OK, it’s been a while since I ragged on the Boomers and I hate to disappoint you, dear readers, but this isn’t going to be about them.
Well, a little bit. Because if there’s one thing that irks me about the Boomers, it’s their overwhelming generational self-regard. For pretty much all their lives, the Boomers haven’t been able to shut the hell up about the bloody ’60s.
But, as Jesus Jones once said, “Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about: You know it feels good to be alive.” They were singing, of course, about that shining period at the overlap of the ’80s and ’90s. For a brief couple of years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the First Gulf War, between Bleach (Nirvana’s indie debut album) and Kurt Cobain’s suicide, it really did seem as if humanity had reached some sort of peak.
Don’t just take my word for it:
In a YouGov survey, respondents were asked to assess 16 periods of time throughout history – starting 400 years back – based on quality of life. Two consecutive periods ranked the highest: the 1980s and the 1990s.
Which might seem odd, really. After all, the ’80s gave us AIDS, Chernobyl, mass unemployment, staggering interest rates and Michael bloody Jackson. But then, a friend’s grandmother who lived through the Blitz said it was still the happiest period of her life – because, never knowing if tonight was their last night on Earth, they lived life to the fullest.
The Cold War also reached a new peak in the ’80s. Ronald Reagan’s first-term belligerence pushed the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than any time since 1962. Even if we didn’t know it at the time, the Able Archer 83 NATO exercise and the deployment of medium-range Pershing II missiles in West Germany had a nervously paranoid Soviet High Command hovering a finger over the nuclear button. A few months later, Reagan didn’t make things any better with an inadvertently broadcast joke about ‘we begin bombing in five minutes’.
It’s hard to convey to generations not born under the shadow of the bomb just how all-pervasive the background noise of fear was. I vividly remember poring over maps at school, plotting blast radii from the nearest likely targets (in my case, the oil refinery directly across the bay from my childhood home). A half-heard mobile public address had us wondering if it was the Two-Minute Warning.
The entertainment industry wasn’t doing anything to soothe our nerves, either.
Irish novelist Garrett Carr remembers watching the film Threads on TV in 1984 – with only three channels at the time, we all do. It was an all-too-realistic depiction of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. “I was watching it with my mother and one of her friends,” he recalls. “Her friend said, ‘What would we do with our children if there’s a nuclear war?’ And my mother said, ‘It would be best to just shoot them.’ And I was just sitting there, aged 10, listening.” He can laugh about it now, but then that’s what today’s generations would call a coping mechanism. We had plenty of them, and it’s hardly surprising.
We are the generation that grew up with Margaret Thatcher and three million unemployed, interest rates shooting up to 17 per cent, the Yorkshire Ripper, the IRA mainland bombing campaign and Jimmy Savile as the ideal go-to for making children’s dreams come true
We couldn’t even take refuge in sex: that would kill us, too. As the government was all-too happy to drive home, with its ‘Grim Reaper’ ads driving home the message that a quick shag could be a death sentence.
And, this might be key to why, because we and the cohort of Gen X and so-called geriatric millennials (born roughly between 1981 and 1985, who are now in their early forties), experienced it all together, not in our own isolated, personally curated digital doom-scrolling bubble. We talked, scared each other and even joked about it all, but in a human and connected way. We shared everything from The Smiths’ first LP to Tony Blair’s landslide and Lockerbie to probably even 9/11. We coped together.
Maybe, like my friend’s grandmother in the Blitz, that was the key.
In difficult and dangerous times, there is only one thing for it. It’s time to “party like it’s 1999”. Or, maybe, even 1992.
So, why are the ’80s and ’90s so fondly remembered? Rose-tinted glasses? Quite likely.
But then, there was, as I said, that brief couple of years when, as the Jesus Jones song went, “It seemed the world could change in the blink of an eye”. This was the period of Francis Fukuyama’s (in retrospect) absurdly optimistic “end of history”.
What went wrong? The invention of the World Wide Web, which brought us instant communications, but also brought us social media? The Clintons and Tony Blair? Gay liberation and the acceptance that what two consenting adults did behind closed doors was their own business, somehow metamorphosing into the strident bullying of the ‘Rainbow’ movement? Or was it just the Boomer Marxists’ Long March through the Institutions finally triumphing?
Whatever it was, something seems to have gone terribly wrong. Come back, Kurt.
