`Ancient' History: Watts, Kent State, Jfk Presidency

NOW that it's 1997, we can say things we never could before. Like: "A quarter-century ago, during Watergate . . . " Or: "In the decades that have passed since Jimmy Carter came to power . . . " There are undoubtedly children today who can boast truthfully that their grandparents met at Woodstock. I like to enhance the dizzying sense of time passing around the New Year with a masochistic ritual guaranteed to make you feel really old.

First, you pick an event that's fresh in your mind, or at least in living memory. You figure out how many years ago the event was. Then you count that number of years back from the event itself. What you invariably find is that this vividly remembered event is a lot closer to dusty old events long before your time than it is to the person you are now.

The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), for instance, seems like it just happened a few weeks ago. In fact, it's just as close to the Carter presidency (1981) as it is to us. The big event of the Carter presidency, the taking of the Iran hostages in 1979, is as close to the Eisenhower administration as it to us.

And how long ago do you think Harry Truman's inauguration to a full term (1949) was? It's halfway between us and the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).

This game is particularly dismal for baby boomers. The gap between how old you are and how old you think you are is nowhere wider than among those whose formative experiences were in the '60s:

-- Kent State (1970) is as close to the Zoot Suit riots (1943) as it is to the present.

-- "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) is as close to "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) as it is to the present.

-- The Watts riots (1965) are as close to the Hoover administration (1929-33) as they are to the present.

-- The Kennedy assassination (1963) is as close to the 1929 stock-market crash as it is to us.

-- The crash, in turn, is midway between us and the 1861 firing on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War.

What really throws people off, of course, is John F. Kennedy's presidency. Everyone thinks of Kennedy as one of the modern presidents, even though his inauguration (1961) is as close to Calvin Coolidge's only formal inaugural (1925) as it is to Bill Clinton's second, this month.

The only things that age more rapidly than Kennedy-era memories are cultural products. Most people over 30 know the experience of going into a record store - sorry, a music store - and finding albums they think of as hot, countercultural hits in the remainder section. Or worse, in the Easy Listenin' section. A lot of modern rock is ancient history:

-- Madonna's hit songs of 1983, "Borderline" and "Holiday," are as close to the Beatles' "Abbey Road" (1969) as they are to today's Top 40.

-- "Abbey Road" in turn, is much closer to Glenn Miller's World War II music than it is to any of ours.

-- "Rock Around the Clock" (1955), by Bill Haley and the Comets, is closer to all the music of World War I, like 1914's hit "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," or even to Gabriel Faure's opera "Penelope" (1913) - than it is to any of this year's hits.

Sports fans, too, are much older than they suspect:

-- The founding of baseball's National League (1876) is closer to the Seven Years' War (1756-63) than to the present.

And few things are older than the "contemporary" novel:

-- Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" (1961) is closer to Thomas Hardy's life (1840-1928) than to the lives of today's babies, who will soon be reading Heller in school.

-- J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) is considerably closer to the lives of Mark Twain (1835-1910) and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) than to the present.

Even television is getting ancient:

-- The debut of "The Rockford Files" (1974) is closer to the birth of commercial television (as marked by the broadcast of NBC's "Today Show" in 1952) than it is to us.

It gets worse:

-- It was 50 years ago, in 1947, that Marlon Brando vaulted to stardom in "A Streetcar Named Desire." So we're now only three years away from being able to say of Brando that he came to prominence "in the first half of the last century" - which is what we now say about Napoleon, Andrew Jackson and John Keats.

Thoughts like that, of course, are enough to make me want to drain that bottle of single malt scotch my wife and I got for Christmas. There it is, sitting on a side table across the room, brand-new.

I take that back: Now that I look at the label, I discover that it's considerably older than Ken Griffey, Jr. or Sheryl Crow.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at the Weekly Standard.