The good old days

There was a time when tomorrow’s world was something that people looked towards with a hopeful twinkle in their eye.

In the 1980s, the forthcoming millennium was to be a paradise of peace and progress; a new, futuristic frontier, where cars flew and people popped out for a packet of fags on their hover boards.

And double denim, which at that point had ruled for almost two decades, had, for reasons never fully explained by the oracles of the time, been toppled from its throne by matching metallic spacesuits.

Yes, the year 2000 represented a horizon of hope, beyond which all our woes would be washed away.

(Granted, there were also those who catastrophised that computers would become so confused by the change from 1999 to 2000 – which, in retrospect, doesn’t sound like computers at all – that the banks would collapse, infrastructure would crumble, and the world would inadvertently be brought to its knees… but we’ll forget about such minor anomalies for now).

Sticking to the simple, column-friendly narrative, pre-2000, the future was seen as being bright.

However, this optimism did not hold.

Because, as the years wore on and the film industry’s forecasts of the future were proven less prescient than the Hollywood prophets had supposed, movie-makers began hedging their bets and back-peddling on their promises of a utopian tomorrow.

In fact, this particular cinematic shift has now occurred so completely that there is about as much chance of a production studio financing a positive foretelling of the planet’s future as there is of Michael Jackson coming back into vogue.

Exactly. Such a renaissance just isn’t going to happen.

“Ye were born in bloody 1997, McElhatton! Where is this trail of muck meant to be leading us?”

Alright, calm down, I’m just about to arrive at my, admittedly, painstakingly-made point.

It seems to me that the nihilistic turn taken by the purveyors of pop culture was either led or followed by a general pessimism among normal people about our species’ collective future.

Moreover, people have come to imagine the recent past, present and future as separate entities – the good, the bad and the worse – as though these timeframes are not constantly overlapping, intersecting, and bleeding into one another.

Before this column becomes alienatingly abstract, let me tighten things up with an example.

Recently, I was speaking with an aul’ fella and he was comparing his generation to my own.

In an unqualified sweeping statement, he declared that people today just don’t hold grudges like they used to.

Though the implications of such a change seemed to me, on the surface, to be a good thing, he sounded forlorn, even contemptuous, about this development.

Being a person who takes no enjoyment in seeing an old man made miserable, I tried to reassure him that there are still plenty of thran, unforgiving and, even, vindictive people about.

“I could name plenty of ones my age that are quick to taking thick and slow to come around,” I advanced, nervously.

“Oh aye?,” he laughed mordantly. “I once gave my own brother the cold shoulder for more than ten years because he said I only smoked Marlboro Red because he did.”

I looked at him and made a face that was supposed to say ‘harsh’.

He continued, “When I eventually broke breath to him in 1973, he never mentioned the Marlboros, and he’d even given up the fags. So, ye know what I mean, who was right and who was wrong?”

I studied on that for a second and got nowhere.

“Aye, good point,” I said, pretending to suddenly recognise his logic.

He smiled.

“Only a few years ago, people knew when a wrong had been done against them, and they let whoever done it know it, too. Today, a man can tell bad manners when they’ve been given to him, but he just shuts up and takes it. By the way things are going, and I’m not even joking, I’d say in five years time you’ll be able to punch somebody square in the face and they won’t even notice,” he said dejectedly.

I have since taken the liberty of writing to Steven Speilberg with a suggested title for a new script: ‘Dystopian Destiny: The Folly of Forgiveness’.

1984 and Brave New World wouldn’t have a look in!