Why in Hell Are We Back in the '80s?

Obama's hope-and-change gap has yet to be filled with anything better than Gaga and The Karate Kid. An exhausted battle cry for finally talking about our generation.


Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/80s-comeback-0610#ixzz0qt8Cdwx6

 

mr frudmeh, tear down this wall!

 

I didnt intend this to be a political discussion..

more like a cultural/generational discussion.

We're in a time where we've created nothing new, and are just rehasing things. We don't need another Reagan. Or a Carter. Or a Bush. Or a Clinton. Or a FDR. Or a Lincoln. We need a new beginning not just keep redoing the things expecting different results. We need to stop brining things back from different eras and look into creating something new, from our culture and entertainment as well as how we conduct our politics and our social structure.

Everyone looks back and romanticizes the past, even when it wasn't really as good as we try to remember it.

 

Oh ya, just wait for the 90s to be recycled next.

 

Cultural-wise, the 90s was pretty impressive. Musically, we had great bands such as Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, ect. Rap was at its intellectual peak with Wu Tang, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, The Roots, ect. Movies we had American Beauty, Pulp Fiction, The Matrix, The Big Lebowski, ect. TV we had Seinfeld, Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire, The X-Files, Married...With Children, In Living Color, ect. So culturally the 90s had alot going for it. Makes the 2000s look even more duller in comparison.

Politically we had Bill Clinton, a moderate politician who was probably just right for the times but had majored flaws that prevented some things from getting done. However on the whole things seemed to be balanced, definitely nowhere near perfect but there was alot of optimism around. Minorities and women were on the upclimb economically but still not on par with white men but there was still a growing middle class although there was a glass ceiling in place since the late 70s/80s for everyone due to the adoption of neoliberal economic policies that we're now paying for. At least we tried to pay down the debt.

 

As for social change, Im all for change coming slowly rather than all at once, especially seeing what happens when you force change and do it quickly rather than having it occur naturally and slowly. On some issues however I wish we could push for so we can finally look past them and move on bigger more important things. Im talking about coming to terms with environmental and energy issues, establishing gay rights, softening and eventually ending the drug war(especially marijuana use), pushing the use of war as last result the way we used to(not a radical idea), accepting separation of church and state and actually applying it, the acceptance of greed to run the economy and thus the country, ect. Alot of these are issues that are still lingering from the 20th century that were never solved and pushed back, and now we have to deal with the consequences of never dealing with them.

 

Oh I remember dos well. We had an old IBM desktop that ran Windows 3.0/MS-DOS. I remember as a kid playing this learning game "Reader Rabbit" and having to type in commands to get the program to run. C:/Windows/Programs/ReaderRabbit.exe something like that.

The Windows 95 came out and then AOL came and advertised like crazy, everyday in the mail you'd get an offer "15 hours free!" for AOL. The whole world changed overnight with that. Suddenly the internet was taking over the everyday aspects our lives.

As far as the economy goes, there was a direct correlation between the investor economy of the 90s and the economic inequality of the 80s. Trickle-down economics did work, after all. But mostly for the those who were already well-off. The stats show that the rich saw their incomes rise substantially from 1980-2000, while there were modest gains the middle class and the poor. In other words, more people were entering the middle class in the 90s, recovering from the poor economy of the 70s and 80s, but many wound up being bottlenecked, you could only go so far. Just as many were beginning to reach the middle class, the recession of 2001 hit, then came 9/11, resulting in a double-wammy recession. Then we had a "jobless recovery", which means the rich's losses were socialized through increase in defense spending and tax cuts, while everyone else had to settle for the growing number of low paying service jobs which replaced the old economy which had more avenues for people to join the middle class. The 1990s economy grew due to a combination of neoliberal practices and the use of the internet as a vehicle to conduct business, but most of the gains made in the 90s were really more of a mirage, a myth if you will. The social safety net put in place since the Great Depression was eroding already since the neoliberal period began in the late 70s, and most of the manufacturing and other important parts of industry was already gone by the 90s. There was growth but no foundation laying underneathe. We had built castles made of sand but the tide of the 2000s came and swept all that away, and that's a good illustration of where we are now. We haven't been creative enough to invent our way out of recession. We haven't created anything new nor have we preserved what has kept us afloat for all these years. We are essentially our own worst enemies.

