Nostalgia

'Is there any doubt that nostalgia is in?If "Forrest Gump," "The Flintstones" and news items about Barbie's 35th anniversary aren't proof enough, then how about the arrival in bookstores of "The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book"?Evidence is as close as the nearest mall, where this season shoppers will find an array of gift items that reflect America's love affair with the pop-culture heroes, symbols and traditions of the past.What fuels this nostalgia?"The past was a less pressured time," explains Arnold Borenstein, creative merchandising director at the Hecht Co. headquarters in Arlington, Va. "With all the chaos in today's world, people want things simpler."

Nostalgia is a fickle beast. Kind to some memories, cruel to others, it can seem maddeningly capricious in what it chooses to remember and what it would prefer to forget. But that's because nostalgia, despite its professed allegiance to history, is really a creature of fashion, its selective memory reflecting only the latest fads and fancies.Nowhere is that more the case than in popular music. It isn't just that the pop styles of the past are regularly recycled (remember the ska revival? new folk?

Nostalgia is a big business in America. We found out at least one expression of this phenomenon while out buying a clock one day.The simple little thing had big figures on the dial for the faraway, wall-sized treatment. It worked, apparently forever, on about $1.69 worth of batteries.But when we got close, we heard the sound of nostalgia. A tick . . .Why did this wonder of modern miniaturization need a tick? For atmosphere, and nothing else. Electric clocks and battery models, as soundless as the deepest chamber in Carlsbad Caverns, have been around for years.

"Factory jobs are the future of America's young," Patrick J. Buchanan declared at a recent gathering of Republican presidential candidates in New Hampshire. The statement was vintage Buchanan: simple, reassuring -- and deeply nostalgic. He longs for the 1950s America of his youth, when the factories boomed and "we did teach right from wrong," as he said during a visit to Los Angeles. His mom stayed home and cooked meals of fried chicken and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. It was "in many ways a better time," he writes in his 1990 autobiography, "Right From the Beginning."

The past is taking over the present. Reflect for a moment on what's "new." The Dukes of Hazzard. VW Beetles. Chuck Taylors.www Then consider that "Dust in the Wind" by the '70s rock group Kansas is background music for a new car commercial. It's just the latest in a long line of recent rock 'n' roll sell-outs, but you have to admit it's kind of nice to hear it again. This year Hasbro Inc. introduced updated versions of classic board games like Twister and Candy Land, and sales skyrocketed.

Wear your saddle shoes and do up the 'do before heading over to "Hot Nostalgia II," the latest offering at Toby's Dinner Theatre.The musical revue offers more than 50 songs in a little more than 90 minutes, covering five decades of music, fashion and dance. The eight-member cast doesn't miss a beat throughout the show, and audience members probably will find their toes tapping to the tunes.Toby's produced the original "Hot Nostalgia" in 1996, and several of the cast members have returned to please audiences in the VTC second version.

HARKING BACK to the past surely takes some bizarre forms these days.In Vietnam, trendy Saigonese gather in a disco called "Apocalypse Now." It features the usual flashing lights plus sounds of explosions, GI memorabilia and wrecks of U.S. helicopters hanging from the ceiling. In former East Germany, cafes have sprung up that celebrate the drab life and shortages of the now-gone workers' state.These nostalgia trips help why the lower house of Russia's communist-led parliament overwhelmingly voted the other day to seek the restoration of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, which went out of business four years ago when communism collapsed.

The November "sweeps" ratings period starts today. And that means it's a time of many happy returns in Television Land.Reunion shows and retrospectives -- along with their inverse image, the murder melodrama (see story below) -- have become a recent staple of ratings periods, and the trend kicks in again on Sunday night.In what now rates full-blown miniseries packaging from NBC, Kenny Rogers is back in the Old West for the fourth time in "The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw." A week from Sunday (Nov.

At exactly noon yesterday, Lester Jenkins turned his rented U-Haul away from the blue-painted rowhouse where he had lived the past 14 years and left Leo Street behind, without a tear or a glance back. "Goodbye to the past," he said, passing three oil tank farms and a herbicide factory.Four minutes later, the 45-year-old plumber parked in front of his new home and said hello to his future: a well-maintained, two-bedroom rowhouse in Brooklyn, less than two miles west."This new world is beautiful, ain't it?"

World War II was the most awful experience of humanity in this century. Nostalgia for it lingers, the lessons forgotten.Cheer up. Jacques Chirac got elected.