"How the bad old days become the good old days." Topic

Dear List.

So I'm pretty tired Sunday afternoon when I finally get home from "The Weekend," and after unloading the car, and fixing myself a sandwich and some iced tea I go out to my living room and flop down on the couch and switch on the television looking for some mindless entertainment. Well it's on Turner and what to my wondering eyes doeth appear than the original film of Godzilla!

Now I haven't seen this film for at least 40 years but I remember it as pretty good and loved it as a kid! So I figure, great, a golden oldie!

WHAT A FREAKIN' TURKEY!!!!

I remember when I was a kid this thing was the best thing since sliced bread, and I loved it. As I was thinking about it and was turning it on, I had memories of it! It was going to be great!

Well as I sat here watching this piece of dreck I realized that my memory had improved it to WAY beyond the wildest dreams of its original makers! With all the hype and the sequels and remakes, I thought it was a masterpiece.

Remember I had last seen it about 40 years ago!

This, for those of you who are serious students of history will show you the danger that comes in with "Memories, and especially Memoirs!" That is, how historical memories of things seen and experienced long ago can "grow" both in excellence, romanticism, and horror as time goes on. Memories are not only capable of fading but creating entirely new "facts" to embellish the past.

It was nothing like I remember, and actually pretty awful! The worst I think was when Godzilla flosses with a railway passenger car.

So Iwatched it to the bitter end and sadly reflected on the ability of man to make "the bad old days" into the "good old days"

Otto

You probably also thought that Chicken McNuggets were the best food on the planet. Ahhhh, the bliss of youth!

I remember being in love with Sci-Fi movies before they were Sci-Fi. I also remember the sense of dread I'd get when I realizef the movie I was watching came from Tokyo. I knew it was going to be another man ina rubber suit monster.
I hated those not so special special effects. Especially after seeing what Ray Harryhausen was doing.
I was surprised one day by the film ATRAGON. No rubber suited monsters, bizaare world history. (Id never heard of MU)
Alas the film only lives in my memory now. The last time I looked for it online,it was available on VHS but no subtitles or English DUB.
Its never been on American TV that I knoow of.
MY movie admission ticket was $0.25 USD….. ah good times.
RC

Dear CP Belt

No, this was BEFORE chicken McNuggets when Mc Donalds wasn't even known!

Yes the stupidity of youth.

As my mother used to say "Youth is wasted on the young."

I spent years tracking down a book on knights I had checked out from the library a hundred times as a kid.

In my head it was fantastic, beautiful drawings, detailed, accurate…

Nope.

Another time I was telling some students a story and decided it would be more fun to read from my journal so I stopped partway. The next day I brought in the journal and I was wrong about the order a bunch of things happened. The Dali painting 'Persistence of Memory' has it right.

I suppose we fixate on what was the "best at the time" and forget about comparisons to modern technology. Spencer-Smiths vs. Mindens, stapled rule sets vs. high gloss things of beauty, Godzilla 1954 vs. Godzilla 2014… wait. Forget that one.

So Dad actually believed he walked 6 miles to school in the snow then?

It doesn't have to be that old either. Used to watch the War of the Worlds TV show back in the late 80's / early 90's. Found the DVD set a few years ago, started watching the thing, and had to open all the windows and turn the fans on, the show stunk so bad. What you remember and what something was can be two totally different things…

And I NEVER remembered Godzilla being anything more then a guy in a really bad rubber suit, and I still love that movie.

I saw the same movie. I even own a copy. I know things have 'progressed'. But I still enjoy the old, 'cheesy' flicks. I collect them.
I do agree that sometimes we remember things as being better than they truly were. But I try not to let it bother me…

I suppose we fixate on what was the "best at the time" and forget about comparisons to modern technology.

Also, most people remininsce about good times, not bad. No one wants to relive humiliation or heartbreak, but rather triumphs. Thus "golden memories" of days long past.

