THE REPEAT GOES ON . . . ; WITH NEW MILLENNIUM LOOMING, TIME ISN'T STANDING STILL - IT'S GOING BACKWARD.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

2001, 2000, 1999, 1998 ...

Notice anything funny?

1986, 1985, 1984 ...

You thought we were going forward, didn't you? Kissing the Good 'Ol Days goodbye, and warp-speeding into the Glorious Future of Y2K?

1978, 1977, 1976 ...

Well, we're not. We're actually going backward, plunging into the past like a wayward Times Square ball, joy-riding in reverse through the waning American Century, shedding the accumulated weight of cultural memory like a sweaty baby boomer on a StairMaster.

A few more months of this, and we'll all look like Dick Clark.

1963, 1962, 1961 ...

See, here's what you may not realize: You're sick. Very sick.

But don't worry. So am I. So are we all, and not only sick unto death of this incessant yammering about The Millennium, and why bell-bottoms are ``back'' and angels are ``hot.''

We're afflicted with the malady that knows no vaccine, the illness for which no quick Prozac fix will suffice.

We're talking about nostalgia, that wistful yearning for yesteryear, that bittersweet longing for a vanished youth, a bygone way of life, or the mint-condition DC comic book that sure would be worth a lot of money now, if only we hadn't used it to swat flies one summer.

1950, 1949, 1948, 1947 ...

The good news is, nostalgia is seldom life-threatening, though it used to be.

``In the 19th century, nostalgia was thought to be a fatal illness, and they did autopsies on people who had nostalgia and found it in the body,'' says Michael S. Roth, associate director of the Getty Research Institute, who has studied case histories of nostalgia ``patients'' and written extensively about history and memory.

At one time, Roth says, it was actually a crime to whistle a Swiss folk song within earshot of Swiss mercenaries, ``because it was said to drive them into paroxysms of nostalgia.''

Warning: Don't try submitting this to your HMO.

The word nostalgia comes from ancient Greece and literally means ``homesickness.'' Odysseus probably suffered from it while taking 10 years to get back to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Either that or scurvy.

``In the Boer War, it was actually put on some British soldiers' death certificates that they became so homesick after being wounded that they lost their will to live,'' says Rudy Franchi of Boston's Nostalgia Factory (www.nostalgia.com), a collectibles store that specializes in movie memorabilia, including posters, lobby cards, press kits and the iconic portraits of Bogey and Marilyn and Dean that have become as familiar to us as our own faces.

So much for things past. Now we are engaged in a great Bore War, a frenzied compulsion to replay, relive and re-enact every last bit of pop culture ephemera from the last 100 years, no matter how vapid or deservedly obsolete it seems.

Rapper Vanilla Ice (nee Robert Van Winkle) is on the comeback trail. Godzilla was sighted over Gotham last summer. Brand-spanking new Volkswagen Beetles are tooling around the freeways again.

Meanwhile, a slew of thoughtful new books by the likes of Tom Brokaw (``The Greatest Generation''), Harold Evans (``The American Century'') and others recaps the outgoing epoch in exhaustive detail.

1941, 1940, 1939 ...

But the current nostalgia fad goes beyond collecting bottle caps and Milli Vanilli Fan Club buttons.

Now, with Hollywood's help, we're recasting ourselves as our own ancestors in a mental restaging of momentous episodes from American's past. Some of these episodes have been the Civil War (Ken Burns' documentary), the Black Power movement (``Malcolm X''), World War II (``The Thin Red Line'') and disco (``Boogie Nights'').

Coming up during February sweeps month: NBC's four-hour miniseries, ``The '60s.''

For true baby boomers, of course, nostalgia is to the '60s what interminable guitar solos are to a Grateful Dead concert. Series executive producer Lynda Obst, a journalist, author and filmmaker, admits that as a member of the Civil Rights/Vietnam/Watergate generation, ``I feel very nostalgic about the period before (President) Kennedy was killed.''

``He was youth, he was vigor, he was everything that was possible, and the call to engagement,'' Obst says of JFK. ``The nostalgia for the purity of that, before the sweetness went awry, I think is pure nostalgia. The thing is to not inflate it, so it doesn't get corny and false.''

In other words, pure nostalgia means never having to say you're sentimental.

In his just-published book ``Life the Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality'' (Knopf), Neal Gabler argues there's nothing necessarily wrong with Americans' tendency to recast themselves as the stars of their own ``life movies.''

Similarly, he suggests, there's nothing wrong with trying to imagine how we would've behaved when the last lifeboats dropped from the sinking Titanic, or when the German welcoming party opened fire at Omaha Beach.

