'If you remember this you had an AWESOME childhood!' Boomer humour and trollstalgia

 So, one side effect of being kicked off Twitter is that I am spending a lot of time on Facebook. And Facebook is, to put it mildly, not the best platform to be spending a lot of time on if you are waging a war on nostalgia. 

Hit share if you agree. Hit share if you agree. Hit share if you agree.

You know the kind of thing I mean. Laments for the passing of the once-hard binmen, declarations that leaded petrol and cow-spine burgers never did their consumers no harm, D-Day landing craft labelled with millennial-disparaging captions - posted, naturally, by people born too late for Omaha Beach and too early for Falluja. And I curate my feed as best I can to keep this stuff out, and I still get it - usually related to music (terrible after a cut-off point around 2005, obviously) or Generation X apparently being physically unstoppable because our parents would give us a key to let ourselves in with when we got home from school so we could eat cereal and watch the ALF cartoon. If I was to poke around in the groups - especially the local ones - I would encounter a lot more of this stuff a lot more quickly. 

This isn't ordinary nostalgia - which, linguistically, means 'our pain'. The Patients Zero of the condition, when it was identified by the Romantics, yearned together to return to the Swiss landscapes they had left behind for mercenary service. Unlike their descendants on Facebook, they were facing actual combat in the morning, not just appreciating the fresh-faced beauty of US Army doughboy privates. This new gear isn't wistful or reflective - it's hectoring and truculent, brimming with the untutored bellicosity of the treat-deprived. It never did us no harm! Our childhoods ruled! Gen X kids can't be fucked with! YEAH! I'd like to see these Millennial Snowflakes storm Gallipoli! Churchill was a LEDGE, mate! Oi oi! 

I blame political correctness - not the concept itself, which never really existed, but the people who put about the idea that it did: because their mendacity, their eagerness to label simple human politeness as outrageous pandering (while ignoring, of course, the degree to which they were pandered to day after day), gave lazy, intellectually incurious people an extremely low-effort way to feel like they'd done something. The kind of posturing it enabled was an isolating, fundamentally masturbatory substitute for social intercourse - so of course it appealed greatly to the Boomers, especially those struggling to come to terms with the fact that turning on, tuning in, dropping out and squeedgeeing their third eye until they could see their first two in it didn't stop them voting for Reagan's tax cuts. 

Is it like hunting Pokemon Creatures?

These people aren't finding common ground with fellow beings longing for home, however promiscuous they might be about using the word 'our': Our Childhoods, Our Generation, Our Mams and Dads...they're using their false memories of the past to distinguish themselves from an imagined Other - one who is, of course, simultaneously so influential that they control the levers of power in society ('I might get cancelled for saying this...') and so weak they could easily be smashed if Our Brave Boys' Hands Weren't Tied. We shouldn't be too surprised - the first feature of ur-fascism is the cult of tradition, after all - even if that tradition is, apparently, drinking out of a hose like a damn dog. And they're wallowing in that nostalgia, sharing their moist, rubbery memories, precisely because it annoys that Other. What, you think you have it hard, living life at the end of the world with all the institutions that sheltered us so hollowed out they can't protect you? Well cry me a river Princess, postmen when I was a kid never pushed around gay little trolleys to protect their backs! They carried a sack and all died of spinal injuries! Like REAL men! 

It's not your grandad's nostalgia, this. This...is trollstalgia. 

It's not quite the same as KCACO but it is part of the complex. The nostalgia-industrial complex. The thing which in large parts of our culture has taken the place of culture. Forgotten in the endless commemoration of the Second World War is the 'Your Britain - Fight for it Now' campaign, for which artist Abram Games painted several posters telling Britons that a world of modernity - rectilinear flats, sheet-windowed public buildings, Health Centres like the one in Finsbury designed by Berthold Lubetkin - could be theirs for the taking once the war had been won. The generation that fought in the war knew what they wanted: clean dwellings with light and air, Doctors they didn't have to treat as a chiselling enemy, safe and cheerful places of education for their children, and a chance for them to take that learning and do more with it in their adult lives. These people had seen what a planned economy could achieve in terms of destruction and death - now they wanted that same sophistication put at the service of a better life instead. 

The Second World War trollstalgics gleefully meme about is a fiction. It's true that Churchill demanded Games' Finsbury Heatlth Centre poster be removed from an exhibition of wartime propaganda at Harrods in 1943 - but at least Games' picture actually went before the public. The patronising admonition of KCACO never saw the light of day until it was uncovered in Barter Books back in 2000, and didn't really start spreading in our culture like a mushroom cloud until at least 2005. KCACO itself isn't quite trollstalgia, though in its lightly parodic variants it can slip into it. But what it shares with trollstalgia is the impulse to wallow in false memory, to indulge fantasies about the past in an escape from sober reflection on the future. Far easier, after all, to proclaim that kids today all have it soft, than to consider they may have it hard in ways you never imagined.