David Sirota - Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explains the World We Live in Now--Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything

Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in NowOur Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything

Hostile Takeover

The Uprising

Copyright 2011 by David Sirota

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sirota, David (David J.)
Back to our future: how the 1980s explain the world we live in nowour culture, our politics, our everything / David Sirota.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51880-4
1. United StatesCivilization1970 2. United StatesSocial conditions1980 3. Popular cultureUnited States. 4. Political cultureUnited States. 5. Nineteen eighties. I. Title.
E169.12.S5188 2011
973.92dc22 2010041627

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design and illustration: Christopher King

v3.1

To Jeff and Stevenbeloved brothers,
best friends, fellow children of the 1980s

What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or something?

M ARTY M C F LY , 1985

or as long as I can remember, I have never seen the 1980s as an era or a historical moment or, God forbid, a period. To me, the decade has always been a language. I dont remember the 1980s as much as I speak it and think in it. As anyone who has seen me around my two brothers knows, I mean this quite literally.

As typical kids growing up in the suburbs, my siblings and I were pretty different from one another. We had different tastes, jobs, interests, attitudes, and politics, and we always had our fair share of fights, including one featuring a flying Karate Kid kick to the throat (alas, I have yet to mete out my wedgie revenge for that one). But through it all, we patched together a common dialect of eighties references that served as a diplomatic Morse code-bridging conflict, forging compromise, and filling uncomfortable silence.

In the Sirota household, you could garner forgiveness with a proper mimic of Planes, Trains and Automobiles (Sorry, whispered like a pajama-clad Del Griffith), demand someone do something by quoting Indiana Jones (Do it, now! with a clenched fist), lament an oddity with a line from Coming to America (Thats real fucked up.), describe the weather in The Empire Strikes Back terms (Its like Hoth out there!), and tell anyone to do just about anything with the generic mantra of Rocky III (Go for it, mumbled with the Italian Stallions guttural inflection). If you didnt understand something, you said, Whatchoo talkin bout, Willis? like Arnold Jackson in Diffrent Strokes. If you were sick of being told to do a chore too many times, you mimicked Walter Fielding in The Money Pit by saying, I know where the bucket is, through clenched underbite. If you were planning on eating a big meal, you told Mom you were ready for The Ol 96er from The Great Outdoors. If you needed to take a dump, you politely excused yourself by saying you had to go be the administrator of this facility la Lando Calrissian. If you were trying to describe a cool car that just drove by, you would characterize it as some iteration of Knight Riders KITT, The Dukes of Hazzards General Lee, or Uncle Bucks transmission-exploding jalopy. For everything else, you simply whipped out Superman IIs berversatile command: Kneel before Zod.

To outsiders, it must have seemed as if my parents had conceived a trio of Tourettes cases and subsequently strapped us, Clockwork Orangestyle, to our hulking Zenith television and its wheezing Panasonic VCR.

Our extended family was for the most part bemused or only mildly irritated by our vernacular. Strangers were bewildered, freaked-out, or bothand we didnt care.

By the time we hit our college years, my brothers and I saw this language as epistemology. To us, nothing could not in some way trace its provenance to an obscure eighties movie, sitcom, toy, video game, song, commercial, or athlete. But as more self-aware adults, we pledged to conceal this view in mixed company, for fear of total social alienation. While steadfast in our enthusiasm for our formative decade, we learned to keep our eighties religion to ourselves for fear of being socially ostracized.

Which was fine with me. Frankly, I did not aspire to a sad, celibate life making my name as the Cliff Clavin of 1980s trivia. And to us Sirota boys, thats what our encyclopedic knowledge of the Reagan-Eras cultural esoterica was: an amusing and fun patois appropriate for inside jokes and barroom theorizing, but not much more.

But then, a little while ago, something weird started happeningsomething heavy, as Marty McFly might say. The 1980s began becoming cool. Not just VH1 Big 80s ironic coollike, really, actually cool. More cool than the decade ever was in its own time. Cool, as in a legitimate phenomenon.

Suddenly, The Karate Kid and The A-Team were fighting for the number one spot atop the movie charts, and Hot Tub Time Machines journey back to the 1980s was the leading comedy in America. At the same time, Red Dawn, Short Circuit, Tron, Ghostbusters, Clash of the Titans, Footloose, and Arthur were being remade; brands such as Transformers, G.I. Joe, Predator, Star Wars, The Equalizer, and Nightmare on Elm Street were being resurrected; video games such as Missile Command and Asteroids were becoming feature-length films; classics such as Zelda were being rereleased; and the Los Angeles Times blared the headline Atari Reboot Is Underway.

Suddenly, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and Devo were back on tour, and Gene Simmons and Dee Snider had their own A&E reality shows. Without warning, you could be at a public event (such as me at the last Denver Brewfest) and find yourself engulfed by a throng of drunk twentysomethings earnestly rocking out to cover bands playing Eddy Grants Electric Avenue, the Eurythmics Sweet Dreams, and the Talking Heads Once in a Lifetimeand playing that eighties Velveeta in a straight, nonironic fashion.

Suddenly, Hulk Hogan, Jerry Seinfeld, and William ShatnerWilliam fucking Shatner!were back to being major TV stars, Meryl Streep was once again winning Academy Awards, and one of the Golden GirlsBetty Whitewas hosting Saturday Night Live.

Suddenly, Apple was again the rage in the computer industry, Nintendo was dominating the video-game market, Tories were winning British elections, and Russians were spying on the United States.

Suddenly, the Philadelphia Phillies were World Series contenders, the Philadelphia Flyers were fighting for a Stanley Cup, and the Los Angeles Lakers were playing the Boston Celtics in the NBA finals.

In an America whose 1980s destroyed the boundaries between entertainment, news, and politics, this bizarre dj vu could be seen in even the most deadly serious stuff.

Once again, we were funding a proxy war in Afghanistan, rattling our sabers at Iran, getting fleeced by Gordon Gekkos on Wall Street, and talking about poverty in Reaganesque welfare queen terms. In this cauldron of nostalgia, George W. Bush started explaining complex geopolitical issues by going