My wife and I recently watched the movie RED, a Bruce Willis actioner based on the comic series by Warren Ellis. It's about a retired CIA agent suddenly targeted by assassins who has to figure out who's trying to kill him and why. In the process he gathers up his team of now-retired old spooks to help him take down the bad guy. It's a competent enough thriller, with one very neat stunt sequence, a superb performance by Karl Urban as the head assassin, and a completely absurd romance plot between Willis's character and a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. (Although as my wife put it, "he is still Bruce Willis.")

None of that is what I want to talk about. One of the ongoing themes in the movie is how all the retired characters are nostalgic for the good old days of the Cold War, when the lines were clearly drawn, the other side were clearly bad, and there was a sense of honor about it all. What's weird is that I remember reading spy novels and watching films made during the latter days of the real Cold War, and they tended to play up how the two sides weren't so different, how everything was shades of gray, and how everybody was cynical and bitter — not like the good old days of World War II. Before James Bond descended into cinematic camp, one of his distinguishing features was how amoral he was. Not like those gentlemanly spies of the past . . .

This is a persistent feature of human society. The past always seems better, purer, more colorful and exciting. Past heroes loom like giants compared to the petty figures around us. I think a lot of this is simply the result of the way people grow up. When you're very young, the world is run by adults, who are supercompetent and infinitely wise. But by the time you grow up, you're one of the ones running the world, and all you see around you are idiots like yourself, struggling to manage day to day.

I don't mean to imply that the heroes we admire weren't worthy of that admiration. Quite the reverse. Just remember that they all thought they couldn't measure up to their own bygone heroes.