The past, bless its black and white soul, was a simple place.
Men were men, everyone wore nice hats, and my mother donned a pair of white gloves when we took the Hillman to Arthur Barnetts to go shopping.
It was a time when post-modernist irony was just a glimmer in the eye of the suspicion of global cultural narrative.
I'm not certain when things got confusing, but it was definitely after Henry Kissinger stamped his mark across United States politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Because at that time, it was still pretty clear who the enemy was.
Tomorrow, at 8.30pm on National Geographic, Kissinger takes you back to a period when the major nations of the world were not speaking, when there was a nuclear arms race that was madness personified, and the world was run by the insane.
There are good arguments nothing has changed, for sure, but take this on board.
Kissinger attended Harvard, where, in Kissinger, Prof Thomas Schelling says he was not a jovial sort of student.
Instead, he was "anxious, temperamental, self conscious, ambitious and inconsiderate".
He wrote a book that became a best seller, with the title Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which promoted the idea in 1957 that a limited nuclear war could be won by the United States.
It was this man who attracted the attention of another colossus of modern political thinking in the United States at the time: Richard Nixon.
Nixon sent him a note of congratulation on his book, and evidently realising there was a like mind out there, invited him to become assistant to the president-elect for national security affairs.
These were the guys who were running things.
If you have ever wondered why many people spent a good deal of the 1970s under the impression the world was quite possibly about to come to an end, that had a lot to do with it.
Kissinger promises a "unique insight" into the man who shaped the United States' post-war foreign policy.
It follows the course of the Vietnam War, the Paris negotiations with the North Vietnamese and the expansion of bombing to include Cambodia.
It features footage from the time of Prof Schelling, who with a dozen of Kissinger's former friends and colleagues from Harvard took a message to the White House that the direction he and Nixon were taking was just plain wrong.
The man himself ponders how he would have dealt with the "moral dilemma" of killing tens of millions of people in one day, and explains his thinking on the Vietnam War, and the bombing of Cambodia.
Kissinger goes a good way towards explaining the certainty in the eyes of student protesters circa 1969.
It also peels back some of the layers that make up the man, providing a fascinating addition to the history of that tumultuous period.