Interview: David Sirota

By aaroncynic in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 25, 2011 3:30PM

Last night, In These Times hosted a lecture by David Sirota, author of the book Back To Our Future: How The 1980's Explain Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything. With the help of an entertaining and interactive slide show and fantastic discussion with Nathan Rabin, head writer at the Onion's A.V. Club, David highlighted how pop culture in the 80's has had a profound effect on the American national psyche. According to Sirota, the 80's not only re-wrote the way we look at earlier decades, particularly the social paradigms of the 50's and 60's or the Vietnam war, but still shape the way we look at the world today. After the lecture, we were fortunate to catch up with David and ask him a few questions about the ideas behind the book.

Chicagoist: Is the fact that you're 35 now - that the 80's was the era you grew up in - did that play a role in your decision to write about the 80's rather than the 70's or 60's?

David Sirota: The decision to write about the 80's was part culture, part politics, part sort of standard history - but then also part personal experience. I was especially interested in this topic because I felt a personal connection to it. I really tried and was very cognizant to try not to let my own generational experience delude me into thinking that my experience was unique in the 80's. I tried to look dispassionately at whether the 1980's really was as culturally enduring for the American psyche as it was for my psyche. That's why you'll see that a lot of this book has a lot of indisputable data in it. I specifically included data so people would know that this is not just me saying “I like the A-Team.” I did like the A-Team, but so did 7 million other preteens. It's easy to say all this stuff is “oh you were just a kid and it seemed bigger to you than society.” But... the 80's kids are world shaping adults now and kids don't have the filter like adults do to discern as much between knowing or distinguishing between entertainment and real life. So when the A-Team tells you you can't trust the government and you're five, that's one of the stories you're going to be looking at the world through when you grow up.

C: Is there a correlation between those kids being professionals today and entertainment producers just kind of running out of ideas?

DS: Many of the entertainment producers today are children of the 80's. They're drawing off the stories they were told. You can say “well what about the entertainers of the 1980's, they were kids of the 60's?” Except the storyline really changes in the 1980's. It really was a point of transition. As much as children of the 80's are drawing on their own lives to create the stories for today, those storylines endure beyond the media producer's personal experience. They have now become ubiquitous in our culture. (In the presentation) I showed presidential pictures of the 50's versus 60's, which gave us the idea that we have to defer to the commanders. There hasn't been a different dominant narrative to come out since to say “here's a different story.” I'll give you a hypothetical. How about we really our first reaction to an international crisis is not to go to war. How about “you know what, if the commanders say they want to escalate, we're not going to escalate. We're going to ask questions.” How about “hey, asking African Americans to be 'post racial' or 'transcend their race' is really bigoted?” That you're asking them to quote unquote get beyond who they are. Those are not the dominant narratives.

C: You mentioned in the presentation that the media of the 80's re-wrote the cultural history of the 50's and 60's. One of the things I thought about when you showed this was our attitude towards resisting that narrative, towards people involved in protest. Has our attitude at looking at people who are protesters as lazy hippies or self entitled college students that sure as hell deserve to get cracked over the skull effected our viewpoint or damaged resistance to that narrative?

DS: I think that we have looked at political activism since the 80's, partly because of the revision of 60's activism, as something not serious or important. It changed a little bit in the darkest years of the Iraq war, not even at the beginning, but when people were both protesting the war and everyone hated George Bush. At the beginning of the Iraq war, a lot of people liked George Bush. So it changed, that 80's idea that protest is stupid because that's the chaotic, stupid, silly, unserious 60's. That paradigm lasted until probably 2005 and still has lasted through that, but was changed a little. The conclusion of the book asks “where have certain 80's paradigms ended?” I actually think that the tea party folks have, inadvertently, called into question at least some of the 80's framing of the tactics that we lambaste. Even though I vehemently disagree with a lot of what the tea party stands for, I think they're validation of the ethos of 60's style protest has helped potentially really enduringly change that 80's paradigm that denigrated 60's style protest.

You talked about the idea of the rogue or maverick who bucks the government. Because you can't trust the government or hate the government, but you still can trust Reagan or Bush.

DS: You can't deny the government caught the guy who broke and entered the car.

C: Did that kind of belief in the rogue or the maverick politician or of a person as a brand help to create the Sarah Palin's of today?

DS: Looking at the 2008 campaign through that lens, it was Barack Obama saying “I'm the maverick” and John McCain saying “no I'm the maverick” and Sarah Palin saying “I'm the maverick.” The question is not who's actually the maverick, because frankly none of them are. They're pretty standard politicians. Barack Obama's policies are not that of a maverick politician. He's a standard Democrat and John McCain is a standard Republican. So the question is not “are they maverick's or not,” the question is “why are they competing for this?” “Why is this brand so valuable?” The obvious answer is that it's been said for 30 years that government is evil and the only person who can solve problems in public institutions is the maverick. Of course, anybody wanting to be the head of the government is saying “I'll go maverick, I'll go rogue.”

C: One of the things that you didn't touch on but I remember most from the 80's is the dystopian or Mad Max post-apocalyptic future. Did that kind of cultural paradigm that we grew up with pave the way for our perception of where we are going? That the world is always coming to an end?

DS: The genre of dystopian 80's culture was a lot about advanced Cold War fears. Apocalyptic fears. That was one set of it. There was also a fear of a totally corporatized world: Robocop; Total Recall. In many ways, I see that genre as dissent. I think that that kind of stuff was saying “we're not going in the right direction. We're not cheering on what's going on. If we keep going down this road, we're going to hit this really dark place where none of us want to go.” One of the darkest movies that impacted Ronald Reagan himself was The Day After. It changed him, it really impacted him. That was dissenting the dominant norm. That's one of the legacies of the 80's that helps inform us now about where we don't want to go.