Time travel is interesting, no matter how you do it, because it is the best way to compare things side-by-side. A quote often attributed to Mark Twain (though we don’t know if he ever said it) is: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” An earlier quote found in a book about the Russian Church says it more accurately: “History repeats her tale unconsciously, and goes off into a mystic rhyme.” That is to say, things do repeat, but not as in a mirror. More like in a funhouse mirror.
Today, people wait breathlessly for the next episode of their favorite show. Or the next season if the whole thing is dumped at once so it can be binged. The thing is, now they are all watching different shows and all on different apps/channels/platforms. Everyone isn’t waiting for the same show. Back in the day, we all were watching the same three networks. We couldn’t wait to watch DALLAS and find out Who Shot J.R.? And it was all of us together. We all wanted to know.
I remember that summer of 1980. I was 13. We lived just outside of Washington D.C. My father was retiring from the military that year, and we were going to be moving to Texas in December. The finale of season three showed in March, and that’s when J.R. got shot. We had to wait eight months to find out who shot the arch-villain in a nighttime soap opera. And the thing is, we didn’t find out until the third or fourth episode of the next season, so it was late November, just a few weeks before my family packed up and moved back to Texas forever. And back then, if you missed an episode then you believed you would never see it… forever. You saw it when it aired, or you missed it.
It was the hot-hot summer of 1980. Back then we’d have block parties, which were a big deal in the 70s and early 80s. A block party was when everyone that lived in the area all got together some night. It was a planned thing. They put up tarps and beverage tents and snack tables and everyone mingled around like in Mad Men and sipped drinks and chatted. The men had taken off their ties and were lean in their short-sleeved white dress shirts and slacks, and the women wore beautiful but casual dresses. No crocs and cargo pants and beer bellies. No yoga pants and flip-flops. The children all ran around screaming and during the gloaming, that wonderful electric blue moment right before dusk (you know it) when the sun is down over the horizon and the streetlights flickered on but it was still that beautiful blue intoxicating moment before dark. And the lightning bugs were out, blinking fire in the ultramarine sky, and now the temperature was perfect, and you could just hear the crickets, and, for a child, it seemed that everything in the world was just right even though it wasn’t. For us it was.
Except we lived in a neighborhood where almost everyone worked for the government in some form or fashion. Military, intelligence agencies, Park Police, FBI, Secret Service. So, the thing is, at that block party in 1980 no one could talk about work. Top Secret stuff, you know? It was an election year and some people would vote for Carter and some would vote for Reagan, but politics didn’t divide people like it does now. They didn’t usually talk politics, and if they did it was peaceful. Instead, they talked about Who Shot J.R.? I remember it like it was yesterday. Running and screaming, barefoot in the cool grass growing wet. Getting a lemonade from a table and then walking up to a group of adults who were all guessing… Who Shot J.R.?
What’s the point? Waiting for a story to be unveiled episodically used to be a thing around which we could all come together.
Before that, it was novels released serially in magazines. Before that, it was theologians and philosophers arguing in books released sometimes a year apart. Before that, it was Jesus or Paul or some heretic teaching on the sabbath in the synagogues (couldn’t wait to get to church to see who might get stoned.) Before that, it was stories told around a communal fire. In any case, we all waited for the next chapter, and it joined us together as a civilization.
Did you know that Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was released serially in magazines? So were The Picture of Dorian Gray, In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Maybe we can regain the magic of that summer in 1980 and not do it on Apple+ or HBOMax or Netflix?
I’d like to do it. I’m game. We’ll see.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.
