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Tag: Society

The Reasons Why The 80’s Actually Kind Of Sucked

Within the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in anything having to do with the 80’s. Everything from endless posts about mediocre 80’s ‘post-punk’ bands to people asking questions as to how to directly copy the look of ‘trad’ goths litter the internet. Then there are the truly special individuals who constantly talk about how cool the decade was and how they wish they could have lived back then. They should never wish that. You want to know why? Because for the most part the 80’s was a hellish landscape of conservative neo-liberal politics mixed in with a highly conformist society that punished those who were in any way different.

I was a teen in the 80’s and graduated high school in 1989, so I spent pretty much the entirety of my teen years in that decade. I was very politically aware during that time and paid attention to the world events going on around me. For example, I went on a trip with some classmates to Washington DC in late 87 that was called Close Up. Teens from all over the US go every year to learn about politics. You get to meet your representatives and talk about important issues with others. We got enough free time to wander about the area exploring and one day two friends and I were walking near the Capital Building when a motorcade appeared. During that week Soviet officials were there to draw up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty along with officials from Reagan’s cabinet which included the Secretary Of State George Shultz. I hated, and still hate, Reagan with the burning heat of a thousand suns so I was obviously not a fan of anybody serving under him. The first limos going past us had Soviet flags attached to the front, rolled down windows and Soviet guys waving at us with smiles on their faces. Seriously, it was as cool as it sounds. We smiled and waved back of course. Then the limos infested with the lice off of Reagan’s head rolled by and not one of them rolled down their windows. However, it was easy to see through the tint that one of them contained Shultz. I started yelling to him that he sucked and gave him the finger with both hands. Yes, I told a high ranking US official to basically go fuck himself. My friends were panicking telling me to stop but I wouldn’t. To this day I am still proud that at the age of 16 I had the balls to do something like that.

Now that you have learned a little bit about me I will now tell you a little bit about what it was really like to live in the 80’s.

THE COLD WAR AND THE CONSTANT FEAR OF NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION

I don’t think that younger people right now quite realize just how close we came to all being killed in a nuclear war. This fear was largely due to the constant posturing of Reagan. He would call the USSR the evil empire and threaten them on a very regular basis. Frankly I was way more afraid of Reagan back then than I was of the USSR. To the credit of the USSR back then they didn’t give in to Reagan and start a war. I honestly think the professional war mongerers who stood behind Reagan wanted an all out war with the USSR because they would have made billions from that. Both empires fought a proxy war in Afghanistan when the USSR invaded the country while the US backed and trained the rebels. By the way one of those rebels was Osama Bin Laden.

Scene from the UK film Threads.

Nuclear war was such a possibility at the time that two powerful tv films were made about it happening. Threads in the UK and The Day After in the US. Since I was living in the US at the time I saw The Day After when it was first aired in 1983 when I was in the 7th grade. It freaked my friends and I out so much that we went to our vice principal and asked about whether the school had a nuclear fallout shelter. Think about that for a second. Imagine being a young teen and having that kind of fear hanging over your head on a constant basis. It sucked. A few years ago I finally saw Threads and it shows the reality of a nuclear war; people being burned alive and the unsanitized reality of what would happen after a nuclear conflagration. If I had seen it back in the 80’s I would have had full blown nightmares.

IF YOU WERE IN ANY WAY ‘DIFFERENT’ YOU GOT CONSTANTLY SHIT ON AND CONFORMITY WAS A WAY OF LIFE

I always see younger people in online goth communities say that they wished that they could have experienced an ‘alternative’ subculture back in the 80’s. With confidence I can say that the vast majority of them wouldn’t have been emotionally equipped to have handled all of the shit that they would have gotten from others. It wasn’t just the ‘normal’ people that you had to deal with back then, you also had to deal with intense pressure within the alternative community to fit in by liking the same bands and behaving the same way. Woe onto you if you actually acted happy or liked a band that wasn’t considered cool. People think that ‘gatekeeping’ is bad now? They have no idea.

Jello even wrote a song about the pervasive conformity.

