It`s hard to imagine how we got along before we had the `80s. Take the whole area of modern technology (by which I mean ”Japan”), which gave us such advances as the cellular telephone, which enables businesspersons to talk while driving badly; and the fax machine, which enables us to send and receive documents and take-out menus faster and less legibly than we would`ve dreamed possible before.
Admittedly, this is part of the ongoing plot by our foreign competitors to reduce the once-mighty American industrial engine to a giant encounter group for obsessive paper-fondlers, but we can`t stop ourselves, because fax machines have gotten so darned cheap you can`t afford NOT to have one, you know?
This is also why everybody in the `80s except the actual homeless bought a VCR, a device that has revolutionized our amusement habits by enabling us to enjoy rental movie classics that we might never otherwise have seen, such as
”Nightmare of the Revenge of the National Lampoon Police Academy Nerds on Halloween XIV,” in the comfort of our own homes, lying on our own sofas, eating our own taco chips and falling asleep with our own drool dribbling onto our own shirts.
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And speaking of video advances, let`s not forget the camcorder. Suddenly, if you were a new parent (which was very big in the `80s), it was possible for you to follow your child (who, in the `80s, was named Jason, Jennifer, Justin, Ashley, Derrick or Courtney) all over Disney World carrying a chunk of technology that, thanks to solid-state electronics, weighed no more than an ordinary household lawn mower yet was capable of making videotapes that would give you countless hours of enjoyment if you ever actually watched them. Which, of course, you never did because there was never enough time for anything in the `80s.
Of course, not everybody became a new parent in the `80s; it just SEEMED that way because of the aging of the Baby Boom. I`m talkin` about My Generation, a humongous herd, the 800-pound gorilla of demographic trends, dominating the culture, spending money like crazy and turning 40 in droves and starting to pay real attention to fiber-cereal commercials and advancing our careers and taking over the vice presidency of the United States as well as many truly important jobs. Yet we did not forget our roots in the rock-and-rebellion years of the `60s. No, sir, we were absolutely fascinated with our roots, so we had our Big Chill nostalgia wallows and our aging-rock-band reunions and our FM stations that play our 17 favorite ”classic” rock songs over and over and over and our movies and our Woodstock retrospectives and our self-absorbed TV shows and all the other Boomer-oriented cultural manifestations that made the other generations wish we would just hurry up and go senile.
Ronald Reagan is a name that for some reason springs to mind here, no doubt because he was one of the defining figures of the `80s, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, Donald Trump and Madonna. But Reagan stood above them all. Wisely electing to delegate to underlings the ”detail work,” such as running the government and remembering exactly what year it was, he chose instead to concentrate on the task of restoring something very precious to the presidency, something that had been sorely missing under Jimmy Carter: height. Religion came back strong in the `80s, especially on television, with various leading religious figures raising millions of dollars for the Lord, although it is not clear what the Lord`s actual net income was after money was deducted for various evangelical expenses such as studios, satellite time, salaries, bonuses, houses, cars, additional bonuses, theme parks, motel rooms and, of course, mascara by the 55-gallon drum.
Speaking of fashion, the `80s saw a shocking increase in Denim Abuse, caused by sharp dressers paying large dollars for jeans that had been attacked repeatedly with dull fashion implements, so that at upscale gatherings you`d see many sectors of leg and butt and occasionally even private parts clearly visible through all these designer rips and holes. The `80s will also be remembered as an era when millions of men wore totally unnecessary suspenders, millions of women wore Herman Munster Model shoulder pads, even to bed, and just about everybody at one time or another got a haircut that looked like the result of an unusually vicious fraternity initiation. Wristwatches went back to having hands, which was good, although some of the expensive watches also, mysteriously, started indicating the phases of the Moon. Why? What possible value could this information have to the modern urban professional? Is there some secret connection between lunar activity and, say, the bond market? We`ll probably never know, just as we never understood such `80s economic concepts as leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, selling short and ”arbitrage.”
Another unsettling trend was that magazines started spontaneously emitting perfume samples. You`d be reading an article about the Greenhouse Effect (which, in the `80s, replaced nuclear war as the Giant Scary Thing You Can`t Do Anything About), and you`d turn the page and, whoosh, you`d be awash in Joan Collins` sensuous new fragrance, ”Thruste de Groine,” and you`d come home smelling like a massage parlor and get in trouble with your spouse. Which was bad because faithfulness came on big in the late `80s, primarily as a form of disease prevention, not unlike flossing.
Speaking of health, the early `80s saw a fanatical popular obsession with fitness, although toward the end this trend tapered off, with a lot of people settling for merely wearing loose clothes and eating frozen yogurt. Another big food trend of the `80s was that restaurant menus became incomprehensible even when they were written in English, featuring things like blackened free- range kiwi that arrived at your table in molecular servings on plates the size of wading pools.
As for names, Morton Downey Jr. is an `80s figure we`ll probably be forgetting soon, along with a lot of others, such as Ivan Boesky, Ed Meese, Jim Wright, Imelda Marcos, Pee-Wee Herman, Gary Hart, Spuds MacKenzie, Roger Rabbit and Karl Marx. In fact, I`ve forgotten many names already because another major trend in the `80s-surely you noticed this-was that it got harder and harder to remember things. Or maybe that was just me.