``In some ways, `Saving Private Ryan' may be the first purely post-ideological movie,'' Gabler says. ``You know, once you get past bullets flying through people, the real effect of the movie is that it reminds us of a time (when) Americans were united about something, where we weren't divided by strife and ideology.

``Which is something of a falsification, I think, in the film. But nevertheless it's a very powerful idea for a country that is right now going through this kind of ideological idiocy.''

1929, 1928, 1927 ...

In the past, nostalgia was about people and places - your high school best friend, your mom's sweet potato pies, the old ballpark they tore down to build another parking lot.

``It was a certain smell, or the way a light settled on a street,'' says the Nostalgia Factory's Franchi. ``But now everything smells the same and no one lives where they grew up. So you need objects.''

Trouble is, objects don't fade away gracefully. Thanks to technology, even ``Porky's Revenge'' is guaranteed an afterlife as long as Plutonium-239. All of pop culture has become like Michael Myers in those ``Halloween'' movies: No matter how many times you whack it over the head with a shovel, it keeps coming back to haunt you.

``If the 1890s were considered `the Gay '90s,' the 1990s have to be considered `the Gray '90s,' '' says Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, a Rhinebeck, N.Y., think tank, and author of ``Trends 2000'' (Warner Books). ``There's nothing exciting going on. There's no intellectual, philosophical, artistic or musical greatness that's come onto the scene.''

1914, 1913, 1912 ...

Of course, we've heard this lament before, that America no longer creates, it merely recycles.

Hollywood grave-robs from its own vaults. Hip-hop steals its hooks from James Brown and Blue Note jazz records. Contemporary art is content to mock the past rather than invent the future. Politicians fax in hand-me-down principles.

In our pre-millennial dotage, the critics continue, we've become a nation of mimics, a culture of impersonators rather than originals. Leo DiCaprio is James Dean. LeAnn Rimes is Patsy Cline. Bill Gates is John D. Rockefeller. Bill Clinton is Jack Kennedy. Every doppelganger has his day.

As for the mass media, it's deja view-ing all over again, a 24-hour prewashed cycle consisting of What You Already Knew and What You've Already Forgotten. Cocktails are back! Burt Bacharach's back! Donny and Marie are back (did they ever leave?)!

Swing music is back! Swinging London is back! McCarthyism is back (did it ever leave?)! Baseball is back!

It's kind of eerie when you think about it. First we replayed the stock market crash of '29 in 1987, then again, for kicks, last summer.

Next, we brought back Woodstock for MTV and nuclear testing, in India and Pakistan, for CNN.

Now, 100 years after the start of the Spanish-American War, we've got ourselves a nice little scuffle going in Iraq. Remember the Maine! Naw, you're probably too young ...

Some pundits are claiming that the impeachment of President Clinton is really Act 2 of the culture wars that began in the 1960s between the free-lovin', dope-smokin', flag-burnin', draft-dodgin' Left, and the commie-bashin', Bible-thumpin', billy club-swingin' Right.

As New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote recently, ``We're replaying the tragic late '60s as farce - so far.''

1906, 1905, 1904 ...

Once, Henry Kissinger supposedly asked Zhou En-lai what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution.

The Chinese statesman replied: ``It's too early to tell.''

If those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, those who predict the future are mostly dead wrong (or both dead and wrong, like Marx).

We like to think of history as a grand pageant, sweeping inexorably toward some predetermined boffo finale. In truth it may be more like a tape loop, endlessly rewinding on itself.

We click on nostalgia and, for a few seconds, we feel better. Then the screen goes blank, and all we see are our own benumbed reflections.

``The reason that nostalgia and narcissism are close is that you don't know the difference between yourself and another,'' says the Getty's Michael Roth. ``It blurs the distinction between past and present, so you feel like you're in the past. And that's a dangerous delusion.''

Maybe someday Ted Turner will buy the United States, lock, stock and barrel, and have it colorized, frame by frame. Something in pastels, perhaps.

``So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,'' wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald at the end of ``The Great Gatsby.''

That was in 1925. Surely by now we must be nearing the source of that vital wellspring, the resurgent heart of what poet Walt Whitman called ``the interior American Republic.''

So we beat on ... 1865 ... 1776 ... 1492 ...

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Drawing

PHOTO (1) no caption (Collage of 20th century icons)

Photo Illustration by Jon Gerung/Daily News

(2) The events of the 20th century have been covered in exhaustive detail by authors and pop historians alike.

Michael Owen Baker/Daily News

DRAWING: (Cover--Color) NOSTALGIA

As we speed toward the Millennium, are we stuck in the past?

Jon Gerung/Daily News