The switch flipped back in 1980 – maybe the beginning of 1981…
It coincided with the election of Ronald Reagan, but what really happened back then, what started in the late 1970s, was a focus on money.
Baby Boomers didn’t care about money.
They’d grown up with enough of it. And those who hadn’t didn’t know any better. Flyover country was thus, assuming you ever got in an airplane to begin with. Unless you moved to New York or L.A. you were clueless as to how the other half lived. Sure, there were glamour-pusses on television, but you lived in an Archie/Betty world where the metaphor was high school. You graduated and grew up, but everything remained the same. You were tarred with not only your moniker but the impression you made years before, this was you…a bumpkin in the greatest country on earth, where gasoline was cheap, sex was free and happiness reigned.
Until inflation hit double digits and the economy tanked and everybody was wondering what came next. They decided to put their faith in an old man with gravitas but little more behind the facade and then everything truly changed.
1981 was an era of CNN and MTV, cable television ruled.
We now could see what was going on everywhere else, and sitting at home in the hinterlands we decided we wanted some of that. Suddenly, having a tricked-out Chevy didn’t mean that much – you were now competing against everybody and it didn’t feel good.
And since competition was now the norm, you might as well win. And we know that rules are just meant to be bent, not only by Michael Milken and his troops at Drexel Burnham Lambert – our first exposure to the riches of finance – but everyone, in order to become wealthy, in order to get ahead.
Taxes were lowered, inflation was under control – the bubble known as the Baby Boomers had obligations – they needed to feed and house their progeny and this required cash. The 1960s went out the window instantly. It was no longer love your brother but screw your neighbor and sleep with one eye open, while you’re snorting Colombia’s finest and parading down the boulevard in German iron (which suddenly replaced Cadillac as the symbol of success).
And we now know that ultimately we all prayed at the altar of Apple, except those needing to maintain a renegade identity, seen mostly as a rearguard identity. But it was in the 1980s that the populace became stratified, that winners pulled away from the losers, and kicked dust in their eyes while they were at it.
And there was a war, but no draft, and the end result was a Baby Boomer President who reigned over a prosperity so glorious, we all felt entitled. The deficit got wiped out, Wall Street was burgeoning, and then it all went to hell. Continue reading →