Best thing to do with a rubber suit Godzilla movie…..turn off all the sound and make your own sound and dialog while eating buttered popcorn. Have several others with you taking specific "actor" parts for who can make the best (worse) short sentence and nodding heads line.

My favorite short line….. "You like the hat"…. whenever a Japanese lady showed on the picture film wearing her pillbox hat and "spoke". Then continue with the conversation on Godzilla's big bouncing rubber feet.

Take a long hard look at Star Wars A New Hope sometime. the acting is so wooden you could build furniture with it (well, at least Luke, Han and Leia).

Take a long hard look at Star Wars A New Hope sometime. the acting is so wooden you could build furniture with it (well, at least Luke, Han and Leia).

That is classic Lucas for you. He wants wooden acting, thinking it makes his movies feel more like B movies of his youth. A famous quote from Ford: "George, you can type this , but you sure has hell can't say it."

BTW McNuggets were 1979. Off by a couple years. :-) BTW in 1976 I used to ride my bike 5 miles to eat at the only McDonalds in our county. Ironically, it sat across from the county's only Burger King. Those were good times!

I remember as a kid begging to see "the Blue and the Gray" on television. It brought to life the Civil War that I had only read in the American Heritage book. Only later would I understand what a that movie was (except for Gregory Peck as Abe Lincoln).

Otto, this one's for you:

YouTube link

I felt the same after viewing "Blackula" and "Vampire" starring Richard Lynch after many years. My mind remembered better movies!

Otto,

To bring it back to miniatures wargaming, I remember spending hours in libraries searching for historical and uniform information from books which could not be taken out. Today it takes a minute or two on the internet and the time I spent would be thought a waste and it is true I could have spent my research time painting.

On the other hand, I know and todays gamers don't. But then they don't have to retain information. So the good old days were neither good nor bad, just different.

So too was it different with figures, which were few and far between. I spent hours converting, especially the Airfix which I used to supplement my 20mm Scrubys. Looking back it was an entire waste of time that could have been better spent playing games.

So to good old days weren't so good.

As for Godzilla, I liked Raymond Burr and the guy in the rubber outfit did a yeoman's job destroying Tokyo.

Cheers,

Bob Coggins

Dear List

Yes but…. as I mentioned the really interesting thing, and important one, is NOT that the movie is now a steaming pile of crap, where it once was the best thing since sliced bread for a 12 year old, but that over the years from 12 year old to here my mind had made the move BETTER than it ever was. That is, when I thought of Godzilla I remembered something that wasn't there at all. Better photography, I had "colorized it" all on my own, better scenes photography etc., even whole entire scenes that were not there at all!

From a historians point of view it was somewhat shocking to see how fallabile and malleable the human memory is and how we ought to be far more wary than we are, especially the most wary among us of memories, and "memoires" of historical persons and those who document warfare. It may not be at ALL like the people who write their memoirs make it out to be, and it's not that their lying, it's that they as human creatures in trying to make the phenomenon that intrude into our life into a coherent story and that this "embroidery" of the story does not stop but goes on.

It is a caution to us in historical gaming who want to have more than a nodding correlation with history to consider that the "primary sources" we think we are reading may not be so "primary" at all. What I mean is NOT that people will embroider and patch up historical accounts to suit personal prejudices or political agenda (that will always be and usually is so ham-fisted as to be easily discernible), but that it may go on even wen there is no ulterior motive at all! That's problematic for historical research, and not only that HOW WE REMEMBER THE RESEARCH WE DID! Several above noted that when they went back and checked sources it did not read as they thought it did.

Images, events and sensations come to us as so many pehnomena. Things that are NOT happening, suddenly happen, and then are gone, which is a phenomena. We experience them, they are imprinted in our memory. Then when we go back and think about them we already pollute the "primacy" of our source by recall, and in that, trying to fix them into a discernible order, slap on cause and effect and fit them into a knowable, orderly whole, which inevitably changes the phenomena of our perception. There is nothing wrong with this. It is a survival skill of our species that we would probably be extinct without. However from the standpoint of what really happened it is intensely problematic.

