David Sirota’s Surreptitious Anti-1980s Campaign
The left has been attempting to recast the reality of the 1980s since at least the middle of that decade. David Sirota is the latest to go on offense — stealthily.
Here are four of the more important things I remember from the 1980s:
• In 1980 or 1981, while driving to lunch with a CPA firm coworker through the area where I had grown up, I said something like, “You know, we might as well get used to gazing at these homes from the outside, because there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to own one of them.” My rider agreed without hesitation. At the time, inflation hovered at around 13%. Interest rates were out of control; the prime rate was at times over 20%. Unemployment was high, and getting worse.
• Being proven wrong by buying a home in 1983.
• Being proven wrong again, this time buying a new home in 1986 after an 18-month out-of-town assignment.
•In what I believe was January 1985, before Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration, watching an extraordinarily bitter and spiteful Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter telling CBS News (probably on 60 Minutes) that Reagan had in essence (possibly paraphrasing) made it okay to be a racist again.
After the Carters’ conniption, I turned my back on the Democratic Party, and have seen no reason to change my mind in the subsequent quarter-century.
The fact that the decade was going rather well was not lost on director Oliver Stone, whose 1987 movie Wall Street was deliberately written not to chronicle the truth, but to maliciously depict the decade as one of unfettered avarice, and its active participants as a collection of conscience-free robber barons.
The latest and perhaps most underhanded attempt to rewrite the decade, aided and abetted by a gullible, cooperative establishment press, comes from the moonbat mind of David Sirota.
Sirota’s book, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now–Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything, just came out on Tuesday — and no, I’m not interested in putting any money in the guy’s pocket by buying it. I don’t have to, because Sirota’s background and the clever media coverage he is receiving give away his game.
Sirota is a longtime far-left Democratic activist. His Wikipedia entry, which “may have been edited by a person who has a conflict of interest with the subject matter” (imagine that), indicates, among many other lefty labors, that he has spent time at the Center for American Progress, as a press aide and spokesperson for Vermont Socialist Congressman (now Senator) Bernie Sanders, as a regular columnist at The Nation, and as a political consultant for Ned Lamont’s ultimately losing 2006 attempt to take out usually liberal but Iraq War-supporting Senator Joe Lieberman. Sirota also has had a morning drive talk show since November 2009 at KKZN, Denver’s 27th-rated “progressive” station.
Almost none of the aforementioned information about Sirota got into USA Today’s March 10 PR piece — I mean, report — on his then-impending book. You will search in vain for the words “Democrat,” “progressive,” or even “liberal.” USA Today reporter Craig Wilson merely informs us that Sirota is “a syndicated columnist, author and radio talk-show host.” Sirota is also 35, which would have made him 13 or 14 at the end of the decade over which he claims expertise.
His core premise about the 1980s is as childish as his age during that decade — not that he’s upfront about that premise. Oh, there are a couple of slip-ups. USA Today’s front-page tease tells us: “Charlie Sheen is big again” (Sheen starred in Wall Street), and “so is greed and anti-government feeling.” Wilson laughably writes: “The Cold War loomed.” Actually, Craig, it was over before 1989 ended.
From the snippets given above. it sounds like Sirota’s take on the 1980s is in conformance with the Woodstock Rule: “If you claim to recall it clearly, you weren’t there.”
Yes, I am old enough to remember all the way back to the Eisenhower Administration (though I was but a small child at that time). I attended neither the original Woodstock, nor the ridiculous attempt to reenact it. I don’t do crowds, I avoid bugs and germs (not to mention noise and snotty hippies), and the only recreational drugs I partake of are alcohol and caffeine. But I remember the political scene only too well.
From the article:
It is painfully ironic that Jimmy Carter has revealed himself to be a blatantly vicious anti-Semitic racist.
Pot, meet kettle.
Yes. The socialists/leftists almost tipped us over the edge into a collectivist and impoverished hell during the 1970s.
Sanity prevailed among some wise people and what seems to have been a loose coalition of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul 2, and some sane think tanks who managed to obtain common cause in the face of imminent destruction, and drag us back from the edge. Much to the dismay of those who sought to destroy the West. The opprobrium heaped on Thatcher, Reagan, etc, at the time was utterly mind boggling. Now they are safely out of the way they have become folk heroes.
The enemies of freedom began to seriously turn the tables on freedom and prosperity around the beginning of this century and it now seems the nightmare is well and truly back.
Which is very sad for everyone. Including freedom’s enemies.
“‘…if we want something different than racism, narcissism, greed, and the like, then we have to realize that those things are a departure from where we were going.’”
“A departure from where we were going”? And this Sirota character gets to write for a living?
This is a very good article. Thank you.
Sirota views it all “Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything”) through the lens of far-left ideology.
His new book, Back to Our Future, then, is a predictably revisionist retrospective, with palpable anger and resentment towards the decade’s Republican administrations.