There was a huge amount of pressure back then by society to fit in. Reagan constantly preached about how America was better in the good old days, which were actually not good for anybody who wasn’t wealthy and white. If you didn’t go along with his not so hidden racist agenda you were seen as unpatriotic and a traitor. I am not exaggerating. You had to hate the USSR, be scared of black people, and look just like everybody else. If you didn’t have a perm, didn’t dress in the trendiest clothes and didn’t listen to the latest pop bands you didn’t fit in so you were considered fair game to tease and even physically attack. Luckily I was never physically attacked but I know that lots of people were. Far more violence happened back then than now. However, I had things yelled at me on a constant basis, for doing such things as simply walking down a street. In high school I was even told by a teacher that I wouldn’t have as many problems if I just dressed like everybody else.

IT WAS DIFFICULT AS HELL FINDING OUT ABOUT BANDS AND SHOWS

There was no functioning internet back in the 80’s. There were some bulletin board type communities but computers were expensive as hell so most people did not have them. There were thee ways of finding out about bands back then. You could be one of those lucky people that lived near a radio station that actually played alternative and punk music. These were usually college radio stations, but sometimes pop stations would play less popular music in the the middle of the night. There was a pop station in my area that did this. So much so that by the very late 80’s they became an ‘alternative’ station. However, by that time they played more radio friendly bands than experimental ones. However, I did learn about some bands by listening to them. Another way to learn about bands was by getting mix tapes from your friends. In early 86 I got one from a guy, who then ghosted me. There was no track listing written down so it took me literally years to figure some of them out. However, I had another person introduce me to Joy Division by handing me a tape with Unknown Pleasures on one side and Closer on the other. The last way to find out about music was by cold buying it. You would see somebody cool wearing a mysterious band shirt and you kept a log of those band names in the back of your head. I actually cold bought November Coming Fire by Samhain using this method, and more times than not I had really good luck.

You probably wouldn’t know who this band was back then if you had been around.

On top of all of this there was a code of silence that the uber goober type people would pull when you would ask them about what bands they liked. Seriously. There was some sort of strange code that some weirdos lived by that made it very uncool to share musical knowledge with anybody. It was as if they were going to be killed by an evil cabal if they dared to utter the sacred names of bands. These were the same types who would try to dictate how you behaved in clubs.

Wanted to see your favourite band play a show? Good luck! Most of the time the only way you would find out about shows was at club nights, but if you were under 18, and sometimes 21, you weren’t allowed in them. I actually went to one that let you in of you were 17 or older and another that was all ages so I was lucky when it came to that. However, that didn’t mean you would find out about all of the shows because venues were usually total shit at advertising shows unless they were some of the better known ones that also hosted metal shows. There were some ‘alternative’ weekly papers where I lived so I would find out about some of them that way, but there were two times that I accidentally saw bands because I thought it was going to be a regular club night. I saw Meat Beat Manifesto and The Call that way which looking back on it was pretty darn cool.

Well, that’s it for today. I realise that I have probably broken some hearts and crushed some dreams but the amount of misinformation about the 80’s really needs to be balanced out with a reality check. I don’t look back at that decade with rose coloured glasses, even though I lived through those years. It could be fun, but it was also really difficult. If I had the ability to go back in time to those years I wouldn’t.

Film Conversations: They Live (1988)

EDIT: I wrote yet another post about this film because I had forgotten about this one. I’m going to keep both up because I make some different points in each.

Please remember that there will be SPOILERS in this article. Instead of reviewing films I am talking about how I connect to them and what they mean to me and society at large.

I am a John Carpenter fangirl! He will always be my favourite horror/sci-fi director, and I have seen most if not all of his films. Even when he makes a supposedly ‘bad’ film, such as Escape From L.A., it is still entertaining. Honestly, I don’t think he makes bad films. I just think that he makes great films and others that aren’t as great but are still fun to watch. I will be talking quite a bit about his films on this blog…because they are nifty!