Then we try and relay this experience which we have already homogenized and orderd by writing to others, which even though WE are the ones who experienced the phenomena, have already changed it by thinking about it, and now are writing it down, which changes the whole thing from an almost "wholisic impression" to a written linear discourse that proceeds from start to finish, which AGAIN changes the whole reality of what we experienced. The vicissitudes of language intrude and we are left with an account that is "good enough" but we cannot arrogate it to pristine purity. Then when you work from a source someone else wrote to a synopsis or narrative history, across the ages and translation, you begin to see the difficulty. We come tot he supreme arrogance that we, speaking from a point far removed in time, KNOSW BETTER THAN THE PEOPLE WHO EXPERIENCED what they saw, thought felt, and were motivated by.

It's the fallacy of Marxism to think that a worthless mysantropic loser sitting in the British Museam pouring over abstract tomes and sponging off his radical chic patron can tell us what Amenhotep thought and why he acted the way he did through control of the means of production rather than that Isis told him to.

The point is a caution to all of us to remember that what we are remembering may not be what happened entirely, and that what we read may be less so.

Let me give you a final example.

In Heroditus when describing the Causes of the Persian Wars Heroditus cites many things. His method was to give all the causes he heard and then argue them this way or that or in the end let the reader decide. For the causes he cites everything from the intervention of the Gods, the meddling of the Greek states in the Ionian revolts, the patterns of trade, and internal politics in the Persian court. He also gives one as an afterthought that the wife of Darius nagged him that she had slaves from every nation of the world, except the Greeks, especially from Sparta, and she wanted some.

Now you can attribute causality to any of the myriad ones that Heroditus lists, but I know from bitter personal experience, as most of you do, that the ability of a wife to make you miserable till you do what you want has power far more exponentially greater than any of the foolishness of Gods, revolts, economics or the means of production.

otto

Otto…. that was great!

There was a book that came out years ago, "The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible", or something like. It pointed out exactly what you are talking about: how the nostalgia for "the good old days" focused on stuff that really wasn't there, and ignored the really horrible crap that was part of life in those times (late 19th, early 20th centuries). I must dig the book out, to make sure my memory of it is accurate, though :) ….

I keep referring back to that book with my wife, as she regurgitates the error-laden mantras of her health food and green/vegan friends and gurus/swamis. "They" all have this weird view of the past, when people farmed their own food and ate pure (untreated) food and water. "Today the world is far more polluted than in the past", etc. BS. I point out how we lack coal dust and how our water is clean and our air getting more clean as time goes by, etc. and etc. And how the quality controls on our food production have reduced incidences of foodborne diseases to almost nonexistence. And how our knowledge of nutrition lies behind the use of chemicals to prevent pests and enhance growth, etc. Sure, some hitches in our gitalong, but by and large the world of today is miles ahead of where our grandfathers lived as pertaining to quality of life. Yet the modern "wisdom" of the health nuts says, "Nu'uh, people are sicker today and the earth is dying", etc. and etc….

Dear Great War Ace

Give it up mate, you'll never convince them. Their minds are high on drugs they produced internally.

A few pieces of empirical evidence.

A friend of mine, not quite a health Nazi, has her own garden in Florida and for six years it has produced wonderful luxuriant crops, and for years she has been railing against the evil Monsanto company because of their highly resistant seeds and how they are ruining the earth. Well last year she got some "legacy" seeds which are natural and aren't so engineered. She planted them and the pests and insects and weather and borers and blight made short work of her garden. It looks like a weed patch now, and the fruits and vegatables she gets are stunded, hard, and tasteless. Looks like the biblical plague of Locusts came through and had a good day!

So Monsanto is back in.

We are in fact the only nation in the world where obesity is a problem, and most of the rest of the world is dying to get in and become obese!

