The Long Shadow of the 1980s

“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”- Walter Brueggemann

I’ve been obsessing about an old banker’s box. It’s tucked away in a spare bedroom. There isn’t much in it: some punk rock posters, letters, photographs of a long-closed homeless shelter, and a handwritten diary. After decades of disinterest in the box, I find myself seeking it out, particularly the diary. Hoping that it can help me make sense of what is happening in the world around me.

The fact is, I just can’t seem to get my bearings. I search for signposts and familiar patterns, but it’s like looking through the distortions of a funhouse mirror. My political, social, and environmental certainties have been knocked off their axes. The world is in uncharted territory. These are troubled times. Disorienting times. Frightening times. Blame it on the fire tornados or the covid-19 pandemic or the data-driven AI that is poisoning the well of human conversation. Blame it on toxic capitalism.

I know many in my age group (Generation X and Boomers) who are also increasingly obsessed with their younger lives. Nostalgia for the 1980s is everywhere. In popular culture, the ’80s has become shorthand for a simpler and more fun time—A Flock of Seagulls hairstyles, catchy pop songs, and Breakfast Club brat pack tropes. It is Hawkins, Indiana, in the Netflix hit Stranger Things—a landscape of well-stocked shopping malls, morning paper routes, and social cohesion. In Hawkins, the youth stand up to the darker forces threatening middle-class America—an “upside down” world of monsters and Demogorgons.

Airbrushed from ’80s nostalgia is the real Upside Down that confronted people—the political and corporate counter-revolution that killed the American dream. This is what brings me back to the banker’s box. Not nostalgia. I am looking for clues. I want to know how that Upside Down created the dystopian world confronting us today.

Media commentators are also doing a major rethink of the 1980s. Whether it’s the economy and rising labour unrest, or nuclear brinkmanship and a new Cold War, the 2020s feel like an ’80s redux. The obsession with the ’80s isn’t new. There has long been a superficial fixation on the era. In Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, Kurt Andersen writes,

“We [aren’t] experiencing ‘an eighties revival’ … in fact the ‘eighties never ended’ … the character of the American 1980s [was] ‘manic, moneyed, celebrity obsessed.’ None of that really changed in the 1990s or in the 2000s or in the 2010s.”

But the crisis of the 2020s is something different from a lingering cultural stasis. The reality is that the political, environmental, and economic forces unleashed in the 1980s have finally caught up to us. This historical frame is essential for making sense of the dissonance of our times. As Stephen Stoll writes,

“Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.”[i]

The 1980s was the hurricane. The hurricane’s path has been difficult to track because many of the most damaging impacts took decades to play out—more like a slow-moving disaster. But the hurricane has finally touched down and we are picking up the pieces in real time.

We are being forced to confront the great lies of the era that have cast a shadow over the last forty years: that an international race to the bottom was the natural order of the universe; that cities would become more livable if we turned our neighbourhoods over to capitalist speculators. And the great petroleum-driven lie that assured us that dealing with the climate crisis could be put off for another day.

To find our way out of this mess it is necessary to confront the false history of the 1980s. Historical amnesia is not accidental—it is a political construct.

If you scratch the sheen of ’80s nostalgia, the underlying socio-economic fractures are readily apparent. These contradictions in the popularized narrative constitute a dangerous memory. Theology professor Candace McLean at the University of Portland explains,

“Dangerous memories … are the subversive memories of the victims of history … They are dangerous to those in positions of power because they are the seeds of resistance and change … and hope to the marginalized.”

This book is an offering of dangerous memories to a young generation. They are living in the ruins of a state-sanctioned pillaging of the economy, the environment, and the common good. They deserve to be told that there was nothing natural about the rise of the billionaire oligarchs. This inequity was a deliberate construct, a staged crisis that broke the back of the North American working class. And they also deserve to know that people fought back.

Amid the urgency of the climate crisis, young people are struggling with the fear, denial, and grief of living on a planet that may have no future. The 1980s was also a time when the dark shadow of annihilation hung over the lives and dreams of a generation. In the face of nuclear madness, people took to the streets.

At first, they came in the hundreds, then in the thousands, and then in the millions. People organized and resisted. The 1980s witnessed incredible acts of solidarity that put an end to the Cold War and brought down the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa.. Grassroots activism scored impressive victories for the environment as well as gender and lgbtq rights.

But obviously we didn’t come far enough. So what the hell happened? How did an era of activist resistance end up being labelled the “decade of greed” Clearly, this turbulent era deserves a second look.

The 1980s defined who I am: the politics I champion, the lifestyle choices I continue to make. My journey began with punk rock. As a teenager, I knew nothing of the dark economic and political Upside Down. But punk rock taught me that I didn’t need to accept the world the way it was. I could forge my own path. The discovery of this diy (do it yourself) manifesto was life-changing. It gave me the confidence to drop out of school and go on the road with a political punk band. This was my teenaged attempt to resist the global forces that were dramatically reshaping society.

And then, at nineteen, I met the love of my life.

Brit Griffin was a student active in feminist politics. Brit and I challenged each other to make a credible stand in a world that seemed beset by injustice. We were also both born and raised Catholic. The Church that existed at the beginning of the 1980s was very different from the one that existed at the end of the decade. It had yet to shred its credibility with crimes, scandals, and cover-ups. The Church I knew then preached a gospel of liberation and economic justice. I took that message seriously.

With no money and even less experience, we became deliberate dropouts from the decade of greed. We opened our home to addicts, runaways, and the homeless. The goal was to create an alternate way of living based on the anarchist principles of mutual aid. Our model was the Catholic Worker Movement, founded by New York social activist Dorothy Day. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing, and many of the people who helped us were as young or younger than we were. But the urgency of the times made us feel like we could take on the world.

In setting out to reframe a history of the 1980s, I found myself turning to my banker’s box of memories. Admittedly, relying on the diary of a punk rock kid from Canada might seem like an odd way to anchor a broad work of social history. But it might be as good a place as any to start making sense of the numerous social Rubicons that were crossed in those tumultuous ten years.

The fact is today’s young people are being threatened by what went down on my watch. Could I have done more? Is it possible to do more now? As I see the world unravelling around me, I need to reconnect with the young man who fervently believed that individuals have a responsibility to respond to the crises of the day. He believed that people can change the world. I hope he can help me make sense of how we got here. How things got so fucked up. Maybe that punk rock kid can help chart a path out of this apparent dead end.

And this is the real reason for unpacking dangerous memories. I want the young generation to know that an alternate future was envisioned in the 1980s. Seeds were planted that could still sprout today. What was made can be unmade. What was decreed can be overturned. This book is not a lament. It is a call to arms.

Therein lies the real power of dangerous memory—it offers lessons in resistance. It tells us that our individual and collective actions can make a difference. If there were ever a time to take to the streets, it is now.

[1] Stephen Stoll, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, New York: Hill and Wang, 2017, p. 31.

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Adapted from Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed by Charlie Angus (2024, House of Anansi Press)

https://houseofanansi.com/products/dangerous-memory?srsltid=AfmBOoq_lCSuoDLNv017MnMFxlgFX2avQ2JSPP_W6fPgP-inY2aZ1xTc

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