The plot of They Live is pretty basic. Alien creatures from some far off planet have colonized Earth, and have gotten themselves into positions of power by successfully disguising themselves as humans. They subliminally influence and control the population by hiding words in programs, ads, books, etc.. How do they do this without people being aware of their evil machinations? What looks like a regular billboard adverting jeans actually says such things as ‘buy’ ‘consume’ and ‘conform’. The only way that humans can see what is really going on is by wearing some sunglasses that shows the world in black and white; the advertisement messages and the aliens out in the open. The sunglasses basically interrupt the signal that the aliens use to disguise themselves and their subliminal messaging. The good guys blow up the satellite that the signal comes from and then everybody sees life as it really is.

It is really obvious that They Live was meant to be a social-political statement against Reaganomics. Reaganomics was a ‘trickle down’ type political theory that stated the following; if the wealthy class of people are given tax breaks the money that they have saved will eventually reach the underclass. It was been proven wrong again and again. What the wealthy do with the extra money are things such as buying back company stock shares, and buying mansions around the world that they actually really don’t need.

How did Reagan, and his cronies, fool the middle class and underclass? They promoted conspicuous consumption as something good that everybody should do to help the economy. Want a new car but don’t have the cash to pay for it? That’s okay, just take out a loan with interest levels so high that you will never actually own the car. Who cares though! You are driving a newer car and people are noticing! That is what was so important in the 80’s, to be seen following trends no matter how ridiculous said trends were.

I am very proud to say that I never owned a neon piece of clothing in the 80’s.

What happened in the 80’s if you did not conform along with everybody else? You were thought of as strange, that something must be really wrong with you to not want to be like everybody else. So, if you looked different or listened to non-mainstream type music you would be confronted all the time. Other people listen to Wham and wear neon coloured clothes, why can’t you? No matter what answers you gave to these type of people they would never be satisfied because wanting to be different in a largely conformist society is just not done. You become the ‘other’, a type of person who doesn’t deserve to be treated well because how dare you flaunt your nonconformist ways. Often you would even be physically threatened or have things thrown at you when you are just minding you own business walking down a street. Quite often even in school you weren’t safe. I remember being sent to the ‘Student Responsibility Center’ one time in high school for verbally defending myself. The teacher who was in charge of watching us told me that I wouldn’t have so many issues if I just dressed normally. Yep, he victim blamed me.

For the record, in the 80’s conspicuous consumption and conformity was even done sometimes in the ‘alternative’ type communities. If you didn’t wear the right outfits or listen to the right bands you weren’t considered weird enough so you were banished to the bottom of the weirdo totem pole. So, not only did you get shit from the ‘normal’ people, you also got shit from others who thought they were better at being a ‘weirdo’ than you were. Instead of helping you learn about music,etc… they would hold the information out of your reach. You had to really be into ‘alternative’ type music and clothes back then to have survived all of that. I honestly don’t think that a lot of the younger folk into such music and clothes right now would have survived as a weirdo back then.

Does the society that They Live depicts seem eerily familiar even though it was made over thirty years ago? The lessons that John Carpenter wanted us to learn by watching the film have not been absorbed, and instead we are right back where we started from. Trump is yet another mentally deficient racist president who tells lies in order to hold onto the support of his fandom, who consist of mostly the white underclass. Trump is the greatest president that the world has ever known because they voted him into office and they could never be wrong, right?

What can you do to fight against such a society as the one we now live in? What has the film They Live taught us?

-Don’t buy crap you don’t need. You do not need to shop at certain stores or wear certain brands just because everybody else is. Also, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. Use some common sense and buy things that you actually need such as food.

-Question authority. Always question leaders and people that sit in a place of power as to why they do or say certain things. Just because they got voted in doesn’t mean that their opinion should be taken as the truth.

-In the wise words of the Subhumans, just think for yourself.

Are We Living In A Dystopian Society? Yes.

Dystopian societies have been historically seen as purely fictional ways to depict the worst case scenarios that could possibly happen to a society if events go terribly wrong; a warning as to what could happen if we are not careful. These events include, but are not limited to, a fascist nationalsitic type state being born out of paranoia, destruction of the environment, the creation of a large underclass that is only kept alive to serve the wealthy, blaming the ‘other’ for all of a society’s ills, and the list goes on. A fictional dystopian society can suffer from just one of these events or several. Rarely are all present at exactly the same time. Why do all these events I have described feel so familiar? That is because we are in the midst of living in a dystopian society.

