The ’80s just won’t go away

„Of course, one could dismiss all this as exaggerating the power of pop culture and entertainment. But since the 1980s began melding entertainment and reality ever more closely — think of the Nintendo game »Contra« or Reagan citing Rambo when talking about national security — social scientists have discovered even more evidence that fiction can influence our views of the world as much as fact.

This is particularly the case for children, whose brains do not yet fully distinguish fantasy from reality. None other than Reagan himself underscored that truth in 1983 remarks about the then-primordial video game industry. »Without knowing it, you’re being prepared for a new age«, he told an audience of kids at Epcot Center. »The computerized radar screen in the cockpit is not unlike the computerized video screen. Watch a 12-year-old take evasive action and score multiple hits while playing Space Invaders, and you will appreciate the skills of tomorrow’s pilot«. Today’s drone pilots prove Reagan’s prescience.

Near the end of the 1980s, political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that the world was reaching the »end point of mankind’s ideological evolution«. He was writing about the intellectual triumph of democratic values and free-market principles, but he could have been referring to the entire zeitgeist of the 1980s — one that the children of the decade have now re-created with a mix of Gordon Gekko economics, Top Gun militarism, Lethal Weapon criminal justice and Cosby Show racial attitudes. History may not have ended, but we are stuck in a loop, our Walkmen endlessly rewinding and restarting the soundtrack to a movie we’ve seen too many times. It’s time to turn it off — or at least to recognize that it’s still playing.”