Pathetic Fallacy

We hear the playback and it seems so long ago

I suppose I should mention here that this is a comic essay and I am exaggerating for, you know, effect. I grew up in a podunk town in the middle of bupkis, so that no doubt is reflected here. If you had a cool 80s childhood that was different, then good for you.

These days the popular conception is that the 1980’s were all pink and aqua, but they were actually surprisingly brown if you lived through them. The success of Stranger Things (at least before its las season), the rise in retro synth-pop as practiced by artists like Chapell Roan, the popularity of $30 vinyl versions of albums one can stream for free, a revival of shoulder pads and denim jackets, the number of YouTube reaction videos for the Goonies—all of these point to an interest in the decade of Reagan and Thatcher that goes far beyond the nostalgia of aging Gen-Xers, and speaks to the generation of kids out there longing for a time before smart phones ruined everything. This amuses me because I am old enough to remember the 1980’s revival of the 1950’s, and even the 1970’s revival of the 1900’s, which was a pretty darn weird thing if you think of it.

Of course, when you look at the 80’s through rose-tinted (and leopard-print-framed) nostalgia glasses when you weren’t even yet alive in the 20th century, you are going to get things wrong, especially if you’re being lied to by Netflix. Correcting perceived misconceptions of the time of my youth—when nobody asked—is the most old-man thing ever, but I just turned 58, so here I go.

'OK, boomer': la frase edadista que triunfa en las redes — actually I’m Gen-X, but no one under 40 knows the difference

I. The music wasn’t that cool

I am grateful, really, that Netflix has popularized Kate Bush for the TikTok set, but the truth is back in the 1980’s no one outside of the UK was listening to her (except me, I was cool)¹. I remember playing my copy of Hounds of Love for my long-suffering high school girlfriend and her declaring the record “strange” and me “weird.”

These days, when a movie or tv show is set in the 1980s, the soundtracks are all songs by Echo and the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, etc. Likewise, Spotify playlists and Sirius radio stations would have you believe the decade’s music was entirely New Wave. But in reality, fm radio playlists were 60% Michael Jackson, 30% Madonna, and the rest was made up of Hair Bands, Yacht Rock, and Pop Country (Kenny Rodgers was very hot around 1982). College radio stations might play Punk or New Wave, but only college kids listened to college radio. Rap was still being invented at the time but it was strictly segregated.

So when a television show or movie tries to play it cool with a Post Punk/New Wave soundtrack (and yes, I’m looking at you, Stranger Things) remember that we all want to think we were cooler kids than we really were².

II. Design wasn’t totally radical

If you think of the eighties look, you probably are imagining some combination of pink, purple, aqua, and neon (“Miami Style”) or of angular floating shapes and zigzags atop backgrounds made up of repeating patterns of dot, lines, and squiggles (“Memphis Style³“). Or maybe you’re thinking of a mixture of both⁴. And if one is to go by the VH1 series I ♥ the 80’s, your conception would be true. But the truth is these styles were entirely the domain of MTV bumpers and overpriced boutiques that sold earrings made from shards of broken CDs⁵.

In reality, most design in the 80s was inherited from the 70s, which means a lot of browns and yellows, denim and tee shirts. It was the design of strip malls, K-marts, and ranch houses—but not cool mid-century ranch houses, cheap 70’s ranch houses with a lot of lucite. It was the age of particle board and the plastic shopping bag and those little springy doorstops that got all bent and never worked.

III. Punks weren’t everywhere

I was going to write a bit here about how in the 1980s it was de rigueur for crowd scenes in movies to feature a punk rocker with eyeliner and an enormous hairspray mohawk, or even violent gangs of these exotic creatures robbing convenience stores and fighting zombies, but it turns out that somebody else already wrote that better than I would.

I will add that punk culture was definitely a thing, but as a movement it was a lot less flashy, and more insular, and largely kept to itself. My wife had a punk era in her teens and she’s super cool. Real punk culture was rich in vernacular style and a DIY ethos. But mainstream America found punks to be scary and local news stories blamed them for everything that was wrong in society, and so fake, threatening punks were everywhere in movies and tv.

Also, valley-speak was entirely made up for that one Frank Zappa song.

IV. It was something of a hellscape

Look, I’m nostalgic for my childhood just like everyone else. I love my original 1980 Rubik’s Cube for which I still the original Ideal⁶-branded plastic case. But the 80s were not a good time to be alive if you were a woman, or black, or queer, or any combination of those. It was the decade when the Hippies made way for the Yuppies, and we elected a senile, jelly bean eating, horoscope believing B-movie actor who ruined everything. The myth of the Welfare Queen upset the squares so much that they tore apart the intricate support systems that fed starving children. Even as the Cold War was winding down, the U.S. couldn’t keep its imperialist hands out of Central America. Also, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an objectively awful cartoon.

