Emerging into a new world

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

There’s nothing new under the sun.
--Ecclesiastes 1:9

In a miracle of medical science, an Arkansas man awoke earlier this month from a 19-year coma. The injuries Terry Wallis sustained in a 1984 car crash left him in a coma and a quadraplegic. I’m not going to make the usual coma joke, because, well, The Simpsons did it better.

(They showed a man waking up from a 25-year coma and he said, “Is the Sonny and Cher Show still on?” Someone told him that Sonny was a Congressman and Cher won an Oscar. The man said, “Good night!” and coded.)

Things have changed dramatically since then. In 1984:
=Britney Spears was learning to read
=Saddam Hussein was our friend (or at least, not our enemy)
=Osama bin Laden was an anti-communist fighter in Afghanistan
=For that matter, there was still a Soviet Union
=George W. Bush was in the middle of an epic bender
=Sandra Day O’Connor was the only woman on the Supreme Court (and Pat Robertson wasn’t praying against her)
=Only rich people had car phones, as they were called at the time
=AIDS was something that gay people in San Francisco caught
=Michael Jackson was known more for his music than his weirdness
=The Detroit Tigers were running away with the American League
=Colin Quinn was a second banana on an MTV game show called Remote Control (and MTV still played videos!)
=Video games were played on Atari
=HBO’s only original show was Fraggle Rock
=People still bought albums and cassettes. CDs were starting to creep into use. MP3s were a pipe dream
=Reality TV was just a joke in Network
=A publication such as this couldn’t exist. (I’ll let you decide if things have improved since then in that regard.) Only a few nerds and engineers knew of something called the internet.

But some things, really, haven’t changed.
=Bruce Springsteen is filling stadiums, like he did in 1984 at the height of the popularity of Born in the U.S.A.
=Deficit spending is ballooning, and our military is still involved in some bad shit in the Middle East.
=Arnold Schwarzenegger is still the Terminator. In a short matter of time, though, he might be governor of California.
=Another Indiana Jones movie is in the works
=America is captivated by a young girl from West Virginia. Then it was Mary Lou Retton. Now it’s Pfc. Jessica Lynch
=The Democratic Party still seems committed to running a presidential election without winning a single state (for the record, I’ll vote for Dennis Kucinich)
=The Cleveland Indians still suck. But this time, the Detroit Tigers suck even more

Wallis might not have really missed the 1980s. It’s still around. Thankfully, some crimes of fashion have been relegated to the dustbin or the St. Vincent DePaul Society (jams, anyone?), but there’s all kind of nostalgia for the 1980s. One of the local radio stations in Pittsburgh has an 80s lunch, where from noon to 1 p.m., you can hear Tommy Tutone and Katrina and the Waves to your heart’s content. That same radio station has 80s Fridays and the occasional 80s weekend. VH-1 (which didn’t exist in 1984) recently had a 10-hour series called I Love the 80s.

I lived through the 1980s, and even remember most of them. I watched The Dukes of Hazzard on Friday nights, and then, when it was cancelled, I watched Mr. Belvedere. I was in bed by Dallas. Wearing a seat belt wasn’t the law, but my parents made me. My mother’s father died in 1982. He was 63. I wasn’t quite 5, and I got to stay up late and play cards with the babysitter. Like my parents’ generation with the JFK assassination, I can recall exactly where I was when the Challenger blew up. I watched the Berlin Wall topple. I remember when Chuck (my dad, to the uninitiated) brought home a VCR. I listened to albums like Off the Wall and Sports on vinyl. The Iran-Contra hearings were only on network television, where they pre-empted daytime game shows. The Cleveland Browns ripped my heart out with The Fumble and The Drive (it wouldn’t be the last time they did that). One Sunday night in 1989, I sat down and watched a cartoon with Chuck. The show was called The Simpsons. I haven’t missed an episode since.

I don’t remember much about 1984. I was seven years old. The Dukes of Hazzard went off the air that year. Idora Park, the amusement park in my hometown of Youngstown, burned and closed. Ronald Reagan ran for re-election against Walter “Fritz” Mondale and beat him handily, becoming one of two presidents to carry 49 of 50 states(Mondale managed to grab Minnesota). Bruce Springsteen came out with Born in the U.S.A. I still want “Glory Days” played at my funeral, but the song gets funnier and sadder the older I get.

Lately, there has been manufactured nostalgia for the 1980s, just as the 1980s saw manufactured nostalgia for the 1960s (I still can’t watch an episode of The Wonder Years without hearing my parents say “I remember that!”). I wonder if there will be as much nostalgia a decade from now for the 1990s.

I remember more from the 1990s. I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana for the first time (in fairness, I also heard “Ice, Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice for the first time). I watched the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas (I know, I know, I’m a nerd). They blanketed the television, which included a 24-hour news channel by that point, much like the Iran Contra hearings blanketed television in the 1980s. I watched Magic Johnson’s news conference saying that he had HIV, the virus that led to AIDS. “If I can get it, you can too,” he said. I remember a hick with a wandering dick coming out of nowhere and beating an incumbent president in the 1992 Presidential election. I voted for the first time in a Presidential election in 1996.

I also covered my first election that year, for the BG News. Most of my memories in the latter half of the 1990s, and most since, came in a newsroom. I was in the Bowling Green Radio News office when I first heard about a place called Columbine. I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 at Pittsburgh International Airport making sure planes didn’t fall out of the sky (they didn’t…sadly, that day came a little less than two years later).

September 11, 2001 is regarded as the day America lost its innocence. There’s a day like that for every generation. For my grandparents, it was December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. For my parents, it was November 22, 1963, when John Kennedy was shot. Or maybe May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four students. Or possibly August 8, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as president, still the only president to do so.

I guess the best way to ensure nostalgia for an era is to have a built-in audience to remember the time fondly while forgetting living through the ominous moments. One of my friends, a decent God-fearing woman who got a degree in history, still likes Ronald Reagan for saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” She doesn’t remember Iran-Contra. She doesn’t remember the largest peacetime spending in history, leading to the largest federal debt in history.

In that respect, I’m sure that there’ll be nostalgia for the 1990s. The children of the Baby Boomers now comprise the largest generation in American history. Being born in 1977, I’m one of the older members of that generation. The people starting college this year don’t remember the world that Terry Wallis left behind in 1984.

I wonder what they’ll tell Terry Wallis about the time he missed. I wonder what he’ll find out on his own. He’ll have to adjust to a world that, for the similarities, is certainly different than the one he remembered.

At the same time, I wonder what the people of America who are younger than me will be told about the events they might remember, but only in passing. They won’t remember that visceral reaction we had in the Radio News offices when news started coming in off the wire about two students opening fire in a Colorado high school. All they’ll know about impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton is what they read in history books (Lord knows they didn’t learn about it at the time…could you imagine explaining to a 12-year-old the significance of the stained dress?). They’ll remember the Power Rangers. They’ll remember Jurassic Park.

In another decade, I won’t be surprised to see “I Love the 90s.”