Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explains the World We Live in Now–Our Culture, Our Politics, Our

291 Pages·2011·1.62 MB·English

by  Sirota David

BY DAVID SIROTA

Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our
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.

BALLANTINE 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 now—our
culture, our politics, our everything / David Sirota.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51880-4
1. United States—Civilization—1970– 2. United States—Social conditions—
1980– 3. Popular culture—United States. 4. Political culture—United States. 5.
Nineteen eighties. I. Title.
E169.12.S5188 2011
973.92—dc22 2010041627

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design and illustration: Christopher King
v3.1
To Jeff and Steven—beloved brothers,
best friends, fellow children of the 1980s
“What happens to us in the future? Do we become assholes or
something?”
—MARTY MCFLY, 1985
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION

PART I • LIKING IKE, HATING WOODSTOCK
DIE, HIPPIE, DIE!
PART II • THE JUMP MAN CHRONICLES
THE JOHN GALT OF OCEANIA
JUST DO IT
OUTLAWS WITH MORALS
PART III • WHY WE (CONTINUE TO) FIGHT
KICKING THE VIETNAM SYNDROME
OPERATION RED DAWN
PART IV • THE HUXTABLE EFFECT
MOVIN’ ON UP?
THE END OF HISTORY?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
GLOSSARY
About the Author
INTRODUCTION

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 don’t 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 (“That’s real fucked up.”), describe the weather in The Empire Strikes
Back terms (“It’s 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 Stallion’s guttural inflection). If you didn’t understand something, you
said, “Whatchoo talkin’ bout, Willis?” like Arnold Jackson in Diff’rent 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” à 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 Rider’s KITT, The Dukes of Hazzard’s General Lee, or Uncle Buck’s