ISIS, Khorasan, Ferguson, Gaza, Putin: The summer of 2014 had been deemed America’s “worst ever” well before Ebola, the Ray Rice video, and the Secret Service debacle kicked in. One sees the point even if it requires historical amnesia about other bad summers (like, say, that one with the Battle of Gettysburg). But you also have to ask: What was a great American summer, exactly? Lazy, hazy 2001, when a peaceful country and its new president nodded off through Labor Day, worrying about little more than an alleged uptick in shark attacks?

The fact is that we can’t write history while we’re in it — not even that first draft of history that journalists aspire to write. While 2014 may have a shot at eternal infamy, our myopia and narcissism encourage us to discount the possibility that this year could be merely an inconsequential speed bump on the way to some greater catastrophe or unexpected nirvana. This was brought home to me when, in a quest for both a distraction from and a perspective on our current run of dreadful news, I revisited 1964, the vintage American year that has been serving as an unofficial foil, if not antidote, to 2014.

It’s easy to travel back there, thanks to the many media retrospectives marking 1964’s half-centenary in ironic counterpoint to this year’s woes. You could feast on the commemorations of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act — The Bill of the Century, as one new book had it — to learn how Washington once accomplished great things. You could relive The Night That Changed America, CBS’s canonization of the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan Show appearance. PBS fielded two documentaries: Freedom Summer, chronicling that courageous civil-rights movement in Mississippi, and 1964, which, like its inspiration, Jon Margolis’s book The Last Innocent Year, distinguished the relatively upbeat 1964 from the apocalyptic ’60s to come. The Times and Daily News saluted the 1964 World’s Fair, with its quaint American Century faith in the inexorability of progress. The fair’s slogan was “Peace Through Understanding,” and its equally naïve signature anthem was “It’s a Small World (After All).” As the soundtrack for a popular ride cross-promoting unicef and Pepsi, the song may not have advanced world peace, but it did do its bit to hook a generation of kids on sugary drinks.

If you were young in 1964, you may have fond memories of that year as well. I have never forgotten how the Beatles, who landed in my hometown of Washington, D.C., for their first American concert in February, chased away the Kennedy-assassination hangover, giving me and my ninth-grade peers permission to party again. From my own immature, hormonally addled perspective, the world kept leaping forward throughout that year as if a stiff wind were at its back—culminating with the election in which Johnson buried the opponent my elders deemed a trigger-happy proponent of nuclear Armageddon. It was a time when many in my boomer generation fell in love with the idea that change was something you could believe in—a particularly liberal notion that has taken hold in other generations, too, whether in the age of Roosevelt or Obama. Even as we recognize that the calendar makes for a crude and arbitrary marker, we like to think that history visibly marches on, on a schedule we can codify.

The more I dove back into the weeds of 1964, the more I realized that this is both wishful thinking and an optical illusion.

I came away with a new appreciation of how selective our collective memory is, and of just how glacially history moves, despite the can-do optimism of a modern America besotted with the pursuit of instant gratification. Asked at the time of the 1964 World’s Fair to anticipate 2014, Isaac Asimov got some things right (miniaturized computers, online education, flat-screen television, and what we now know as Skype), but many of his utopian predictions were delusional. His wrong calls included not just his interplanetary fantasies but his vision of underground suburbs that would protect mankind from war, rampaging weather, and the tyranny of the automobile. Asimov also thought birth control would find international acceptance. It was no doubt beyond even his imagination that a half-century hence American lawmakers would introduce “personhood” amendments attempting to all but outlaw contraception.

The screenwriter William Goldman famously summed up Hollywood in three words: “Nobody knows anything.” Would that this aphorism were applicable, as he intended, solely to the make-believe of show business. It often seems that nobody knew anything about anything in 1964. Most everyone was certain that the big political developments of the time, epitomized by LBJ’s victories for civil rights and against Goldwater, would be transformational. Many of the same seers saw the year’s cultural upheavals, starting with the Beatles, as ephemera. More often than not, the reverse has turned out to be true. Are we so much smarter in 2014?