Pure unadulterated food and water???? HA!!!! the Tigris and Euphrates and Nile were open sewers and people drank it as well as got their food from it! Grew their own food? Yah they did… do you think the Mesopatmians LIKED eating the millet that was spoiled by crop blights for a dozen years? Remember all those stories of famine where Joseph saved up in seven years of plenty for one year of famine! That tells you something about crop yields in the ancient world, and THAT was a good time. Mostly records show it was one year of plenty to three of famine!

but wait!!! they also grew everyone else's food for them and they were given barely enough to keep body and soul together. I'm just studying up on the ancient world and it's interesting. They all were crushing tyrannies tempered by monumental inefficiency. The upper classes took everything from the lower classes, but there was not much to take. Farming was subsistence and that level was as I said, barely enough to keep body and soul together. There was little surplus production and people starved all the time. They were menaced also by barbarians and hunter-gatherers who wanted to come in and get what fat they could, and if they wanted to come in and live off the civilized and the sown, it mean't that the hunting and gathering could not have been that good!

Steven H. LeBlanc authored "Constant Battle" a complete examination of this idea of the Indian and the hunter-gatherer as a peaceful, ecologically aware soul who lived in harmony with nature, who took only what he needed. BULL! We have the evidence they weren't. Before the Europeans who came along with guns and horses allowing them to bring down an animal like the buffall0 they had to run whole herds off a cliff to get meat. They killed thousands to get one.
His work shows that all this is a myth. That primitive people are no less caring of their environment than the worst polluters are and that in fact it is WE the Civilized who are the ones who care about ecology. Ancient peoples in the Middle East stripped the land of food and forest, creating a desert. All those cedars of Lebanon and fragrant Sandalwood? of Myrrh and the others, all stripped long before the Mesopotamians setup the irrigation systems to grow food. Why are all those Greek islands barren== goats- goats are the worst destroyers of young trees- and without trees and without trees there is no shade and without shade you have-- desert. There is no food in the desert.

"Then there is War Before Civilization" by Lawrence Keely. Keely shows how much a myth the peaceful savage is. He shows that throughout the world, village sites have the same pattern on each level of habitation. even when heaped on top of each other through successive millennia, each one has an identical terminal layer. Each settlement has a final layer of the charred remains of wooden walls (why do they need such stout sturdy walls if everyone is peaceful? A mere fence will do against animals) on top of mounds (why do they need mounds if everyone is peaceful) with many skeletons laying in sprawled positions where they were killed with a profusion of spear-points and arrow heads around them. Almost all of the skeletons are male, and the only females found are very very old and show obvious signs of being crippled and infirm. All of them have heads bashed in.This is the evidence of the last stand of the "thin skin-clad line" as it went down by attack from overwhelming numbers. And the rest? The women and the young children were formed into columns by the lurid light of the burning town and marched off to slavery, rape, slavery, torture and death.

Of Course Keeley only follows in the footsteps of Harry Holbert Turney-High who wrote "Primitve Warfare." and in which he delighted in detailing to his fellow archeologists the effectsof the wounds and weapons the primitves used. He pointed out that it was bnrutal, murderous, and never ending. Turney High asked when the pipe-puffing buffoons of the Archeological establishment noted about the man found in the glacier, that the axe heads and knives he carried were "trade items" or early forms of money, old HH asked about the arrow heads "Was this his small change."

For a slight deviation from this there is "A View to Death in the Morning" by Matt Cartmill's "A View to Death in the Morning" It is a disquisition on hunting, and perfectly fascinating. Cartmill's hypothesis is that essential to the morality of hunting, a morality that lets us kill and be cruel to animals, is the positing of a "man-animal difference" that allows us to kill animals. Whatever it is, and wherever it comes from, and Cartmill examines them all, his thesis is that this is central. Cartmill goes through his entire book as a more or less anti-hunting book. But then in the very last chapter, in the very last paragraph he springs the surprise on us and says "I believe that even if we were to abandon the "man-animal" difference we would still hunt and be cruel to Animals. " When I read this I was shocked. I remember thinking "Holy crap on a cracker!
he's saying in so many words is, the difference doesn't matter, we're evil and cruel and like to do cruel things. It's just us.The way we are. He just threw out his whole book, and said, in effect… "It's original sin."

