All the cool kids (Ace<\/a>, Ed Driscoll<\/a>, etc., etc.) are slagging on Ryan Reynolds for some pull quote from an interview where he says:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh, yeah. \u2018Top Gun.\u2019 Cocaine!\u2019 Like, \u2018No!\u2019 It was really scary.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n But the pop cultural zeitgeist, or at least the pop culture force-feeding, was<\/em> 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<\/em>, Testament<\/em>, and Red Dawn<\/em>; it was the era of post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max<\/em>, Hell Comes to Frogtown<\/em>, et cetera, et cetera.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But the Cuban Missile Crisis? He’s thinking about the television series Call to Glory<\/em><\/a> 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.).<\/p>\n But we don’t really remember that part of the 1980s because it was, for the most part, background noise. But present.<\/p>\n I’ll leave the final word to the Philosopher from a 1980 treatise:<\/p>\n