Thus I have been astonished at the extent to which the 80s have infiltrated the consciousness of the current up-and-coming generation. I first noticed this last summer when the topic of favorite movies came up at the summer camp where I teach and all the kids started naming movies that had come out before they were born: Top Gun, Ferris Bueller, the John Hughes movies... they live forever on DVD, apparently. Cut to wall calendar pages flying through the air and we're back at summer camp again, a year later, and one of my kids strolls into class singing a Culture Club song to herself. I did a double-take: Culture Club? Boy George had become a has-been years before this kid had even been conceived! Where on earth does a fifteen-year-old girl in 2004 pick up a working knowledge of Colour by Numbers? But then it occurred to me — pretty much every radio station in the country plays 80s tunes at lunch. Modern-rock stations play Depeche Mode, Top-40 stations play Madonna, rap stations play, I dunno, Blondie... and then there are entire stations whose playlists have been piped in from the Reagan Administration.

I am all for learning about the past — would that my history students knew anything about the period between WWII and the year 2000 — but still, I can't help but think that the kids of today should defend themselves against the '80s. They are definitely someone else's sentimentality (mine): I can listen to 80s music and wax nostalgic about elementary school, but to anyone without those associations the 80s should seem like a cultural nadir — the politics, the materialism, the hair. When I was in high school, the 60s were the vogue retro decade, and it wasn't camp. We played the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix over the quad speakers at lunch and the principal would shake his head about how we were living in the past, but nothing better had come along since. Sure, we resented that baby boomers jammed their decade down our throats, but a lot of the resentment came from jealousy: we didn't have anything cool like the counterculture, history seemed to be stagnant, and the little pop culture that wasn't commemorating the 60s tended to suck. We had a reason for listening to music and watching movies that had come out before we were born.

Which is why it was so thrilling when the 90s rolled around and suddenly music and film and television and society became just light-years better than it had been. (For some specifics, count the number of years that start "199" on my lists of favorite songs and movies. As for society — having lived through the Reagan and GW Bush Administrations, I can say that the 90s are pretty much the only time I can remember that the government wasn't actively evil. I voted for Nader in 2000 because I couldn't conceive that another president in my lifetime could be as bad as Reagan. Whoops.) And even the kids who were just coming of age around this time realized they were living in a golden age. Certainly none of my students in the 90s were on a nostalgia trip. Now, true, the cultural and socioeconomic prosperity of the 1990s eventually petered out and we're back in a period of decline. I would certainly understand if the Class of 2006 were still stuck on Nirvana and Tarantino like their Class of '96 counterparts. But stuck in the 80s?

At least when they had their cartoon discussion it was about "Captain Planet," which was recent enough that I don't remember it. Though I understand that one of the Planeteer kids had the power to talk to a monkey.

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