on nostalgia

When I first started doing this project as my dissertation, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of nostalgia for the eighties (which I mentioned in my statement of purpose). It seemed to creep up largely around the music of the 1980s, which really shocked me...as I thought most of it was crap.

It was VH1 who, in their desperate effort to escape their position as "old man's MTV," aired a lot of these shows: The Big 80s, with its emphasis on new wave pop, springs to mind. Their show I Love the 80s was the one I was most interested in...it was basically a "pop" (in the derivative sense of the word) look at major events in the eighties, commented on by c-list celebs.

These shows had a very specific effect. In my dissertation, I claimed

they presented a homogenized version of the era and of that culture which differed vastly from the one I recalled. Gone were the high level of Russophobic cold war paranoia (epitomized by the film Red Dawn, about high school students who turned into guerrilla fighters after a Soviet invasion of America) and nucleophobia (epitomized by The Day After, which showed the aftermath of a nuclear war), which were replaced with images of the collapse of the Soviet Union, caused (of course) by the victorious, superior United States’ political maneuvering. Gone were several recessions, high unemployment, and urban decay, which were replaced by the “greed is good” imagery (personified by Donald Trump). I imagine that veterans of the fifties, looking at Happy Days or American Graffiti, would similarly wonder what happened to the Red Scare, Korea, and the rest of the decade they remembered.

In these re-presented images, everything conceivably negative or contrary was removed from the depiction of the eighties and replaced with homogenous images of white people in funny clothes and big hair performing weird techno-pop music.

These shows, when I finished my dissertation, were still being aired (or had been played relatively recently), so they were current examples that could suck in a reader.

Unfortunately, by now, when I finally have time to do a good book manuscript version, these things have been off the air for a while, and if I used them, I would be indulging in nostalgia itself...which I did not want to do. However, I did want my book to have some timely effect, and I was afraid that I had missed the possible windows. It would've been perfect around 9/11, around W's second presidency, and for Reagan's death. Had the eighties passed me by?

A few things gave me optimism. First, when I was looking for something to do for the 2006 CSA, I found Reagan being used in all kinds of books about W, including the pro-W books as well as the anti-W books...both from liberals and conservatives. Reaganism had passed from nostalgia to the realm of standard commentary.

This is not to say, however, that there is no more eighties nostalgia. The gawdawful country song "Nineteen Somethin'" is still getting airplay. This year, The History Channel came out with History Rocks (I've written about their eighties episode elsewhere).

I'm still current. Weee!