# WWII was/was not a long time ago, and other ways time messes with your head... **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 14, 2014, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465 "2014-09-14T08:41:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Aeschines](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aeschines/32/16251_2.png) [@Aeschines](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aeschines)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/21 "2014-09-14T15:55:41Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > So, there are good reasons why WWII felt like it was from the other side of a time divide in the 1970s, while here in the 2010s it feels like the 1980s are on the _same_ side of that time divide. > > And I think color TV/film is a huge part of this. It just makes you grow up assuming the WORLD looked one way up until 1964 (_A Hard Days Night_), then started looking like the _real_ world in 1965 (_Help!_). > > \*though I am one. 😉 I think all of your reasons have merit, and this last one is an element of the “misleading” part. B&W photos and movies were definitely described (and still are) as “old movies,” whereas they definitely were not in any objective sense “old” at the time. In 1973, for example, _Casablanca_ (1944), was just 29 years old–the same age as _The Breakfast Club_ (1985) today. But the latter film doesn’t seem “old.” Certainly the cultural changes and the B&W divide have a lot to do with this difference in perception. ---
**Author:** ![Stringbean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Stringbean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stringbean)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/22 "2014-09-14T16:07:46Z")
WW2 was not that long ago at all. And these kids today wanna bitch about cyber bullying and forcing bakers to bake cakes for gay couples. It’s all kind of a joke how serious people take themselves these days. They have no f\*\*\*ing clue. ---
**Author:** ![Aeschines](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aeschines/32/16251_2.png) [@Aeschines](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aeschines)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/23 "2014-09-14T16:16:59Z")
I lived in Japan 8 years and married a Japanese woman (now divorced, FWIW). Her grandmother lived to age 85 and died in 2010. She was a traditional Japanese dance instructor before WWII even began, and of course she remembered the war years vividly. But even my ex’s mom, who was a kid, remembers bombs falling on the neighborhood. WWII definitely seems closer to the present in a country like Japan. I worked in real estate for a bit with a woman whose mom was a kid in Germany before and during WWII. She remembered pictures of Hitler in the classroom. One thing that makes the Nazis seem so distant to us now is that a lot of their politics and hate were based on the aftermath of WWI, including largely forgotten (yet major) events like the Occupation of the Ruhr ([Occupation of the Ruhr - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr)). So they were reacting in a sense to a previous generation of issues which is truly foreign to us (albeit still not that long ago in actual time). So it messes with my mind to think of those mother\*\*\*\*ers occupying the same world as people still alive. Things like YouTube definitely bring the past closer to the present. I recently watched _Triumph of the Will_ on there. Although the Nazis were evil from the start, there is still a kind of latent hope in the propaganda that is heartbreaking. Like: These guys had the power not to go apeshit and ruin everything. One can go back to that time when that potential was still there. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/24 "2014-09-14T16:21:53Z")
> [@Aeschines](#): > > I think all of your reasons have merit, and this last one is an element of the “misleading” part. B&W photos and movies were definitely described (and still are) as “old movies,” whereas they definitely were not in any objective sense “old” at the time. In 1973, for example, _Casablanca_ (1944), was just 29 years old–the same age as _The Breakfast Club_ (1985) today. But the latter film doesn’t seem “old.” Certainly the cultural changes and the B&W divide have a lot to do with this difference in perception. Old movies are movies that were made before you were born. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/25 "2014-09-14T16:42:24Z")
I just realized that Princess Di has now been dead & famous longer than she was alive & famous. For a candle in the wind the smoke sure lingers. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/26 "2014-09-14T16:55:30Z")
Well your perception of time changes markedly as you grow older. In your teens and even 20s, a decade is a vast amount of time. It’s living a large proportion of your life over again. Once you’ve got a few decades under your belt though, it’s a period of time you have some feel for, you can work with. For me, it’s not just the past, but the future too. When they announce some construction or space project or whatever, that won’t be completed until 2025, I have a good feel for how long that is. I know how clear the memory of its initial announcement will be in my mind. In my teens and twenties, a date like that would translate as “way off in the future; forget about it”. You may as well have said the year kajillion. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/27 "2014-09-14T17:12:08Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > I just realized that Princess Di has now been dead & famous longer than she was alive & famous. For a candle in the wind the smoke sure lingers. :eek:Fuck you are right. And if she had remained alive she would have been a grandmother. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/28 "2014-09-14T18:03:35Z")
For people in college now, Woody Allen has always been married to Soon-yi Previn. How’s that? B&W films look sort of artificially old to people born in the 1970s, I think, because B&W TV had just ended, and few people had them anymore. We had only B&W TV through the late 1980s (although my aunt and uncle had color), because my mother had some weird idea that color TV could give you cancer, so I thought there was more B&W than there was, I think, and it didn’t read “old” to me the way it does to a lot of people my age. I’m also a huge film buff, and I watch B&W films all the time; because I love silent films, films from the 1940s don’t seem that old to me, and films from the 50s are positively modern. I think there’s going to be a big gap in the way CGI vs. non-CGI is perceived. My son was not impressed by some Ray Harryhausen special effects he saw in one of the Greek myth films, because the lack of motion blur made it totally unbelievable for him, and he’s not old enough to see the effects in the context of their time. (He also doesn’t remember being accidentally scared crapless by the 1933 King Kong that he accidentally walked in on me watching when he was supposed to be taking a nap when he was 3.) ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/29 "2014-09-14T18:11:39Z")