This all may sound like a lot of complaints from a cranky old dude, but my motives are pure. I am a pathologically nostalgic person (just look at my tag cloud), but I am also aware of the toxic nature of nostalgia. As kids, my generation were brought up being told about the wondrous world of Boomer culture, of how everything was peace and love and drugs and sexual liberation and how each and every one of them had attended both Woodstock and Altamont. And how much the music today sucked, and how lazy and cynical the kids were. And I was determined that when I was older I would never let my own nostalgia cloud my memory, and I would not think that my childhood was more special and magical because I grew up when I did.

Now let me tell you why Talking Heads was the greatest band ever.

She was huge in the UK, which is one way they’re better than us. ↩︎
Except, of course, for me with my Laurie Anderson and my wife with her Smiths. ↩︎
Which originated in Milan, Italy, although it was named after Memphis, Tennessee, by way of a Bob Dylan song. Look, the 80s didn’t really make sense. ↩︎
It’s a free country. ↩︎
CDs were actually everywhere in the 80s. ↩︎
R.I.P. ↩︎

Most of us have gears we never use

My junior and senior years of college I spent my summers working on a grant to develop the Whitewater Gorge in Richmond, Indiana into a public space. This meant that for the first time in my life I was living on my own, or rather, with the four other students renting a dilapidated brick house with me—or maybe it was five; people came and went. One of my roommates, a year ahead of me, decided that he would teach me to use drive using a stick shift (I’m still not sure why). This was 1989, and new cars with manual control were already becoming scarce. He had a beat-up ten-year-old AMC Spirit¹, and I would drive down the quietest road we could find while he talked me through the gears, and I tried (in vain) to not destroy his transmission. Each time I shifted, the car would lurch forward like the ghost Samara from the Ring exiting a television. Not knowing what to do, I would instinctively brake, which of course meant having to shift back down to first. I think I successfully made it to third exactly one time. Eventually I called the project off because I did not want to be on the hook for buying a new clutch.

Years later, in the early 2000’s, I read a comment on a bulletin board site that was something like: I don’t get these dumb kids today. If you don’t know how to drive manual, you don’t have the basic skills to be a man. Print was still a thing then, and around the same time male “lifestyle” magazines like Esquire, Men’s Health, and Maxim² had a cottage industry producing listicles of the manliest things every man must do to call himself a man³, and some version of “learn how to use stick” was usually an entry. This gendering of transmissions was one of the last hold-outs from a postwar era that saw skills and consumer goods as belonging to men or women exclusively. Women had been driving (and engineering) cars from the first days of the automobile, but the popular view in the early 20th century was that cars were for men. That changed after the First World War, in which women drove ambulances and delivered supplies. So the gendering shifted (no pun intended) to “real” drivers vs. those who merely used their cars for utilitarian things, like running errands, transporting children, or, you know, going to jobs.

The most egregious example of this is the Hurst “dual gate” control, which was sold as an aftermarket shifter in 1963. It featured two tracks for the stick, one of which had a drive setting that was automatic, and the other of which was a ratchet shifter that could manually bump up or down the gears one at a time in order. Not necessarily a bad idea, but its marketing labeled the manual side as “his” and the automatic side as “hers.” Additionally, one could only engage the manual side by using a key, which was labeled as “his only” in a magazine ad for the control—because the “little lady” can’t be trusted with not “over-revving” the engine.

Hurst ad — The infamous “His and Hers” dual gate transmission ad from 1966.

Yes, this is all very silly. But when you look past the machismo, the performative maleness of things that a man should know, there remains a legitimate conundrum. What knowledge should a competent adult have to be an adult? What abilities should be considered basic? There are an endless number of skills one could learn, but you have only finite time, energy, aptitude, and interest. To the BBS complaint I mentioned earlier, I posted a reply: But do you know how to sew a button on to a shirt that needs one? Some skills might be more useful than others, and a lot of the most useful ones are the ones that have been traditionally coded as feminine: how to cook, how to knit, how to tend to people’s feelings.

The other question that stick shifting suggests to me is, what gets lost when you automate things? I became a web designer back when the way you made websites was you learned to code HTML (and later, CSS and Javascript) and you wrote your pages by hand. Then you stuck them on a server, which optimally you maintained, and registered a domain name. There was a common job title people had, Webmaster, that meant you did all the things. And even now, in these days of drag and drop content management systems, I am glad to have had all those years of coding, and I think it makes me a better designer. But should kids today learn HTML? If AI is really going to replace us, what’s the point in learning to do anything? I believe that even in a world where everything is made or done for you, developing proficiency or understanding has value in itself. Sure, there’s a utility in having the skills to survive the collapse of civilization⁴, but more importantly, knowing how and why, and being able to do, is a reward to itself.

So what I’m saying is, if anyone out there has a junker with a stick shift, I’m ready to try again.

I think? Listen, I’m not a car person, as is probably evident from this post. ↩︎
Yes, In my 30s I occasionally looked at Maxim, don’t hate me. ↩︎
I wrote a parody of these features a few years ago and I think it amused only me. ↩︎
Or zombie apocalypse, whatever. ↩︎