JAMES LILEKS ON THE PROS AND CONS OF ‘80S NOSTALGIA:

The problem with nostalgia is the way you burnish and polish the past, until you’ve a curio that bears little resemblance to your actual experience. The question isn’t whether things were somehow Better when there were post-modern geometric patterns at Taco Bell; the question is why in the NAME OF GOD you would even begin think things were better. Because they weren’t, and I know it. Some things were, but there was an underlying dread of an existential sort that today’s climate-emergency hyperbole can’t touch.

Let me put it this way: we were, at any time, a few hours away from a series of mistakes or overreactions which would result in the destruction of our civilization.

If that didn’t happen, we would all get SEX CANCER.

On the other hand, glass blocks made a comeback in architecture, and that was cool.

For everyone who lived through the 1970s, with one disaster after another (the Penn Central bankruptcy, Watergate, the oil crisis, the disastrous last days of the Vietnam War, leisure suits, the Iranian hostage crisis, sky-high unemployment, inflation and interest rates, nuclear winter, Super Train, and Hello Larry, etc., etc.) that mid-1980s period of Miami Vice, MTV and the last vestiges of modern architecture and cool European design really did seem like “Morning in America,” and helped George H.W. Bush get elected in the hopes the good times would continue. (Until the DNC-MSM convinced voters that they wouldn’t.) Read the whole thing.