> [@Aeschines](#): > > I was born in 1971. I feel that growing up, time was portrayed by the media and people around me in a misleading way. It’s just a theory… tell me if you agree. > > WWII was “a long time ago” growing up. Those days were horrible but so far in the past. B&W movies were “old movies.” Silent films, which they would show at the Ground Round, Shakey’s, and restaurants like that while you ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor were “really old movies.” Those were the “olden days.” > > In reality, WWII ended only 26 years before I was born. WWII vets were still in their 50s and 60s. All of that old stuff wasn’t very old at all. Did people in the 70s really perceive those times as long ago? Because that would be like perceiving the 80s as long ago now, and I feel as though very few people do. > > Now, in 2014, WWII really does seem like a long time ago… and yet. I was at a funeral last year, and I was talking to a senior at the lunch. He didn’t really even seem _that_ old, but he was a WWII vet. I watched a recent History Channel documentary in which vets who were at Pearl Harbor are recounting the battle. > > There are several kids of Nazi leaders (Goering, Himmler, etc.) who aren’t that old who remember their parent well. There are many concentration camp victims still around who remember those days as though they were yesterday. > > And all this kindof blows my mind. It’s almost as if, in a weird way, WWII has grown closer to me as I’ve grown older. > > There are still a handful of people alive born in the 1800s! > > And there is plenty of other stuff. We live in a pretty weird time, when you think about it. Most communications technology was still pretty new when I was a kid–although, again, it was as if the collective culture didn’t see it that way. In the 1970s, TV was still a very young medium. Rock music was just 20 years or so old. In many ways, we have lived through the dawn of technologies that, in some form or another, will continue as far as humanity does. Heck, we are still getting used to this Internet thing, which been a factor in most people’s lives for less than 20 years. > > So yeah… WWII, far from being that old horrible thing that happened “a long time ago,” was fought and experienced and remembered by many people _still alive._ It all just kinda blows my mind. > > What are your thoughts? This weekend, I took my parents to the WWII memorial in DC. My father is a veteran of the war, and my mother remembers the war (though she was pretty young when it ended), so the war has always been part of my worldview, even though I was born 19 years after it ended (some of my father’s siblings, who lived into my 40s, remembered WWI, having been just a bit too young to be directly involved). I think there was a deliberate turning away from talk of the war in a lot of pop culture of the 1950s - think about all those fathers from 1950s sitcoms (and “Happy Days” for that matter) - many of them would have been in the armed services, but the topic just doesn’t come up. Sometimes, too, people just forget to do the math - on “MASH” Hawkeye talks about being a “kid” during WWII - but in fact, he couldn’t have been that young during the war; you don’t get to be a surgeon much younger than 30 years old, which would have put Hawkeye’s birth in 1923 or so - or old enough to be drafted for WWII. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/30 "2014-09-14T18:31:45Z")
Other ways that time messes with your head: Next summer it will be 20 freeking years since Jerry Garcia passed away. This makes me feel old. It seems much more recent than that, to me. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/31 "2014-09-14T19:02:57Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > Sometimes, too, people just forget to do the math - on “MASH” Hawkeye talks about being a “kid” during WWII - but in fact, he couldn’t have been that young during the war; you don’t get to be a surgeon much younger than 30 years old, which would have put Hawkeye’s birth in 1923 or so - or old enough to be drafted for WWII. Being in college could have gotten him a deferment if he was studying medicine-- the Army would rather do what it did, which was wait until he paid for his own medical training, then draft him, than draft him, and pay to train him to be a doctor. Since no one knew when the war would end, being in med school, or in college on a med school track would get him a deferment. Some of the others are a little harder to understand. Maj. Winchester was older than the other, and from a family who could have afforded to get him out of the draft. I guess there was some backstory where he was supposed to have a cushy job, and then pissed someone off, but you’d think he would have done his time already during WWII. Everyone, no matter who you were, volunteered, even people from families like Boston Brahmins. He would have volunteered, done something stateside for most of the duration, and then not been draftable, having already served when Korea happened. Maj. Burns is harder to explain as well, unless he is younger than Hawkeye, and volunteered at the tail end of WWII, and stayed in the reserves, which is how he managed to be a major, and why he was ready to go when Korea came along. I never thought about stuff like that until I was in the service myself. Now I can’t watch the show without it bugging me. