‘For younger people, ‘back then’ is the time they can barely remember, before Donald Trump began polluting our politics’ 

In a nostalgic piece of writing in The Atlantic Daily, Tom Nichols writes that “so much of our current national strife is predicated on how much better things were ‘Back Then’. For younger people, ‘back then’ is the time they can barely remember, before Donald Trump began polluting our politics. For some people, it’s the years just before 9/11”. 

“Others have fond childhood memories of their first game system, in the 1990s, or their narrow ties and big hair from the 1980s. My generation—call us Gen Jones,  wedged between the Boomers and the Xers— grew up in the late ’60s, a nice time to be a child but a period of frightening turmoil for anyone older than us. (I have left out the ’70s. I graduated from high school in 1979; for me, the ’70s couldn’t end soon enough, and I doubt whether anyone is really nostalgic for them.)

Nichols writes about the the prevalence of nostalgia and his treasured childhood possessions: for instance, the 1966 Batman trading cards, “beautiful, whimsical, and just a little bit scary”.  “plaster” might not be a good description: Plaster, if made properly and chewed enough, is digestible.

One series united his neighbourhood in an “explosion of sugary pink smoke: Dark Shadows.

“Dark Shadows was a boring Gothic soap opera until some genius at the ABC TV network said: Hey, what if one of the leads is a vampire? No, not the emotional kind, but a real, bloodsucking chieftain of the undead?… Kids raced home from school to spend their afternoons getting weirded out. Soon, Dark Shadows trading cards were like child bearer bonds, gold in the hands of anyone who had them…

“Things change. Now people apparently buy cards by the box just for the sake of owning them. At Walmart, you can snag a full set of basketball cards —14 boxes, seven packs a box, eight cards a pack, or 784 cards—for about $100. We couldn’t spend that kind of money, but why would we? We were scouring the town, pooling pennies, taking our chances, and then trading, which is why they were called “trading” cards. That’s what made them fun.

“These are kind and gentle memories. But my collection also includes the cards issued by the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corporation in 1968 after Robert F. Kennedy was shot.”

He says that a bubble-gum card on an “assassinated politician” might be in bad taste, but it made sense. Children understood the tragic story. “I lived in Massachusetts, and I knew that Bobby was Jack’s brother, but that was about it. I didn’t know who Martin Luther King was, but I knew he’d been murdered , and when I got the bubble-gum card that pictured RFK and MLK, I started to understand that good men were getting killed. I threw away a lot of cards, but I kept the one of Bobby and Martin. I threw away a lot of cards, but I kept the one of Bobby and Martin…”