The entire book is devoted to showing the 1980′s as a paean to materialism and greed (heard that one before?) And that the pop culture of the decade was largely contrived to edify conservative values of the 1950s while vilifying the liberal advances of the ’60s. And how it all links to today.
Here, the author unleashes the full fury of his “Shock-and-awe” vocabulary in dealing with an “Aw-Shucks” subject.
However, he salts the narrative with constant references to ’80s pop icons and enough profanities (“William ****ing Shatner!”) to hold the interest of his reader-followers.
Through the liberal looking glass, the cross-marketing of E.T. products appears as part of an anti-government propaganda machine.
Sirota grouses that the era’s popular movies (Ghostbusters, Back to the Future) and prime-time TV shows (A-Team, Dukes of Hazard) disrespect government authority figures who are improperly marked as incompetent buffoons.
To the far-left, the racial glass is always half empty. So, the Cosby Show is paid lip service for its ground-breaking portrayals of Blacks as respected, affluent professionals. But it’s seen more as a condescending “post-racial” branding of the “transcendent” Cosby (paving the way for Barack Obama)
Sirota scores a single point in describing Atari games as training mechanisms for techno-militarism.
Ha — Ronald Reagan himself agreed with him on that one!
But to the author, even Saturday morning cartoons were vehicles of indoctrination, corrupted by corporate manipulations.
So when Sirota takes a nostalgic stroll down the memory lane of his Gen-X youth, what does he see?
Not visions of sugar plums in a land before Fox News, but of neo-con psy-ops.
In the words of the great ’80s philosopher, Clubber Lang: “I pity the foo’!”
David Sirota? Never, ever, heard of him. He will sell about 10 or 12 books, mostly to his own family. Did you ever notice how poorly books sales do of liberal pundits? Ann Coulter, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Dick Morris, Sean Hannity, and Newt Gingrich? I HAVE heard of them and they sell MILLIONS of copies of their books. I think people are reading a different set of authors than you are, Mr. Blumer, and for good reason. The conservative authors make much more sense, at least to a lot of Americans. Their book sales prove it.
Oh I thought it was b/c conservatives actually read books, liberals merely parrot or mock what they read in book reviews
what is their obsessive interest in lying about “racism”. Seems to me USA has become less racist every year since I was born (1950′s) and as a nation any laws passed have been in favor of lessening racialism and in fact protecing and reversing it.(affirmative actions, quotas)
I also bought a house at 11% in the 80′s and after the rates dropped we re-financed. My business was good in the so called recession. Can’t say the same now- it tanked under Obama. Thanks to those Dems, who refused to regin in Fannie Freddie our house is now worth less than it was in 1984.
This is no small part of the Great Leftist Enterprise – Gaining absolute control of the infotainment industry and then using that control to endlessly promote the Big Lies that they want and need to be “true”. This is not just a passing effort, it lies at the very heart of the Lib worldview and identity. If they can just convice enough people that the world can and will work they way they want it to, and if they have absolute control over dispensing that message, it will happen. “It” being the Libs vision of the perfect world that only they can see and bring to reality. The Libs believe this one thing right down to the core of their being. It is an inalienable part of their identity. Like all of the other notable aspects of Modern Liberal assumptions, these assumptions are completely immiscible and as such cannot be seperated.
The one thing that ties all of these Lib assumptions together is this – They serve to justify Liberals inserting themselves into every aspect of our lives. A true Lib believes that only THEY are uniquely bestowed with superior enlightened intelligence, wisdom and compassion that is indespensible and critical to the continued survival of everything – The human race, the planet, etc etc etc. The list is endless. The bottom line of all of these efforts, including the recasting of history in Sirotas book, is to “prove” the correctness of their assumptions to the masses and thermselves. This will NEVER end.
Modern Liberalism is merely an excercise in grand Narcissistic flatulence designed to give cover for the Libs deepest desires to aggressively dominate others, but with a fig leaf of justification that it really isn’t all about them and their own desires, it’s about “others” and making the world perfectly fair for those others. All of those “others” are just interchangable props in the Libs grand melodrama of falsely portraying themselves as the good guys when in fact it is about their aggressive pursuit of and insatible hunger for raw power. It is the Big Lie in service to the Lib boundless ego.
Perhaps the 80s seemed intense to sirota because he was an adolescent and beginning to notice girls. For the rest of us, however, it seemed like a frivolous, sleepy kind of decade.
Maybe Mr. Sirota has such a fondness for the seventies because he likes disco music and Barry Manilow!
Chapter 397,431 from Marxism, Inc., the monolithic multi-national industry that our salivating future regents have organized over the last 60+ years to re-throne themselves, using Karl Marx’s politics of envy as bait to sucker the rubes.
They are 97% of the way toward rewriting the history of the world since 1776.
3% more and the last 230 years will disapper from the history books forever.