 

My opinion on public schools isn't that the idea of public schools is wrong, its that they were deliberately neglected due to this new Gilded era. There is no use for public schools in this age of economic inequality, especially if the best and the brightest are sitting at homes with their degrees with no hope for work because most of the jobs are sent overseas where the cost-benefit for multinational corporations has overtaken that of national interest. So they continue to find ways to take money out of public schools, such as vouchers. Charter schools/alternative schools/private-public schools whatever, do not work. They try to attack the symptoms of public school dysfunction by setting targets and by establishing strict coherence to "rules" and "discipline", but there are many examples of how they aren't much better, and in fact many are worse, than public schools. You'll find most charter schools are mostly in it to make money, not enlighten your child. In fact we've pressured education into a way to prepare our children for the workplace rather than enlighten and enrich them, and yet we are accomplishing neither. From incompetent bureaucratic oversight to misuse of money to states cutting back on funding altogether, public education is facing its worst state in years, and Im glad I graduated when I did, after attending a dysfunctional high school that was on the decline.

Alot can be said about public education's faults, and one of the biggest ones is the teaching of history. Textbooks, which are bought from private companies and which recycle every paragraph from edition to edition, compromise the teaching of history because of the combination of eurocentric/amerocentric biases("Europeans discovered everything" and "America is great and everything about it") and political correctness. Teachers are stuck teaching to curriculum and anything outside the box is at best discouraged. The introduction of standardized testing, the emphasis on statistics and targets, privatizing parts of public schools, are making this worse, because again, its an attempt to attack the symptoms of a broken public school system from the top down, rather than reforming it from the bottom up.

As for my advocation that MJ be legal, its part of my libertarian-left philosophy I would like to see carried out for purely my own selfish benefit and for the selfish benefit of others.

 

I agree but to a point. Im mostly self-educated, but only in areas Im interested in. The state should have a role in providing basic education for the masses in order to have a more economically advantaged population. There was a time when the state was not in the education business and there were no public schools. This resulted in a mostly uneducated, backwards populace, where only the rich minority could afford an education.

Of course, but a more realistic approach I think should be taken to give students are more broad view of the world and better appreciation and acceptance of different cultures and values. One view should not be endorsed over the other. A nuetral view on history IMO is better, I learned alot more when my teachers were more honest. It increases interest because propagandized education is rather quite boring and most students these days don't buy it. Its not the 1950s anymore and attitudes have changed towards authority, the government, business, ect.

Im not advocating abolishing stats, they do have a place in all aspects of society. But they should not be the end all of decisions made. The world is grey and not black and white. For example, in Florida, the FCAT is used to evaluate not individual students, but schools. Schools who do well with the FCAT get more funding, schools that do not face the possibility of decreased funding, which does happen. Schools in economically poor areas are already at a huge disadvantage and also depends on district votes for whichever party controls the state legislature, a double jeopardy situtation of which they cannot win. With the FCAT's emphasis they face higher standards that are almost impossible to meet, so they cut corners, just like all statistics based democratic institutions do. This is a result of neoliberal policies.

I agree I guess it depends on one's values and interests. If you value in only pleasurable things, then your life will be spent living with a minimal education and an ignorant world view. I guess that explains my distaste for materialistic people.

There's some great films on all this.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7QtzHjj-bg"]YouTube- The Trap - "**** You Buddy!" - 1/6 - Adam Curtis[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk1WkmioQvA"]YouTube- The Power of Nightmares-Part1[/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mojw7DIpu1k"]YouTube- Century Of Self. Adam Curtis 1-1 Happiness Machines[/ame]

 

Im going to start a petition to get me back in.

Honestly all the irrational anti-Obama hate and wacko conspiracy theories keep me from joining political forums at all. There's no room for rational intellectual discussions which Im much more interested in.