Thirty Years Back
by
Ross M. Miller
Miller Risk Advisors
www.millerrisk.com
November 8, 2010
This month's commentary was inspired by IFC's
recent rerunning of the cult TV series Freak
and Geeks (F&G). The purpose of this commentary is not to
remark about the show, its actors, or its producer (Judd Apatow), but
rather to contrast the era of the series with the present time. Although
F&G began its disastrous (and limited) run in primetime television
in 1999, the show takes place during the 1980-1981 academic year, a time
when the world that was in more chaos than usual. Economically speaking,
1980 was a disaster. Inflation topped 13.5% for the year and seemed
destined to continue to rise indefinitely. At the same time,
unemployment rose from 6.0% at the beginning of the year to 7.8%, solid
recession territory, before dropping back a bit by year-end.
What is more interesting to me than the sorry state of the economy in
1980 is that it was a fundamentally different world from today,
something that F&G does an excellent job of capturing despite an
occasional anachronism as well as being completely oblivious to the
economic circumstances of the time. Having grown up in the 1960s and
having survived the 1970s, the year 1980 was simply more of the same,
only with a deepening sense of national impotence. The burgeoning punk
movement sang out the message: "No
future for you." Despair was everywhere. The U.S. was
introduced to Ted Koppel, whose job each weeknight was to keep count of
how many days the U.S. was being "held hostage" by Iran.
President Jimmy Carter was like an unwanted house guest whose days were
numbered. Indeed, if the current 1960s retrospective, Mad
Men, showed the 1960s as they really were, one would readily see
despite the social upheaval upon which the series focuses, 1965 and 1980
were quite similar in terms of culture.
Radical technological changes had yet to manifest themselves fully in
1980. Although telephones began to sport modular plugs, color
televisions were still trickling down through the middle class, and
calculators were becoming affordable, the big changes were still in the
works. Primitive versions of PCs and the Internet were available in
1980, but they largely remained in the hands of the hobbyists and the
academics. Live people still answered corporate phone calls (although
given the high cost of long distance, most people sent in their
complaints and queries in by mail). Mobile calls could only be made on
expensive and unwieldy phones with limited range and even more limited
reliability. Radio in all its forms remained the cheap, dominant
communications technology, with CB
radios becoming a national craze in the late 1970s.
Despite political commentators who wish to compare the present
administration with the Carter administration, 1980 and the years
leading up to it were nothing like 2010. The year 1980 was a world of
infinite privacy by current standards. Closed circuit cameras were so
expensive that their use was limited to banks and a few other high-value
applications. Indeed, they were so expensive to purchase and operate
that most of them were simply dummies that were connected to nothing
simply to serve as a deterrent and they were so large that it was
difficult to hide them. (Crime was rampant in urban areas for all of the
1970s and well into the 1980s.) Modern database technology had been
invented at IBM and Berkeley, but computers were not powerful enough to
develop the technology, much less employ it on a massive scale. Analog
communications still ruled the world, so wiretaps were still literal
taps placed on phone lines. Show like CSI were unthinkable because none
of their spiffy technology existed. Compared with today, everyone was
off the grid in 1980. Indoor agricultural flourished because a high
electric bill did not bring the police to one's door (or so I am told).
Despite its recent deregulation by Alfred
Kahn, air travel was still a joy, albeit still generally an
expensive one; and the skies, notwithstanding the occasional side trip
to Cuba, were still friendly.
While the dominant culture features of the U.S. were condemned by
many as "artificial" as early as the 1950s, the world of 1980
provided a largely authentic experience, especially as compared with
today. While lots of cheap junk flooded the marketplace, authentic
versions of many goods, some of them still handcrafted were still
available and sold at a relatively small premium to their artificial
counterparts. The world was not yet a global village, but rather a globe
of villages. The homogenization of culture was still in its infancy, so
most places still had their own identity.
I spent all of 1980 in Houston, Texas at the peak of the oil boom.
Houston's similarities to the Boston that I had left the year before
were just enough to assure me that I was still in the United States and
not on some other planet. Outside of its major cities, Texas really
seemed like another planet or something out of the movie Easy
Rider. Texas circa 1980 was realer than real. Giant people
strode in their cowboy boots under the big blue Texas sky.
Texas would have been even more alien, except that it was the place
to be in 1980. Even in Freaks and Geeks, the TV show Dallas
is ubiquitous. Urban
Cowboy, about life in nearby Galveston as portrayed by the
not-very-Texan John Travolta and Debra Winger, was the hot movie of the
year. Texas was not becoming like the rest of the U.S., the rest of the
U.S. was becoming like Texas.
Somewhere between 1980 and 2010, the world changed. While the change
came about slowly, if I had to give an exact date when the switchover
happened, it would be the fourth quarter of 1988, which just happens to
be the time frame in which the cult movie Donnie
Darko takes place. The world of Donnie Darko bears only
fleeting resemblance to that of Freaks and Geeks. When Nick
(Jason Segel) of F&G does not behave as expected, his father sells
the drum kit that he had assembled as a shrine to his personal
drum hero, Neil Peart
of Rush. When
Donnie misbehaves in 1988, he is given behavior-modification drugs and
talks to a therapist.
The real reason that I picked 4Q1988 was because of two important
events that historians have completely overlooked: the banning of the
lawn dart (the link points to a later press release where the
federal government acknowledges that nine years after the ban kids are
still getting "pegged in the head with a lawn dart" as the song
goes) and the unleashing of Morris
worm. Although it was building for years, by 1988 the U.S. had
reached the critical mass of overprotective crybabies. While there are
some products that should be removed from the marketplace because their
risks are either misrepresented or not obvious, the dangers of lawn
darts are apparent to even the lowliest dolt. Lawn darts began the trend
where one idiot's misuse of the product would spoil the fun for
everyone. And, like most regulation, the banning of lawn darts was not
even effective. It turns out that while one cannot buy an assembled set
of lawn darts, one can buy all the pieces over the Internet and then
easily construct them. Moreover, the government only encouraged the use
of more dangerous alternatives, such as the flaming
arrow game depicted in Garden State. Your tax dollars at work
taking the fun out of life.
The Morris worm was another bit of insane overreaction. Ubergeek
Robert Morris (often referred to as "Robert Tappan Morris"
to draw the parallel to Lee Harvey Oswald), a computer scientist who was
himself the son of a noted
NSA computer scientist, wrote a program designed to create a map of
the Internet in the days before web pages and crash commercialization.
There was nothing intentionally malicious about the program; however, it
did not work as intended and crashed good chunks of the Net such as it
was a time. As a result of the hysteria engendered by the movie WarGames,
which starred a pre-Ferris and pre-SJP Matthew Broderick, Congress
passed a law making an overly wide variety of "hacking"
activities illegal. (It is always a bad sign for a society when
Hollywood fantasies drive public policy.) The young Robert Morris was
convicted under that law, but managed not to receive any jail time, more
likely due to his government connections that the common sense of the
federal judiciary.
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