80s News Today

Do you see them? These are the new wizards, the digital alchemists of Access Software out in the suburban sprawl of Salt Lake City. And what have they conjured up for the winter of 1984? They call it Raid Over Moscow. Picture the scene: It is January. The sky is the color of a bruised plum. In every split-level ranch from Levittown to Palo Alto, the Commodore 64—that beige breadbox of destiny, that 64-kilobyte marvel of the New Era—groans with the weight of the Apocalypse. And there it is on the screen! The Great Bear itself! The USSR! Only they aren't playing fair, are they? The storyline tells us the U.S. has dismantled its nukes—The Great Disarmament!—and now the Soviets, those "deceitful aggressors," have launched a sneak attack! Your mission? Not just to defend, but to STRIKE BACK!  You aren't just a boy in a striped velour shirt anymore. You are a Stealth Pilot! You guide your craft out of the hangar—taps, nudges, frantic stick-wiggling—trying not to scrape the ...

Managua, January 10, 1985 The tropical sun dipping low over the Plaza de la Revolución, that vast concrete expanse named for the very upheavals that birthed it, now thrumming with the electric hum of a new era. There he was, Daniel Ortega Saavedra , all of 39 years old, stepping up to the podium like a matador in olive drab, the guerrilla turned statesman, the former bank-robbing revolutionary now draped in the blue-and-white presidential sash over his fatigues—yes, fatigues!—as if to say, "Comrades, the fight goes on, but now with ballots and briefcases!" He sports those signature oversized spectacles—thick, dark frames that give him the look of a militant librarian who has just finished shelving the works of Marx and is now ready to seize the means of production. Around him, the plaza is a sea of red and black—the colors of the FSLN—waving, snapping, popping in the heat. It is a tableau of the New Left’s wildest dreams. You can practically smell the mixture of diesel exhaus...

A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon . The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters. Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon...

November 8, 1988. The very air itself, brothers and sisters, was thick with it! Not just the usual whiff of stale ambition and light beer that hangs over every American election, no sir. This was the culmination, the apotheosis, the very zing! of the Age of Reagan, now metastasizing, transforming, elevating itself into something else. Something…Bush! Yes, George Herbert Walker Bush ! The man, the myth, the scion of privilege with the patrician grin, the tennis whites, the entire gestalt of New England rectitude mixed with a Texas drawl as authentic as a Hollywood stagecoach. And what a stage it was! The nation, awash in the glow of Morning in America, flush with material prosperity, high on the sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of eight years of Reaganomics!  The stock market was roaring, the Soviets were…well, they were still the Soviets, but they seemed to be doing it with a little less conviction, a little more glasnost! America felt good, damn good! And into this fertile, ego-stro...

November 4, 1988. Mark that date in your calendars with a big red Sharpie, because that’s the day John Carpenter’s masterpiece THEY LIVE hit theaters and ripped the mask off the New World Order like a chainsaw through a copy of Das Kapital . The plot? Simple, and frankly, disturbing: A drifter named Nada, played by professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, a real guy in a fake world, finds a pair of sunglasses that expose the truth about who really runs the show. These aren't just any Ray-Bans, oh no. These are truth-seeing glasses. And when he puts them on, what does he see? He sees the world for what it truly is. He sees the subliminal messages plastered on billboards, on magazines, on television screens: "OBEY," "CONSUME," "DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY!" They're everywhere, folks, brainwashing you, programming you, turning you into compliant sheep. When Nada looks at the people in power with the glasses on, the ones pulling the strings,...

Forty years ago, a different America was emerging, though many refused to see it. It was the America that Billy Joel captured with stark precision on his album, The Nylon Curtain , released on this very day in 1982. Joel, the piano man from Hicksville, delivered a powerful and unapologetic album that spoke to the silent majority's fears, disillusionment, and quiet patriotism. This was Ronald Reagan's America. The Cold War was back on, and we were "winning." Yet in the heartland, the factories were closing, and the promises made to the children of the Greatest Generation were being broken. Joel raised the nylon curtain on the dark underside of the 80s, where in the darkness of decomissioned coal mines and blast furnaces, it was anything but "morning in America." Billy Joel wasn't singing about champagne and limousines; he was singing about the factory worker in "Allentown" waiting for a Pennsylvania he'd been promised, but that never arrived...