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Back to the Present
It’s 1970s and ’80s politics all over again
Goddammit. Boomers and GenXers are horrified to discover that not only do we have to live through the inflation of the 1970s again, we’re back to worrying about nuclear war with Russia. My entire childhood consisted of this sort of background threat that he world could end any day and at any time, which was expressed in popular culture at the time — most notably the iconic ’80s films War Games starring Matthew Broderick and Alley Sheedy, and Red Dawn, which was chock-full of young Eighties stars like Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey.
Weirdly, the almost equally infamous television miniseries The Day After was filmed in my little Midwestern hometown. The miniseries attempted to show with frightening reality what American life would be like the day after being nuked by Russia. They transformed our cute downtown into a ruin of ash and rubble, and there were triage scenes filmed in the gym of our local college. The old townies still talk about it, because many of them were extras.
And then there are the millennials who have yet to catch one motherfucking break during their…
