All the cool kids (Ace, Ed Driscoll, etc., etc.) are slagging on Ryan Reynolds for some pull quote from an interview where he says:
The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
C’mon, man. The real world was not so bad, in retrospect. We were young, and although my 80s were a series of upheavals and dealing with being the nerdy kid in the trailer park (different from my 70s, which was being the white nerdy kid in the housing projects), I have fond memories of the time because, you know what? I turned out all right in the end.
But the pop cultural zeitgeist, or at least the pop culture force-feeding, was of imminent doom. Either the Soviets were going to conquer us, or we were going to get nuked. It was the era of The Day After, Testament, and Red Dawn; it was the era of post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max, Hell Comes to Frogtown, et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe I just remember the anxiety because I was a neurotic kid (I’ve grown out of it; I’m no longer a kid) and because I don’t have any memories that remotely resembled a John Hughes or other teen comedy to overwrite it. But, yeah, it turned out to have been a good time to be a kid. Or, I presume, a yuppie that appeared in some of the other programs of the era, the ones that were designed to mock the spirit of the age and not to dampen it.
But the Cuban Missile Crisis? He’s thinking about the television series Call to Glory where it featured prominently and which was part of the not hatefully and not ostentatiously anti-American counterprogramming competing with the pro-American and more popular programming–Rambo, Rocky, the blockbusters, and the fact that the conservative characters designed to be foils for the right-thinking characters (Alex P. Keaton, etc.).
But we don’t really remember that part of the 1980s because it was, for the most part, background noise. But present.
I’ll leave the final word to the Philosopher from a 1980 treatise:
Sure, it’s from the tail end of the 1970s, but.
