Perfecting Equilibrium is still on vacation. I’ve scheduled items from the archives during the break; new content will resume July 14th.
Eighties, I'm living in the eighties
Eighties, I have to push, I have to struggle
Eighties, get out of my way, I'm not for sale no more
Eighties, let's kamikaze 'til we get there
The PE Reader, February 12, 2023
Freddie DeBoer is absolutely, positively completely 110 percent wrong! He writes It's so sad when old people romanticize their heydays; also, the 90s were objectively the Best Time to Be Alive. The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science.
Nope. The 1980s were way, way better. For one thing, they put an end to the hideous 1970s. For another, the 90s were built on America regaining its mojo in the 80s.
Here’s a little more from Freddie:
Bill Clinton sucked and our government was doing all kinds of awful skulduggery in the world, but he didn’t suck in the same way as George W. Bush and there wasn’t this constant sense of the world falling apart.
Excuse me? EXCUSE ME!?! Has everyone forgotten the mass hysteria that was Y2K? People LITERALLY thought civilization was ending with the 90s. In the ensuing panic there was a real estate boom in…wait for it…bomb shelters. All the right people were preppers, stocking their bomb shelters with Twinkies and other foods guaranteed to last for years and years.
The Y2K panic was set off by the realization that early mainframe systems were so constrained for memory that programmers used two digits for the year to save space. So instead of “1969,” they would use “69.” The “19” was simply assumed.
Which worked fine when the next year was 1970.
And a disaster when the next year was 2000.
In the late 90s computer nerds argued that such decades-old software – many were government systems – needed to be repaired or replaced.
People were terrified that on the stroke of midnight critical systems everywhere would roll over to 1900. And banks would fail, planes would plunge from the sky, and civilization would end.
Legions of nerds — including me —- pointing out that the vast majority of systems of that time were not decades old and had not been written in COBOL or Fortran did exactly zero in getting people to calm down. I was on a conference call from 11 pm CST Dec. 31, 1999, until 3 am New Year’s Day of the new millennium as my company’s operating units across North America each reported in that they were still there as their clocks struck midnight and their calendars flipped to January 1, 2000.
Of course a huge help was that the much-more mature media of the day handled this in its usual responsible manner. “The End of the World!?!” Time magazine trumpeted on the cover of its January 18, 1999, Y2K issue.
By the time the new year dawned and pretty much nothing went wrong, America had blown $100 billion on the panic.
A word here about me, for perspective. Technically I’m a Baby Boomer, which has never made sense to me. All the stuff in the 60s happened after my bedtime, because I was a baby. I was in high school in the late 70s, and college in the early 80s. By the time I left college for the Army, Elvis was dead, and Paul McCartney had broken up the band.
Wings.
The Rolling Stones are my mom’s age.
So I was in middle school and high school for most of the 70s, college and the Army for most of the 80s, and spent the 90s adulting. So that’s my perspective.
The 70s were…bad. Just bad. There’s no other way to put it. Helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy, Saigon. OPEC and the oil crisis. Gas lines. Sky-high inflation. WIN buttons. Multiple recessions. Son of Sam. The Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter’s malaise. Classical rock featuring the London Festival Orchestra.
And it should be no surprise that the peculiar adult was a peculiar child. So while disco ruled the airwaves in the 70s, I was listening to David Bowie and Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and homemade cassettes of Dr. Demento shows.
In any case, the 80s were a giant turnaround. It started with the release of the Iranian hostages and a short, sharp recession that knocked down inflation. Then the economy boomed, and the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the United States as the lone remaining superpower as the 90s began.
And we sort of went a little bit crazy.
Global thermonuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union was never going to happen.
The Y2K panic was the 90s in a nutshell. The entire decade was a weird, ridiculous echo of earlier, more interesting years.
The 60s had Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday Mr. President to John F. Kennedy.
The 90s had Bill Clinton and The Blue Dress.
The 80s had the constant fear that the US or the Soviet Union would Push the Button and life as we know it would end in the ensuing 30 minutes. So we had duck and cover, and 99 Luftballons, and bomb shelters.
The 90s had bomb shelters for Y2K.
Sorry, Freddy.
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Best of PE while we’re on vaca; new content resumes July 14th
Agreed, for the most part. But you should tweak that bit about the collapse of the USSR. The Wall came down in Nov. of ‘89 but the Soviet Union didn’t immediately disintegrate. It stuck around a couple more years.