I am inordinately fond of that thing that adverts and occasionally movies do where they show a progression through different eras in montage. It’ll be a car commercial, and in the first few seconds we’ll see a young married couple, she in a polka-dot dress, he in a staid suit, but their faces are beaming as he turns the key. They go off for a drive, but the camera ducks behind a newsstand and when they come into view again, the music’s shifted and now The Chordettes have been switched out for The Who on the radio, and her bouffant’s now a beehive, and then there’s another shift and he’s in bell-bottoms, his hair unruly and her dandelion hues have been traded for browns and KC and the Sunshine Band is on the (now stereo) soundtrack, and now the world’s gone pastel and everyone has shoulder pads, and they turn a corner and people in sagging jeans are breakdancing to a boom-bap beat and her hair’s long and straight and they pass a movie theatre (“Now Showing: Titanic”) and an Apple Store and Kelly Clarkson and the commercial fades out as they disappear into an Instagram sunset. All in twenty-five seconds. And the message will be like, Chevy. We’ve been around forever. We’ll be around for just as long.

I don’t know why this class of thing moves me so. I don’t really care much about the car or the bread or the laundry detergent or the World Cup or whatever’s actually being advertised, just the era progression montage thing. Something about glimpsing different cross-sections of historical culture in chronological order, each for a few precious seconds, tugs at my heart-strings. It’s like, look at these silly fashions that people like yourself once wore! They all led up to you. But it’s also like, look at how quickly the times change! Your current styles are just as fleeting. And suddenly I feel an aching nostalgia for ten different time periods at once, including the present. This too shall pass. That’s too much for me.

Whoever in the history of the small screen thought of doing the era progression montage thing first probably won a lot of awards, but now this sort of thing has probably been done enough that everyone else has stopped thinking Aw, that’s cute and started thinking, Ugh, so corny. Not me. This sort of thing is a foolproof way to my heart.

In The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green has a segment on The Hall of Presidents at Disney World. He gave it two stars. He hated it and everything it stood for, and I have a similarly dim view. It’s a showcase of animatronic Presidents giving a sanitised tour of American history, and its message seems to be gee, ain’t the U.S.A. getting better and better? That’s progress, folks! It evinces no awareness that for a lot of people, the U.S.A. is not getting better and better.

But I remember enjoying it a lot when I was thirteen. And the Carousel of Progress, too! Now I finally understand why. It’s all because they did this era progression montage thing. That’s it. That’s why.

Why do I even like this thing?

I don’t know. But I think a lot about time, and how the past is a foreign country. And if you take that literally, then this sort of thing is like the Parade of Nations at the Olympics. And I live for it.