The '80s Did It! The '80s Did It!

1980s cinema fixed all the world's problems, which is a real drag for the kids. Also, I defend Boomers.

The ‘80s did it! The ‘80s did it!

In his 2015 Federalist article, Hans Fiene coined the term “Selma Envy” to describe the current crop of Leftoids’ yearning for their own seminal, life-affirming civil rights moment, similar to that of Martin Luther King Jr. and his heroic supporters during their legendary, 1965 march from Selma, Alabama to the state capital, Montgomery, in order to secure voting rights for black Americans.

It is a brilliant turn of a phrase.

Fiene basically posited that modern Wokesters, fearful they may have missed the slave boat on racial inequality, are so desperate to be a part of something, anything socially meaningful—and, in turn, to give meaning to their own shallow lives—that they exaggerate or outright fabricate “LGBT” issues to fill that activism vacuum.

Race: the final frontier. Until the next frontier. Gay: the finaller frontier. Until the next frontier. TrAnZformers: the final-for-real frontier. Until the next frontier.… We have already seen some of the potential candidates they’ve been workshopping next, and it ain’t good, boss. It. Ain’t. Good.

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Tangentially, this is the problem with being progressive for the sake of progress, or conversely, conservative for the sake of conserving. Context matters. If your car is about to careen off a cliff, Thelma & Louise-style, progressing forward would be a very bad idea. Where you are is infinitely better than where you are headed.¹ You may even want to put ‘er in reverse.

If your car is being chased by a tyrannosaurus, Jurassic Park-style, staying put would be a very bad idea. Where you are headed is infinitely better than where you are. You may even want to go faster.

A healthy balance of progress and conservation is fundamental to civilizational flourishing. Maintain practices and institutions that have demonstrated value and efficacy, while always remaining willing to question, test, refine, innovate, and pioneer new practices and institutions in case demonstrable improvements can be made. And if you see a fence, think twice before kicking it over.²

But, balance is so blasé in today’s Manichean milieu.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

But, I digress.

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Being envious of people who suffered the horrific abuse of those Selma protestors is obviously deeply depraved. But, I understand. I can feel a twinge of it too, if I try. If I put myself in that mindset. It is, however, a selfish, myopic, warped perspective born of a disturbed psyche. It is also dismissive and insulting to the actual civil rights leaders and protestors of previous generations who often paid an enormous price for their courage. An enormous price for the rights and privileges we enjoy today. It is sick to feel envy and resentment instead of sympathy and gratitude. But, when you are a vacuous husk of a human, all you see is the photo, the headline, the holiday. And you envy. And you seethe. And you scheme.

The kids today love to roll their eyes and spit “OK, Boomer” this and “Dumb Boomer” that. We are told that is because the Baby Boom Generation (people born between 1946 and 1964, roughly) is too blame for all the world’s woes. Maybe they are. I am no stranger to taking potshots at Boomers myself. To quote Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Case in point:

But, then again, maybe they’re not to blame for all the world’s woes. Maybe this “Generation War” turning and turning like the Wheel of Fortune is just another tool of division wielded by generation-spanning, dynastic “elites” to pit the proles against themselves, to make them scapegoat all the “greedy olds” or all the “lazy youngs” while blinding them to the monolithic machine in which we are all mere modular cogs. “To turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother.”

Fun for kids of all ages!

I elaborate a bit further in the note below. I suspect I shall elaborate even further in a future article, if only because I find the idea of writing an entire article based on faux-intellectual, Resident Evil references as enticing as a Jill sammich!

Let us put aside the possibility of socially engineered, internecine strife for now, though.

Maybe the real reason the kids hate Boomers isn’t for what they broke, but for what they fixed. Because the Boomers fixed the problems the Wokesters wanted to fix. The ones that looked so cool and sexy in the movies. The kids love to complain that Boomers bought up all the real estate and now the kids can’t buy homes, but perhaps they are really mad because Boomers beat them to all the good civil rights real estate, and now they feel culturally homeless.

I suppose it could be the actual homelessness, too.

Generations position themselves relative to each other on multiple axes, in this case on economic and cultural axes. Could there be both a tension between and a conflation of the two metrics that is contributing to this ageless ageist acrimony?

Regardless, I am focusing on Boomers here because they are largely responsible for the cinema of the 1980s, cinema which saved the world. Well, Boomers and “The Silent Generation,” which is aptly named because I bet some of you younglings didn’t even know that was a group until you read that.

