Classic Mr NYC

Here at Mr NYC we love delving into the past of this great city as well as sharing personal memories and getting wistful at things that change and disappear in it. It's only natural -- the longer you live, the more people and things you see come and go, resulting in a natural sadness. 

Such is the force of nostalgia.

But nostalgia can have a dark side -- it can make people mis-remember the past, fetishize the way things used to be, yearn for a distant world that is gone fforever, even if the past wasn't that great to begin with or is gone for a good reason.

That's why I love this long article that looks at the recent Downton Abbey movie and the Netflix series The Crown -- both are brilliant shows, beautifully written and acted, the production values are lavish, and the affluent, upscale appeal of them is huge (both are big hits with audiences). But, as this article states, they are also pieces of dangerous nostalgia, making people long for worlds of British aristocracy that were actually exploitative and oppressive.

And, in their way, they explain Trump and Brexit: yearning for a long ago world and painting it with rose-colored glasses. In these cases, the desire for nostalgia these days is so strong that people are willing to wreck their countries in pursuit of it, their oars against the currents of time, trying to be borne back into an un-real past. 

For example, in the Downton Abbey movie, King George V and his wife Mary are presented as kind, lovely people -- in reality, they were monstrous, horribly abusive  people. As parents, they psychologically and emotionally abused their children. They were such bad parents that their son, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne in perhaps one of the biggest FUs in history. 

Nostalgia, as the article explains, is a fantasy we sell ourselves -- the future be damned.