An appeal for sanity

With the next crop of undergrads wandering campus, this seems like the time to get something off my chest:\nGuys, all the contrived nostalgia -- it's creeping me out.\nSee, the vast herds of pre-frosh foreshadow the coming year in campus fashion. Granted, they'll change as they adapt to college life -- but they bring in new trends. And one thing I've noticed is a proliferation of classic band T-shirts: The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, etc. At first this was heartening. I'm happy to see that great bands are not forgotten, and I get a little thrill when music I like suddenly becomes trendy. But I've started seeing the same shirts for the same bands, all carefully aged -- often with the anachronism of commemorating a tour that ended 20 years before the wearer was born, as if he (or, less likely, she) just arrived in the present aboard a magic 1977 Trans-Am.\nThis obsession with nostalgia is hardly confined to our new recruits. TV Land and VH1 are dedicated to it. Hollywood seems committed to remaking every film or program that aired between 1955 and 1985 -- how else to explain "The Honeymooners," "Bewitched" or "Dukes of Hazzard"? In music, "New Wave" is back, much of hip-hop keeps retracing the same ground as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg circa 1992, and pop, sadly, never ever changes.\nI'm not saying we should avoid nostalgia altogether. We can't escape the past, nor should we. But the new-to-old ratio has become skewed. Pop culture always has influences -- but the distance traveled beyond those influences seems to be shrinking.\nI think it started in the mid-90s. Our baby-boomer parents had been reminiscing since the mid-80s, when movies like "The Big Chill" started them pining for the "good-old" hippie days and feeling guilty for living in suburban townhouses rather than communal wigwams. However, sometime around grunge's decline, this hunger for the Woodstock-era mutated -- virus-like -- and leapt from the boomers to their kids. Suddenly, innocent teenagers like yours truly found ourselves surrounded by bell-bottoms and lobotomized "Brady Bunch" fans. And the plague has only gotten worse -- progressing from decade to decade, resurrecting their worst, most irritating aspects as "camp."\nI'm not sure what's causing this. Some might say it's longing for simpler, less scary times -- but all these decades being celebrated, 50s to present, had pretty scary aspects. Perhaps technology has made it much easier to relive the past: by transferring old recordings to cheap and durable digital media, by assisting communication between fans, by facilitating the buying and selling of childhood knick-knacks. I don't know. \nAll I can do is beg you to please, please try something new -- something that didn't appear on the sides of your parents' lunchboxes. When the producers of "I Love the 70s," " ... 80s" and " ... 90s" get to " ... the 00s" -- will the show be nothing more than clips from the previous series?