This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hello, my name's Dan Hancock's and I'm the author of the 2022 Guardian Long Read,

Who Remembers Proper Bin Men, the nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today.

This is an article about the weirdly popular world of nostalgic baby boomer Facebook memes which

kind of summon up a half-remembered post-war idyll in Britain in which the bin-men were

real men, not like the apparently emasculated, useless, jobsworth, health and safety-obsessed

bin-men of today. And these memes get across the

idea that life was tougher. Britain was authentic and proper, like the bin-men, and everyone was

happier as a result. I really wanted to understand why these memes were so numerous and so popular

and why they were so obviously a distortion of history and what that says about Britain today.

And I ended up with the idea of what we decided to call bin-menism, which is not quite like

normal nostalgia. Normal nostalgia says things were better in my day, but I think bin-menism

represents something stranger which I've summed up as the following. Things were worse, therefore they were better.

So the genesis of this piece was actually two obsessions that I acquired during the pandemic in 2021.

Firstly, I was reading and rereading Walter Benjamin's strange, mesmerizing, opaque piece of writing, theses on the philosophy of history.

And I was trying to work out what it all meant and thinking about what is excluded from the historical narratives of progress.

The heart of that Benjamin piece of writing is the idea that history is written misleadingly and self-servingly by

the winners, by which we mean the most powerful people in society. And that raises the question,

what about everyone else? You know, I did a history degree and I always had much less interest

in kings and their courts than the history of ordinary life or, you know, what's called

social history.

...