Canadians in the Spotlight

I am a new kind of burnout—burned out on boomer nostalgia. Born too late to know first-hand the excesses of the 1960s, I did not have the chance to stir-fry mind and soul back in the day, but have lived in the hazy shadow of that most celebrated of decades since I became aware. It is a cultural obsession that, as I enter my own version of middle age, has me asking: Having missed the party, why must I suffer the hangover?

The tinfoil-enhanced rabbit ears on the black and white Magnavox in my childhood home drew episodes of I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan’s Island and Bewitched from the ether-like signals from a distant, extinct star, ten years after they’d first aired. It was all new to me, of course. And I bought into the myth of glorious pasts, eschewing as rubbish any peep or image from my own time.

This nostalgia-induced cultural vacuum had its apex for my generation in the 1980s, when a constant reel of documentaries on Woodstock, Vietnam and the summer...