Fevered Distraction.....The Eighties Were NOT a Real Time of Greatness....

"Push, push.......STRUGGLE" Video: "Eighties" by the great Killing Joke



Of course the only sources I find to question the current fascination with the 1980s are usually in Australia, European and UK papers. This is a particularly biting article about that strange nostalgia. What, joblessness, "greed is good", emotional and physical exploitation of the poor is just so groovy! As the great Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke screams "feather the nest and fuck the rest".....this is not an era I value. I value honesty, not someone trying to sell me soured milk as fresh. I can hardly wait for the 1929 Stock Market Crash craze! I would like to send everyone back to the 1980s that has made a career out of extolling the uber mediocrity, Voodoo trickle down economics and cruel policies which took jobs from hard working people and cut the social safety net. I look to the future while glancing with malice at this oh too recent past, and those who selectively agrandize it. Squeegee the Third Eye!!!!!!!!!


From "The Age" (Australia):
"But that's the thing about nostalgia - it cares little for facts. It filters, sanitises and simplifies history. Nostalgia is as much a forgetting as a remembrance of things past. That's why America is able to have its own '80s nostalgia for Ronald Reagan, even as the evidence mounts that the Gipper's great legacy is to have put his country in a great economic shithole. (The push for Reagan to be the face of the $50 bill is ironic, given millions of Americans would be unlikely to see such a large denomination anyway.)

But the pull of nostalgia will always be strong when people feel insecure about the present and worried about the future. We head towards an election with both parties shamelessly seeking to exploit fear, and with Labor campaigning under the vapid slogan ''moving forward''. With word and action so emptied of meaning, it's hardly surprising many of us want to look back."
http://www.theage.com.au/national/melbourne-life/going-gaga-for-the-80s-20100727-10ud7.html