As will personal freedom, the blink-of-an-historical-eye treasure that the Founders gave the world.
They despised the recipients of that treasure from the first moment. Now with the aid of PT Barnum, they are about the snatch it back and once again rule as they always had before.
This guy is like a med-evil religious zealots going on an on about the evil of usury. For Christ sake leave people alone and let them make a buck. It is none of your business why a person is pursuing wealth. Each life deserves to be defined by the owner of that life. The left can’t stand that. They must inject themselves into the lives of other like a med-evil clergy.
Interesting timing for me to read about Sirota’s take on the 80′s lasting negative influence. Now more than ever all I seem to encounter are the overwhelming number of deeply ingrained policies, programs, and regulations implemented by 60′s socialist leaning change-the-world types now in power.
The idiot should ask his parents if they were better off under Carter or Reagan. Which direction would they have chosen since well, he was in elementary school: double digit inflation, gas lines and wage controls or economic growth?
Democrat. Liberal. Socialist. David Sirota. Little people running around with signs chanting reworded high school cheers hoping to be seen and heard. Hoping to accomplish something as followers real men and women do for themselves. The real men and women of this world want to achieve something better in life, to improve their standard of living and create a work place that will reflect that, not bring everything down to the lowest common denominator. A better life and self esteem in this world is something you earn not demand from others that have worked for it, that part they’ll never get. Self esteem is that golden ring just out of their reach in life.
I did show one person who these little people really are, my 14 year old Grandson, I dragged him kicking and screaming down to the legislature grounds here in Victoria, B.C. to see first hand one of their demonstrations. After wandering around for about 10 minutes he looked at me and said, why did you bring me here Gramps, who are all these weird people? I told him.
Yes, ironic that the 80s is when the 60s protest generation were ending up in government, media, and law in increasing numbers.
To take a phrase out of their playbook, “it’s all the MAN’s fault…and that’s YOU.”
I remember the 80s, people having to work three jobs to make a decent living because they all paid minimum wage, right wing groups like the PMRC who wanted to censor the music we listened to and the intolerance I personally suffered because I committed such crimes as growing my hair too long when I came out of the marines and seeing my buddies get blown up in Lebanon. All of these were a direct result of 80s Regan America.
However, the 80s was the golden age of heavy metal and if you want a good read about that, then read my book “Rock And Roll Children.”
Yeah, discussing and criticizing hairstyles is really the height of intolerance. You poor victim. Isnt there some reperations-fund you can turn to or some support group for people with such a trauma?
I entered college in 1980, when Jimmah Carter left America in a helluva mess. Unemployment was near 20% where I lived; and for the 18-25 crowd, unemployment was over 25%. I was wondering what the hell I would do with a college education when there were no jobs to be had.
But by the time I graduated in 1984, the economy was on the rebound, and the job market was opening up. I bought my first home in 1989 with an interest rate of 8.5%–a far cry from the 18% interest rates of the good old Carter days.
If all you can complain about is getting dissed for your hair being too long (how that was possible in the big-hair 1980s is beyond me), then you’re a pretty lucky guy.
Sirota’s just jealous he wasn’t old enough to drink, drive, or enter a nightclub during the 1980s.
It was exhilarating being led by a president who believed in American exceptionalism, loved our country, and kicked the a$$ of our greatest enemy without firing a shot. I’m a proud member of the Reagan Generation!
Not surprised at the responses I got, funny how everyone attacks my comment about the hair and none of the other points I made. For the record, in the 80s, it was only women who had the “big hair.” Men were expected to have hairstyles like on Happy Days. My point was how the Regan era seemed to herald a backlash of intolerance and right wing fundelmentalism. I know, my experience was light in comparison.
What I find interesting here is that no one seems to remember how Regan sent the marines into Lebanon to keep the peace by being a target. I lost quite a few good freinds that day. But lets bring up the one aspect of the Regan years that no one seems to remember. His determination to topple the government of Nicaragua because they were too left for his liking. To do this, the he backed a group called the Contras who were nothing more than terrorists. I’m sorry, but people who kill health and education workers in cold blood are not my idea of a freedom fighter. His “blood” money contributed to thousnads of needless deaths in that couuntry. Regan’s justification that the Soviets were going to use it as a jump off point to invade California didn’t cut it with me.
Blumer hits the nail on the head with his comments on the Cold War.
The Cold War began to thaw in 1985 when Reagan and Gorbachev started negotiating arms treaties. In 1989, Gorbachev and Bush Sr. declared the Cold War dead.
The ending of the Cold War was a massive victory, not just for the west but for all of humanity. It drew the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. It is perhaps the most critical event of the 1980s.
And all Sirota had to say about this was “The Cold War loomed.”
Wow.
I must occasionally endure Sirota in my daily newspaper (I’m in Ft Collins, he in Boulder.) Sirota is every bit the liberal nut-case that Blumer describes.