What passes for a discourse today often seems to assume that in the beginning was the Boomer, and the Boomer was with God, and the Boomer was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Boomers and without Boomers was not anything made that was made.

Or, for our atheist friends, the world began not with the Big Bang, but with the Big Boom.

However, this a terribly parochial perspective, one drowning like innocence beneath the torrents of time “turning and turning in the widening gyre,” as Yeats so powerfully put it.

During the “Mostly Peaceful Riots” of 2020, a Lefty friend took to “educating” me as to why “all cops are bad.” I told him I am extremely reticent to put “all” in front any such group, that it is lazy at best and highly dangerous at worst. We may tell ourselves that we are using it as a convenient shorthand, and, to be sure, such usages exist. However, are we so confident that people are really integrating that nuance into their perspectives in these Manichean times?³

We are often advised not to miss the forest for the trees. We can similarly miss the chain for the links.

In my continued, concerted effort to make people listen to Machines of Loving Grace, I am reminded of a great lyric from their song Ancestor Cult:

I am connected to the people ahead of me
By a tangled stream of blood and entropy

And I am a child of the twentieth century
And I recall that the others ahead of me
Their eyes… they filled their eyes… they filled their eyes

We are all connected “by a tangled stream of blood and entropy.” And we all would do well to fill our eyes… with ‘80s-era movie magic.

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To be fair—as I am an honest lyre—Fiene’s original article used the phrase “Gen Xers and younger” when lampooning the Lefties obsessing over “LGBT” issues. However, as one of those Gen Xers, I can say with confidence, he was bit off there. This is definitely a phenomenon that falls squarely on the “—and younger” community, and not the sainted warrior-poets of Gen X.

One reason I know this as a metaphysical certitude is that we Gen Xers gobbled up those ‘80s films and their messages as quickly as we would wolf down a bowl of Trix while watching Saturday morning cartoons. We are the glorious culmination of the valiant efforts of the previous generations, of “a tangled stream of blood and entropy.” They threw that social justice alley-oop up there like Kobe, and we threw it down like Shaq! Seemingly unbeknownst to the Junior Woodchuck Social Justice Warriors™ of today, we are still out here genuinely living MLK Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. We don’t give a shit who you fuck or how. We will crack jokes about race, sex, and sexuality, and pretty much anything we like, but that’s precisely because we know that it’s just that—a joke—and that it’s retarded to actually think someone is intrinsically worth less because of their skin color, genitals, or sexual proclivities. Because we know that laughter and candor knock taboo topics off the “Altar of Solemn and Reverential Terror" where they would otherwise continue to grow to grotesquely inflated sizes that only perpetuate division and resentment. Oh, and we also think retard jokes are funny.⁴

Truly, we are God’s chosen people.

We had solved all the world’s social ills.

God was in his heaven, all was right with the world.

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In other words… booooooooriiiiiiiiing!

Where does all of this leave the “—and younger” generations in Fiene’s formulation? The every-loving, ever-progressing Left—the official political persuasion of tweens determined to prove themselves and change the world? It left them with a terminal case of Selma Envy, that’s where.

And look, kids, like I said: I understand. The same Gen X that grew up on these ‘80s classics would later go on to spend countless hours listening to copied cassettes and scratched CDs of Kurt Cobain lamenting how he “missed the comfort in being sad” and Corey Taylor screaming “Fuck me! I’m all out of enemies!”

I get it.

In fact, hunky ‘90s icon—and Boomer—Brad Pitt (best known as J.D. in Thelma & Louise) made the following observation in the film Fight Club, one of the defining pieces of cinema for our generation:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

So, as another hunky ‘90s icon—and Boomer—famously said: “I feel your pain.”

Yet, sometimes you just have to “take the L,” as the kids say. And, sometimes, you have to understand that other people “taking the W” needn’t be an L for you, especially when we are all on Team Humanity here. Don’t erase their Ws; celebrate them. Is the goal for the few to experience the fleeting rush of reaching the mountaintop, or the many to experience the lasting bliss of living in the Promised Land? Should we drag all of humanity out of Paradise just so some sick individuals can feel self-satisfied with crossing the threshold anew? We know what MLK Jr. and his selfless Selma supporters believed.

The following films provide incontrovertible proof that we had had reached the Promised Land by the year of our Lord 1989, and that lately culture gremlins have been working sedulously to undue all of that progress… in the name of progress.

