish Modern was the current furniture phase and I myself at the time worked hard to appreciate it because I preferred Chippindale style furniture but I knew I was supposed to appreciate the squareness of Danish Modern rather than the stylish curves of past furniture designs.
Move forward a generation. My son, who was a teenager in the Eighties, can clearly mark that time as including in the past was graffiti, all over walls and monuments, but already known as museum preservations for some of it left over from the Seventies, and also left from the Seventies, the fanciful colored clothes that were replaced in the Eighties by drab colors. John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” was a nostalgia trip to an older working class Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. New things in the Eighties, my son thinks, were Japanese restaurants and the coming of the computer age. My son was very aware of politics and so what was new was “glasnost” and “perestroika” coming into the Soviet Union and that would result by the end of the decade the end of that entity called “The Soviet Union”, however much Vladimir Putin still feels, in the current present, nostalgic for that entity and pines for it. But my daughter who was not at that time much involved in politics did not think about the then current state of the Cold War. She has changed. She now thinks the past is when there was a peaceful transition to a new Presidency but thinks what is present was the introduction of GPS to guide car travel, even using it to manage Manhattan streets which seem to me to be so logically laid out that it is easy to navigate. In olden times, I was the navigator who used roadmaps taken at gas stations to locate places and plan a trip. Her husband thinks that streaming services are the present while it is old fashioned for people to congregate at the same time to watch scheduled broadcast television, able in the next day to discuss what had previously been seen but which some people might have missed. There is no time to know when to see a streamed program, just when it becomes generally current, and so not part of the moment, just a library of resources learned through word of mouth because streaming has not yet mastered how to access what you might want to see rather than the endless number of series that are available. Needed is a new technological fix.
Skip another generation. My granddaughter thinks Blackberries are old while I-phones are current. Her brother thinks that radio is old but dating services are current while I, as a sociologist, would emphasize that the busybody matchmakers did that job without technology. My granddaughter’s boyfriend thinks cassette tapes are dated while Artificial Intelligence is the present. My son and my granddaughter reawakened or supported my perceptions of the periods without altering them, which suggests the periods have objective reality, those decades in youth more vivid than the decades that came after. So people are different in their perceptions but the menu is stable.
What my informal survey provides, which is the most important thing that all surveys provide, which is the range of answers rather than the percentages of the types, is that for the most part people judge what is past and present from fashions of dress and from disappearances and innovations in technology. That makes sense in that fashion denotes what is temporary and so is a placesetter of a moment or period of time that will start something new that will inevitably be replaced by another fashion, the New Look after World War II replacing the short lived Art Moderne. Everyone knows that what is fashionable will become dated. That is, after all, why it is called “fashion”: it is a fad that comes and goes without much meaning, though one might claim that the flapper era was a breakthrough in women’s liberation rather than just something that just passed. Technology also makes sense as a marker of past and present because these are wholesale substitutions of one way of managing aspects of life with another technology and these rapid replacements have been going on for hundreds of years in that we can include the introduction of postal service as a technology for organizing the reliable and regular delivery of letters during the eighteenth century as well as in that century the publication of regularly scheduled newspapers. But technological change is easy to notice because it imposes upon you as a way to organize things, a mechanism, rather than a change of consciousness. It takes a bit of circumspection to realize what things only seem to change because fashions and technology does but social relations change slowly if at all. Generals were generals even if they wore togas and the relation of how men and women were not essentially different in the way they related to one another in personal relationships even if women got the vote and took advantage of the technology of the Pill. People still write letters even if by email rather than by quill.
Politics, on the other hand, is something different from a marker of past and present. Yes, Presidents come and go and so we can speak of the age of George W. Bush or FDR and tie events of that time to the figure, as I tend to do because I am so political. But politics is different because it is an aspect of consciousness rather than a vehicle to enhance and alter consciousness. Politics is like time as a permanent moment of duration rather than a moment as marking some change. Prior moments of politics are what those times are, a consciousness evaporating when a new age, every new president emerges, so that people forget the past while in the present except when figures like FDR create long term consequences, as most Presidents do, and because we are or make ourselves preoccupied with the details of the present as well as the past now understood less as different but before new things had been incorporated into our consciousness. Who would think FDR would make the government the solution to whatever social and economic problem that arose? Who would think that a liar and mean spirited person not at all subservient to the general interest would obtain that office? People, even those interested in politics, cannot say how history will jump and alter our consciousnesses. And so politics is not a marker of change but a container of a time however much politically attuned people like myself look for similarities and differences across these political ages as well as grander social and cultural ages. History records the changing states of consciousness but when a new one will emerge for a society it is just very hard to assess.