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/32 "2014-09-14T19:10:53Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > Being in college could have gotten him a deferment if he was studying medicine-- the Army would rather do what it did, which was wait until he paid for his own medical training, then draft him, than draft him, and pay to train him to be a doctor. Since no one knew when the war would end, being in med school, or in college on a med school track would get him a deferment. > > Some of the others are a little harder to understand. Maj. Winchester was older than the other, and from a family who could have afforded to get him out of the draft. I guess there was some backstory where he was supposed to have a cushy job, and then pissed someone off, but you’d think he would have done his time already during WWII. Everyone, no matter who you were, volunteered, even people from families like Boston Brahmins. He would have volunteered, done something stateside for most of the duration, and then not been draftable, having already served when Korea happened. > > Maj. Burns is harder to explain as well, unless he is younger than Hawkeye, and volunteered at the tail end of WWII, and stayed in the reserves, which is how he managed to be a major, and why he was ready to go when Korea came along. > > I never thought about stuff like that until I was in the service myself. Now I can’t watch the show without it bugging me. Good points, but Hawkeye gives the impression that he was a young kid, listening to “Der Fuehrer’s Face” on the radio during the war, not a college or med school student. For that matter, since Colonel Potter lied about his age to get into WWI, he was not much older than I am now during the Korean War - far from retirement, even if tired of war. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/33 "2014-09-14T19:16:12Z")
I remember watching an episode of _Jonny Quest_ when I was a kid, that involved a mad Nazi doctor who was experimenting on cavemen on some remote island. At the time, escaped Nazis were plausible plot elements. ---
**Author:** ![pancakes3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ba9def/32.png) [@pancakes3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pancakes3)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/34 "2014-09-14T19:17:48Z")
My great grandmother who passed away in 2004 remembers when China was still dynastic. My 5th grade class got to meet a Tuskegee Airman (back in 1997) and he was telling us all these stories of shooting down Italians in P51’s. Danny Larusso is now the same age as 1984 Mr. Miyagi. This year starts an entire generation of teenagers who has lived their entire lives post-9/11. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/35 "2014-09-14T19:56:46Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > I remember watching an episode of _Jonny Quest_ when I was a kid, that involved a mad Nazi doctor who was experimenting on cavemen on some remote island. At the time, escaped Nazis were plausible plot elements. Yeah, it was very plausible in Heinlein’s “Rocket Ship Galileo” to have a group of escaped Nazis as villains in 1947. It was considerably less plausible for Fred Pohl to have a former Nazi as a villain in a book in 1980 that takes place in some unspecified time clearly well more than a decade after 1980. And it was getting really silly for a Nazi to be the villain in Sawyer’s “Frameshift” (which was published in 1997 and took place in about that year). ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/36 "2014-09-14T19:59:31Z")
> [@pancakes3](#): > > Danny Larusso is now the same age as 1984 Mr. Miyagi. Will Smith is the same age as James Avery when he played Uncle Phil. ---
**Author:** ![rsat3acr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a3d4f5/32.png) [@rsat3acr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rsat3acr)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/37 "2014-09-14T20:36:36Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > Being in college could have gotten him a deferment if he was studying medicine-- the Army would rather do what it did, which was wait until he paid for his own medical training, then draft him, than draft him, and pay to train him to be a doctor. Since no one knew when the war would end, being in med school, or in college on a med school track would get him a deferment. > > Some of the others are a little harder to understand. Maj. Winchester was older than the other, and from a family who could have afforded to get him out of the draft. I guess there was some backstory where he was supposed to have a cushy job, and then pissed someone off, but you’d think he would have done his time already during WWII. Everyone, no matter who you were, volunteered, even people from families like Boston Brahmins. He would have volunteered, done something stateside for most of the duration, and then not been draftable, having already served when Korea happened. > > Maj. Burns is harder to explain as well, unless he is younger than Hawkeye, and volunteered at the tail end of WWII, and stayed in the reserves, which is how he managed to be a major, and why he was ready to go when Korea came along. > > I never thought about stuff like that until I was in the service myself. Now I can’t watch the show without it bugging me. Don’t know how it was then but I did five years in the Army and got out(as a captain) to go to dental school. Was thinking about going back in, they were going to credit my time in school and make me a major. Could have been stuff like that. ---
**Author:** ![wellanuff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/57b2e6/32.png) [@wellanuff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wellanuff)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/38 "2014-09-14T22:01:22Z")
My favorite piece of “my how time flies when you’re having fun” trivia (learned here on the SDMB) is that there are people alive today whose grandfather was born in 1790, when George Washington was president…namely, the grandchildren of President Tyler. > **[Are John Tyler's Grandchildren Still Alive?](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/heir-raising-experience/)** > > Two grandchildren of John Tyler, who became U.S. President in 1841, are still with us. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2014, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/39 "2014-09-15T00:09:14Z")
People will be voting in this years election who do not remember Y2K. The children that GWB was reading to on 9-11 will be old enough to vote. There can be a legal candidate for president in the next election who does not remember the Vietnam War. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2014, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465/40 "2014-09-15T00:15:05Z")
Approximately 100 search dogs worked the WTC site after 9/11. Today only one, a 15 year old Golden Retriever named Bretagne survives. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wwii-was-was-not-a-long-time-ago-and-other-ways-time-messes-with-your-head/698465.md?page=3)