ROLL THE MONTAGE!

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Exhibit A: “Uuuwaaaah!” Friday the 13th Part II, 1981
Directed by Steve Miner, Baby Boom Generation

✅Ableism: SOLVED!

J-Vo was an equal opportunity murderer. Can’t get less discriminatory than indiscriminately killing everyone within melee range! It didn’t matter if you were in a wheelchair; you can still get a machete to the face and knocked down a flight of stairs just like anybody else. Ambulances aren’t just for the ambulatory at Camp Crystal Lake!

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Exhibit B: “The only winning move is not to play.” War Games, 1983
Directed by John Badham, The Silent Generation

✅War: SOLVED!

Why are we still playing?

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Exhibit C: “First, you gotta do the Truffle Shuffle.” The Goonies, 1985
Directed by Richard Donner, The Silent Generation

✅Body-shaming: SOLVED!

Put Corey Feldman in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Exhibit D: “That was a guy! A guy dressed up like a Sheila.” Crocodile Dundee, 1986
Directed by Peter Faiman, The Silent Generation

✅Trannies: SOLVED!

If we’d just sort people using “The Paul Hogan Test,” all related problems would disappear. Honorable mention to Monster Squad.

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Exhibit E: “Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” Aliens, 1986
Directed by James Cameron, Baby Boom Generation

✅Sexism: SOLVED!

No clever jokes from me here. This is genuinely one of the sickest burns I have ever seen, and it cracks me up every time I watch Aliens, which is daily. I legitimately love Vasquez and Hudson, and everything about this scene, and this movie. And this franchise also features one of the most badass babes ever in Ellen “Get away from her, you bitch!” Ripley. Game over for misogyny, man! Game over!

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Exhibit F: "Johnny 5 is alive!” Short Circuit, 1986
Directed by John Badham (again!), The Silent Generation

✅Artificial Intelligence: SOLVED!

It was between this and Terminator.

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Exhibit G: “Dillon! You son of a bitch.” Predator, 1987
Directed by John McTiernan, Baby Boom Generation

✅Racism: SOLVED!

Predator is still a better love story than Final Fantasy 8.

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Exhibit H: “Stop acting like a fucking retard.” Rain Man, 1988
Directed by Barry Levinson, The Silent Generation

✅Mentally Handicapped, Special Needs, Neuro-Retarded, Autism Discrimination: ALL SOLVED!

This is still only the second most savage thing someone’s said to Dustin Hoffman on a movie set.

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Exhibit I: “Oh, I’m sorry, peck. Peck. PECK PECK PECK PECK!” Willow, 1988
Directed by Ron Howard, Baby Boom Generation

✅Dwarf, Midget, and Peck Discrimination: SOLVED, SOLVED, AND SOLVED!

Madmartigan apologizes, which was very considerate of Leprechaun’s lived experience. He is also an ally. Doing the work. Doing better. Honorable mention to Time Bandits.

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Exhibit J: “My son’s a homosexual, and I love him. I love my dead, gay son.” Heathers, 1989
Directed by Michael Lehmann, Baby Boom Generation

✅Homophobia: SOLVED!

“People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say: ‘Now there's a school that self-destructed, not because society didn't care, but because the school was society.’ Now that's deep.” — J.D.

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Exhibit K: “Nazis. I hate these guys.” Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989
Directed by Steven Spielberg, Baby Boom Generation

✅Nazis: SOLVED!

I’m going to overlook the fact that Alison Doody’s portrayal of Aryan bombshell Elsa Schneider probably precipitated the greatest jump in Nazi enrollment since the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

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Exhibit L: Love scene. Big, 1988
Directed by Penny Marshall, The Silent Generation

❌ Minor-attra—ooooooookay, you know what, this one is actually more in the modern Woke’s wheelhouse, so disregard! The Wokesters can have this one! We still get the great piano scene though.

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There you have it. Irrefutable, objective, scientific proof that 1980s cinema—created by the noble visionaries of The Silent Generation and the Baby Boom Generation, and uncritically consumed by and incorporated into the formative minds of enlightened Gen Xers—had vanquished Evil and restored Earth to its Edenic state prior to The Fall of Man.

On some level, we are all aware of this obvious truth. Surely that realization—and a complete dearth of creativity coupled with overwhelming greed—motivates the countless reboots and remakes we see today. It is our re-fallen souls yearning for the cinematic salvation that was so swiftly and unjustly stolen from us. However, such retread is clearly not the answer. These pale-horse comparisons will only lead us further into the artistic apocalypse. The only redemption lies in a return to the classics or the creation of new, imaginative works.

