Queen of the Stone Age

Jeff made an interesting comment about my being a Luddite, and it's odd, because I was thinking the same thing this morning. I have great nostalgia for simplier times, when cars were bigger and slower, when shopping was done on main streets, when stores were closed on Sundays and families were forced to interact with each other, when parents "entertained" and had parties (swinging and not-so), when we went on family vacations to the seashore and National monuments and not Disneyworld. As addicted as I am to the Internet, I wonder if I would trade it for a simpler time, when crooks (Nixon) were caught and the press (Bernstein, Woodward) did their job. I don't know. I'm sounding very reactionary and conservative, but there is something to the notion that perhaps that was a "perfect" age for which we now clamor. Unfortunately, it would be a different age for everyone. As for me, it'd waver between the late Victorians and the mid-70s. The progressive notion of "progress," that things continue to get better, used to be my rallying cry, but nothing, in my opinion, has really gotten "better" in the last ten years, or in history. People still ostracize in the name of religion, governments still lie, people still kill for petty reasons. I don't know. I've been turning to spirituality a lot lately to try and fill the void of modern life, but I'm wondering whether becoming Amish will do the trick.