And finally there is Preston and Wrangham's "Demonic Males" in which they examine the idea of the "killer ape" and the origin of violence in human societies. If the above do not spare the noble savage, Preston and Wrangham do not spare the animals and show how organized cruelty is a part of primates societies, and that for example, Orangutan's organize gang rapes of the females, and how violent chimpanzees can be once they reach puberty. But OH NO, it doesn't stop there. It continues with showing that females in the group are often active participants in the cruelty against others, and are even more vicious than the males. That is, that they too like to do cruel things an. No one gets a free pass from Messers P&W.

Which Brings us back to Kipling with his poem, the female is deadlier than the male….

WHEN the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other's tale—
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations—worm and savage otherwise,—
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger—Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue—to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges—even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons—even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish—like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern—shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

And there it is… Let me quote it again.

"here, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice—which no woman understands."

To a God of abstract justice. This idea of abstract justice is possible ONLY once we have left the morosely murderous state of the primitive. Once we have left the tribal, moved into the civilized (and for H.H. Turney High the point at which civilization emerges is the emergence in society of a state with division function and an army with professional officers). It is possibly only when states reach that level where they can command and organize their production no matter how inefficiently that they can marshall their resources. At the lowest level maybe only SOME people get enough to eat, but it's far different from a primitive society where everyone starves and there is no hope to ever get better. It is only when we leave the primitive where so much of our time is spent in growing our own food that there is little time for art, poetry, science, or for that matter kindness, mercy, and compromise, and that the Female has a chance to not be so deadly.

The books I pointed out all say one thing. We're not noble savages or glorious animals. We're bloody, brutal murdering beasts, male and female alike, and the only thing that allows these myths is our completely artificial civilization with its laws and codes and manners and scientific achievement which allows us to have enough food to eat ourselves into lethargy. My God think what we would do if we were as hungry as those in the ancient world..

If you want proof of this I can give it to you. Every year we have Thanksgiving where the whole family comes together, including Uncle Mort and Cousin Ed who keep their blood circulating by thinking murderous thoughts to each other. All of the sins, all of the ills, all of the insults, slights and animosities are brought into the dinner. It is amazing that with so many sharp objects around and guns on the wall that there is not a mass bloodbath. But, everyone stuffs themselves and drinks themselves into immobility and inaction and while they may rail at Uncle Mort and cousin Ed, there is little else they can do about it.

Thank God for our modern agriculture.

Sorry to go on but this slobbering insipid people who look back to the good old days when we all lived in a non existent matriarchial Eden.

link

link

@Schmidty, that, was impressive….

Otto,

Great post old friend. I love Kipling. Try "Grave of the Hundred Head."

Cheers,

Bob

dear Robert

Ah yes, read it, great stuff.

Have you read "Plain Tales from the hills?"

Excellent.

My favorites are

"Yoked with an Infidel"

"Venus Annodomini"

and of course the best of the whole book--

"Wressly of the Foreign Office!"

Hint- if you haven't read it get the audio books version it makes it a thousand times better.

Otto

I still enjoy the old Godzilla movies, though I prefer the batch based in Japan in response to the dreadful American one from the 90's.

The most recent one to hit theaters was rather fun.

That being said, there are many things I saw as a kid, that I don't want to see again, because the idea they formed in my mind will never be the same as the reality of what the film actually is today.

I still have War of the Worlds( Gene Barry version) . I watch it from time to time. Still think it was better than the newer version with Tom Cruise.

Human memory isn't nearly as good as we think it is. Your brain mostly remembers the important information ("I was at event X doing Y"), a few details that mattered at the time, and then just fills in the rest from context.

So the OP remembers that, as a kid, watching Godzilla on TV and enjoying it. Maybe he remembers a specific scene or two. But remembering it as a great movie is an example of his brain filling in details based on his emotional memory of the film.

And besides, you've been spoiled by CGI like the rest of us, so of course it's going to look worse than you remember it!