I am 49 years old, and never in my life have I lived through such a year as 2020. This has become the year in which all of the cracks that have always been on the surface of society have finally appeared to those who had never paid attention to them before. Suddenly these cracks have been deemed important enough to now discuss and act upon, when before they were seen as issues not important enough to garner a lot of attention.

Before I go any further please understand that I will be discussing our dystopian society from the point of view of somebody who has lived in both the US and the UK. The countries are similar in some ways but very different in others. The Tories to date have been trying their best to copy the actions of the GOP in America so they may be carbon copies of one another in a few years time.

How would a competent leader of a country deal with a rampaging virus that is killing thousands of citizens a day? They would declare a national health emergency, mandate federal laws concerning social distancing and the wearing of masks, pay each citizen a monthly amount of money that can help them cover rent, food and bills, and offer absolutely free healthcare to those who are unfortunate catch the virus. Instead you have Trump ignoring all of the medical advice given to him, because in his mind he is more intelligent than actual scientists who study the effects of such diseases. While over in the UK you have Johnson behaving in much the same way, even after he caught the virus himself and was very ill from it. No compassion at all has come from either of them, and you get the sense that they probably both wish that all of those with pre-existing medical conditions should die already so that they don’t have to deal with the virus any longer. Only in a dystopian society would such actions be viewed in a positive light by a large percentage of the population. Both Trump and Johnson must know what is best since we put them in power, and we are never wrong!

Scene from the dystopian film Soylent Green.

Both Johnson and Trump are members of political parties, the Tories and Republicans(GOP), whose members have openly colluded with foreign powers in order to win elections. They were made Prime Minister and President in order to grant the wealthy even more power and money than they already have. Screw all of the people barely able to make ends meet because of the economy tanking and the virus making things even worse. In a matter of months there are going to be tent cities all over the US and UK because of the masses of people losing their homes since they can no longer afford rent or their mortgages because of losing their jobs. When you are down and out all you have to do to make yourself happy is think of all of the billionaires, such as Zuckerberg and Bezos, making record amounts of money during a pandemic. Remember making money off of the backs of the underclass is what makes both the US and UK such great places to live! Only in a dystopian society can the underclass be made to think that their underpaid jobs are actually just fine, and maybe through some hard work and luck they too will become very wealthy. If they don’t become very wealthy then it is their own fault because they didn’t work hard enough.

There has always been open racism in both the US and UK. Equality laws being put into place does not mean that people of colour were treated fairly from that moment on. Within the last few years there have been a lot of video recordings of the police, mostly in the US, openly killing black men and women. This sort of thing has always happened, it’s not a new phenomenon. The only difference right now is that these murders are being recorded by police body-cams or by bystanders who are witness them. Even though these cops know they are being recorded they go ahead and kill these black men and women anyway because historically they rarely get convicted of murder. In most cases they get paid leave and then go back to work a few months later, or even if they get fired they will easily get hired by a nearby police department. Only in a dystopian society are some people deemed expendable just because of the colour of their skin.

Another group being treated unfairly in both the US and UK are immigrants; legal, illegal, POC and Eastern European. Even though these immigrants do essential work, such as nursing and harvesting food, they are still looked down upon by large sections of a society who are told by their governments that immigrants are to blame for how shit their lives have turned out. Only in a dystopian society is the construct of this ‘other’ created. This is in order to placate the population whose unwavering support both the US and UK governments need in order to retain power. This white underclass in taught to hate the ‘other’, even though they have more in common with them that they do with white people who are wealthy.

I have touched on many of the reasons why I think we are living in a dystopian society and I can easily think of even more. Sometimes thinking really deeply about this scares the crap out of me, as it should. We are not living in normal times. Probably the best thing you can do is pay attention to all of the events going on around you. If you live in an area where there are ongoing protests against racism, and the government in general, take part in them. Also, if you are a US citizen please vote. Even though I am a US citizen in the UK I am voting by mail in the upcoming November election. If Trump is not voted out of office things are going to get even worse in the US during the next four years.

Give a damn and stay safe.