Consider the elegant video from a civilized age embedded below. What it documents should be the wet dream of every Wokester; it contains the only two things they ever talk about: diversity and Star Wars. In 1983, men and women, boys and girls of all colors, creeds, shapes, and sizes across the land turned out in droves and packed their local movie theaters (without even wearing masks or “social distancing!” Oh my!) to enjoy a fun film and a pop-culture touchstone together. This was an age without relentless lecturing about racism and D.E.I. This was a film free from meticulously positioned diversity hires and incessant preaching about The Message.

And yet, watch the video. What do you see?

Yeah.

It’s awesome. Rad. Tubular. Most excellent.

In recent years, we are constantly being told and sold the notion that we need race-swapped representation and assiduous advocacy jammed down our throats until we are Force-choking on it because otherwise the arc of the moral universe will never bend toward… where it already was in 1983? That only the kids can save the old, racist, phobist fuddy-duddies.

So, how is all that Wokeness working for us?⁵

Yeah.

It’s horrible. Heinous. Mental. Totally bogus.

This is what happens when you Thelma & Louise “progress” yourself right off the culture cliff. When you “progress” so hard and so far that you loop back around to where you started like some ‘80s-era arcade game.

By the way, it infuriates me that not only was Black Panther not “dUh FiRSt BlAcK SupAHEROz!” movie or some revolutionary, cultural meditation, as Wokesters would like to believe, it was third-rate rubbish riding the trench-coattails of the best superhero film of all time—the pioneering, modern masterpiece that singlehandedly proved the genre could be more than low-budget camp for kids: Stephen Norrington’s (Boomer) and Wesley Snipes’s (Boomer) 1998 seminal classic Blade.

Blade: a film about a jacked, heroic, badass black dude with a white sidekick (who dies) and a hot, independent, brilliant, black female doctor beating the shit out of an evil, pasty white vampire guy and his annoying, even pastier white girlfriend.⁶ A film that everybody loved and nobody gave a shit about the race or sex of the characters. Because it was fucking awesome, and we weren’t idiots.

Yet, when we same fans who bought action figures of Blade and Ellen Ripley, who cheered for Axel Foley and Sarah Connor, don’t waste our money on Hollywood’s latest woke trash then somehow it’s because we are racist and sexist. OK, Wokester.

Forget “Selma Envy.” These people have “Blade Envy.” And if they actually had any understanding of or respect for history, they’d have learned a valuable lesson from MLK Jr., from the great flicks of the ‘80s, and from the Daywalker himself:

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1. Yes, I know in the specific case of Thelma & Louise Geena and Susan do choose the cliff over incarceration or a return to the quotidian cruelty of their previous lives. That’s why I added “-style” to my description because in this thought experiment you aren’t actually two fun-lovin’ lesbians running from the cops after shooting a rapist and having your shit stolen by Brad Pitt. You’re just two regular, happy gals whose car is about to Toonces into the Grand Canyon. And, yes, you have to be two women in this analogy. Those are the rules.

2. For a bit of additional reading on this topic, feel free to peruse a brief thread started by

Alexander Hellene

that I will paste below. In fact, you should be following Alex already, especially if you share my love for culture-musing and retro-gaming.

3. I’m starting to think “Manichean Times” would make a great name for a newspaper… or blog. I may soon update my Substack’s name to “The Manichean Times: All the News that Fits in the Dichotomy!” And, yes, I love that word so much I shoehorned it into this article twice.

4. Some people may be thinking, “Hey, Apollo, isn’t it a little presumptuous to be speaking for an entire generation here? Not every Gen Xer thinks or behaves the way you are brazenly, broad-brush painting them here. And your hypocritical ass just got done haranguing us about never saying ‘all' people in a group are the same.”

To this I say, “… Naaaaaaaaaaah, I totally nailed it! ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’”

5. Brandon dropping the line “You got the retarded black woman starter kit!” makes me laugh out loud every time I watch this and earned him honorary Gen X status. (I’ve been a fan of Officer Tatum for years.) Maybe the kids are alright, after all. I should note that I actually am extremely white-pilled for the future and have great optimism (along with compassion and even admiration) for the kids today. It’s all in good fun, and I kid ‘cause I love.

6. This is what comes up if you look up “Blade” in the dictionary.