296. Nostalgia, as useful in cinema or literature as pernicious in politics

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Noun, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a time in the past. Interesting how valuable nostalgia is to disciplines such as literature or cinema. How effectively the bringing back to life of the past can elicit strong sentiment in their audiences, giving them license to transport themselves to a time past, remembering the good and forgetting the bad, as one can choose to do in fiction. Interesting also how it can be catastrophic in politics, how when the citizenship takes license to try to bring about a time past, which they remember as being better than the present, they invariably succeed at rescuing what was bad, and little of what was good. Politics is about building the World of tomorrow, accepting that the past is gone but learning from it. It’s about recovering, maybe, something that worked well, but realistically adapting it to future circumstance, accepting that circumstance, environment, cannot be wound back. Politics calls for aspiration and ambition, not nostalgia

Length: 1,000 characters

Location: Hereford, UK

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