In with the old, out with the new
We do live in odd times. Caught between the Rock of Ages and the hard-headed Gospel of Change, we no longer know what to do with ourselves in the immediate here and now.
There’s a desperate urge to move on, yet, at the same time, nostalgia has become a booming business. So, on the one hand we see that some of the most faddish people around, the gurus of the food & lifestyle industry, have lauded the arrival of a new cookery book that deals with truly wild-eyed retro fare, like boiled cow’s udders and Sumerian ale. On the other hand, bad boy Jeremy Clarkson, who hates most new-fangled things & gimmickry and often has Greens for breakfast, now has composed his personal Ode to Joy, singing happy dirges about the death of that oldest and most nostalgic of games: darts.
This struggle between the old and the new is taking place all over the world – and all cultures seem united in their confusion. In the East, countries are in a furious competition to become the fastest growing, the most modern and rich and industrially advanced societies on a face-lifted planet. And yet, they also want to hang on to bits of the past: the rediscovered roots and old certainties of faith. In Indonesia a trial has just started against the editor of a local version of Playboy. They love the loud and garish ads for perfumes and cars and watches but would rather not have people lift that shiny surface veil that tries to hide and to deny the world of the naked and crass, commercial flesh that lies beneath.
Meanwhile, in America, that land of the brave and the free, the most modern and daring of heart, isolationism is on the rise again. The skylines still glimmer and stand tall and proud, yet again a disastrous war has many eyes turning inwards, turning down. The outside world is wicked – and more threatening than ever. Many Americans again start to long for some shared past they can make their own. No wonder then, perhaps, that there were such furious and bitter protests, when a Boston museum decided to sell old artworks, to enable it to buy new art. This, in America, the country that from its untidy, revolutionary birth made a virtue of and always celebrated the changing of the guards, the sometimes violent, sometimes vandalistic but always truly optimistic replacement of the old with the new.
While America, grown weary, looks inwards, sometimes backwards, searching for a new direction and new meaning, a redefining of its position in the world, the East is still enamoured with the trappings of modernity, the virtue of greed and the prestige of new-found wealth, with its trinkets and its temples (if not its new, official temple art, courtesy of Playboy.)
Still, whatever might have changed, whatever changes we still want or fear, one thing will never change: whatever it is we (can’t decide we) want, as always we want it delivered to us, without cost, right now.
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