'When Was America Great ~ Part Three'

The Eighties

 

So far in this series of posts, we've raffled through the decades of the sixties and seventies searching for the answer to 'When was America great?' While indeed both decades presented milestones that propelled our country forward, each had their drawbacks, some with dire consequences. As the seventies drew to a close, America was experiencing double-digit inflation, high unemployment, interest rates nearing twenty percent, and a dark cloud of impending doom. Coupled with serious foreign issues with the USSR and a hostage situation involving American citizens and Iran, President Jimmy Carter's presidency hobbled into the eighties on its last leg.
I hobbled into the decade of the eighties as well with an old car that barely ran, a wife and new baby, and a job that paid very little for the eighty hours a week I invested into it. The company had 'promoted' me and forced me into the wilds of west Texas, to a place named after the king of cereal, Post, Texas. My eighty-hour workweeks became closer to a hundred and with rampant inflation, what little raise I had received with my promotion evaporated like raindrops on a hot summer sidewalk. After several months, disappointed, disgruntled, and desperate, I quit my job and moved back to where I belonged...back to the town I had come to call home.
Meanwhile, a movie star named Reagan had won the presidency by a landslide , garnering an eight million vote lead over President Carter. Mr. Reagan had promised to make America great again and amazingly, no sooner had I settled back down in my hometown, everything really did seem to get better. I landed a decent job, bought a house and a better car. I planted a garden and bought a few goats and some chickens. I spent many of my evenings trying to figure out a Rubiks Cube while listening to Joan Jett belt out 'I Love Rock and Roll.' MTV came along and I discovered Madonna, who really didn't seem to be like any virgin I knew. I and the rest of America discovered Pacman which became even bigger than...oh, yeah, John Lennon got shot. Prince Charles married this smoking hot blonde and Reverend Myung Moon married 2,075 couples at the Madison Square Garden, thus the Moonies.
Michael Jackson got rich with 'Thriller' and E.T. and Ghostbusters made our imaginations run wild.
Somewhere in the early eighties as recession came and went, but as the song goes...'we were so poor that we couldn't tell.' Heck, we had survived the seventies! Mr. Reagan would tell us it would all be just fine, and we believed him. We'd just go about our daily lives watching MTV and playing Pacman. I discovered George Strait, Reba, and some boys who called themselves 'Alabama.' While Don Henley and the rest of the Eagles were trying to go solo, I bought a cowboy hat and a pair of boots. In '83 Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America, but then some dirty pictures of her showed up. M*A*S*H went off the air and 125 million people watched their last show. Motorola invented the first mobile phone if you could call it that...the bag phone and Sony invented camcorders. AIDS appeared on the horizon which made us all ponder our pasts.
Urban Cowboy, Gilley's, and Dallas threw many of us into the cowboy culture, which was about the only culture the eighties seemed to have. Fashion left much to be desired and to the best of my recollection, there was nothing whatsoever sexual during that entire decade, except Demi Moore in 'Saint Elmo's Fire.' I have said from time to time that the eighties was perhaps the most boring decade of any I've lived through. Those who observe the rest of us might tell you that the generation of the eighties was a materialistic, self-centered bunch driven by their quest for wealth. Indeed, better times had arrived. Most households had two wage earners and a surplus of cash. And life was good. As Mr. Reagan had promised, government was no longer up in our business. Those who had money to save or invest saw generous returns on their investments. One could buy a hundred thousand dollar certificate of deposit and earn a cool ten grand a year on it...and some did just that. Me, I just tended to my garden and played Pacman, but life was good, nonetheless.
The space shuttle mission was in full swing and I remember how I marveled as I watched the Enterprise glide from the depths of space and land precisely on some concrete runway in some remote desert. I remember the horror on that January morning in 1986 as the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded just after liftoff. But we didn't give up on those space missions, because...America was great in those days, you know!
Let me tell you how great we were in those days. Mr. Reagan told Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall separating Berlin...and you know what? He did it! The cold war ended just like that.
I've spent quite a bit of time researching the events of the eighties in preparation for this article. Sure, there were a few glitches. The Iran-Contra affair was a pretty noticeable glitch, for example. But, boring as I seem to recall it being, I remember the eighties as a time for greatness in America. After eight years, Ronald Reagan handed the wheel over to George H. Bush in 1988 and the following year showed a growth rate of 3.8%, the largest in four years and an unemployment rate of 5.3%, a low of fourteen years. Army General Colin Powell was elevated to the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, becoming the first African-American to be nominated to that post. By 1989 the Berlin Wall was nothing more than a memory.
Me? Life was so good that I bought my wife a faux fur coat for Christmas and my son a Gameboy! As I sat in my recliner watching the first episode of the Simpsons, two shadowy figures in a dimly lit room huddled closely, and in muted voices:
Gore: "What is it?"
Gates: "I call it Windows."
Gore: "What do you do with it?"
Gates: "It's like a...window to...somewhere?"
Gore (stroking his chin in deep thought) : "I've got an idea..."
He scribbles three large letters onto a yellow legal pad on the table before him...WWW

Take my word for it...the eighties were indeed an era of greatness for America. Would the nineties be able to keep pace? Next blog...don't miss it!

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