And in that day shall be heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the whole earth shall be in commotion, and men’s hearts shall fail them, and they shall say that Christ delayeth his coming until the end of the earth. And the love of men shall wax cold, and iniquity shall abound.
My wife pointed out to me that the distance between 1980 when we were kids and now, 2021, is the same distance as between 1980 and 1939. While of course the math is very simple, and shouldn't be something that's amazing or wondrous, this realization kind of blew my mind. It's amazing how quickly a nation can be brought to the brink of disaster, considering that relatively speaking, 1980 was still a fairly healthy time for America. 1939, other than the disastrous implementation of New Deal policies and the imminent equally disastrous and pointless entry into WW2. But following the war, America was arguably at its healthiest since the War of Northern Aggression. Certainly throughout the late 40s, the 50s and the early 60s when my parents were growing up, there was no hint that America's decline and imminent likely destruction were right around the corner, in spite of the fear porn of the media who hoped we would abase ourselves in submission to the Soviets.
In the 80s, because we had a Republican president, the fear porn was ramped up to the point where some people literally thought that the world would likely end in an apocalyptic nuclear firestorm. To be fair, the risk of that happening is actually much higher now than it was during the 80s, when nukes are not limited to a number of superpowers who balanced each others threats, but instead are in the hands of tin pot despots and Third World strongmen.
I've, in many ways, kinda sorta made this blog a paeon to 80s style (or even older) pop culture, in part because that's when I grew up, but also in part because that's the last time that American pop culture was relatively healthy. By "the 80s" I don't literally just mean Jan 1, 1980 through December 31, 1989. The 80s as a pop culture era lasted the better part of fifteen years, and include some of the late 70s as well as a decent chunk of the early 90s. And it's slightly different for different elements of pop culture. I think "the 80s" started in movies with the release of 1977's Star Wars and with music at probably about the same time when New Wave as a post-punk phenomena was starting to be defined. To use two metrics, I suppose. When did it end? That's a little harder to pin down for some elements; for music, I think 1992 when the impact of late 1991's surprise hit by Nirvana prompted the grunge bandwagon to ruin pop music for the next half dozen or so years.
But that's why I've focused on things that have a kind of "80s" vintage on this blog; Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, certain video games like Street Fighter (first released 1987) and 80s music, especially synthesizer New Wave like Depeche Mode or New Order. America has been on a rapid downhill slide since that era ended.
As an aside, in 1990, 90% of the people in America could trace at least some of their ancestry to Americans who were here during the Revolutionary War. That number has rapidly diminished as we've admitted tens of millions of Fake Americans and we pretend that they are Americans. The correlation between that and America's rapid decline is rather obvious.
In any case, the notable exception to my love of things that either originated or were at their peak in the 80s is the Street Fighter style games. While technically they did originate in the 80s, it was 1991 when Street Fighter II really created the genre, and it was the very late 90s and earliest 00s that the genre arguably peaked, before coming back again in the 2010s.
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