Listening to 1984: The Rest of July
Listening to 1984: The Rest of July
Reagan v. Mondale: Which haircut wins? Plus, Purple Rain, the NeverEnding Story, the Summer Olympics, and Meat Puppets!
2024 Editor’s note: Last month as I was working with the material pertaining to my 1984 Scotland trip, it became apparent that it needed to stand alone as the single entry for July. (In case you missed it, you can read the end result here.) Consequently, all of the usual media observations have been moved over here to this special-edition installment. Enjoy!
The story so far: Sometime in 2019, I had a premonition that 2020 was going to suck. So— I decided to spend the year re-experiencing my favorite year from my childhood: 1984. By "re-experiencing" I mean listening to the music, watching the TV shows and movies, reading the news magazines and books, and listening to "American Top 40" and "Newsweek on Air" week-in, week-out, in chronological order. Weirdness ensued. I kept a journal.
(Note: If you just came onboard and are thoroughly confused, start with Part 1.)
July 7, 1984 / November 24, 2020
I was vaguely aware at age ten that there were two political parties in our American system, and that the existence of a challenger to Ronald Reagan meant that there were people out in the world who didn’t like him, or at least disagreed with him. But it would be a few years before I grasped that there were ideological tribes arrayed against each other like football teams—and that the members of these tribes defined themselves as much by their distaste for the other tribe/team as by any shared set of values.
This ignorance of ideological divisions shaped my early approach to the creative arts and continues to color it. I was blissfully ignorant of the idea that if you listened to certain types of music or read certain books, it implied a set of behaviors and political affiliations. I still resist this idea. From early on, I understood how music related to itself—how bands like World Party, XTC, and ELO drew heavily from the Beatles. Later, I came to see the (perhaps unconscious) commonalities between Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Isaac Hayes’s Enterprise compilation, and how the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” drew from John Coltrane. But awareness of political context and how music might reflect the mores of its time is something I only began giving serious thought to when I started writing about music.
In the spirit of this longstanding disregard for the partisan horse race, let’s focus on what’s really worth fighting about: the two truly impressive haircuts arrayed against each other in the 1984 presidential election.
We all understand that Reagan’s hair is legendary, consisting of dark, luxurious locks slicked back, sweeping jauntily up over the left side of his forehead. Pure 1940s, it channels the energies of George Raft, Tyrone Power, and Reagan’s sometime nemesis Errol Flynn. Add the perfectly tailored dark suit and cufflinks and you have a man who appears to have stepped straight from Hollywood’s Golden Age into the 1980s, bypassing the slovenly decades in between. Come to think of it, that quality is one of Reagan’s greatest strengths and weaknesses: out of time and out of touch. But so out of touch that he somehow becomes the touchstone.
But wait: Mondale’s hair, while less flashy than Regan’s, is still formidable. Silky smooth like his opponent’s, with a distinctive graying at the temples and sweeping back from a subtle widow’s peak, Mondale’s ‘do, like nearly all things about the man, remains underrated to this day. It tops a pair of deep-set, sleepy eyes and a warm smile that radiates sincerity. Come to think of it, the former Veep has his own Golden Age antecedent: He is Raymond Burr on a casual Friday. Don’t count this dark horse (or grey horse) out!
July 14, 1984 / December 1, 2020
Two items surface to remind me how long ago 1984 was (is): New York passes a car seatbelt law and it is hoped the other states will follow suit. Also, the debate rages about the impact of secondhand smoke on children and adult nonsmokers. The demand is not that airplanes, restaurants, and other businesses go smoke-free, but that smokers stick to designated smoking sections. It’s hard to imagine that in my lifetime there were people smoking on airplanes, but I have trace memories of such a thing. I can remember smoke-filled restaurants, and I remember Jittery Joe’s: the poorly ventilated coffeeshop in downtown Athens, GA that had a tiny nonsmoking section. Yet the victories of the nonsmokers over the smokers, in these open hostilities that broke out in the 1980s, were rapid and decisive. And I’m selfishly grateful for the change, even if it represents a troubling (to me) lurch toward the collective good at the expense of personal liberty.
Also transpiring in this summer of 1984: the president gets onboard with raising the drinking age to 21. Federal highway funds will be withheld from any states that do not comply. This from a Republican president! A few states—notably Louisiana—will hold out for a couple of years, but this is a bulldozer that can’t be halted. Again, I’m not distressed by this, though my behavior during those transitional years (coinciding with my late teens and early 20s) was not 100% in line with this development. And I did take advantage of Louisiana’s intransigence.
C. Everett Koop’s celebrity is in the ascent: the first and only time I can recall the U.S. Surgeon General having any kind of presence on the public stage (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s first SG, Joycelyn Elders, who achieved notoriety with her suggestion that masturbation was a natural part of adolescent development).
Koop! He of the distinctive facial hair and the showman’s touch: a sort of counter-president, taking the lead on various public health concerns: smoking, drinking, and, most notably, the AIDs crisis.
One other item of note: Our hosts on Newsweek on Air seem unsure how to talk about Geraldine Ferraro’s vice-presidential candidacy. David Alpern, known for his one-liners, quips, “If nothing else, Democrats will have a lock on the swimsuit competition this year.”
On the one hand, it’s wince-inducing: demeaning to Ferraro and indicative of a bygone way of thinking.
On the other hand, is this statement anything other than the truth? In a hypothetical swimsuit match-up between Geraldine Ferraro and George H.W. Bush, Ferraro would in fact win.
July 17, 1984 / December 8, 2020
What a week in 1984! The nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as Walter Mondale’s running mate is a sensation, fueling in equal parts excitement and “consternation” (as Newsweek on Air puts it). I remember mostly the consternation. This must be when I learned of the menstrual cycle; there were rampant jokes and warnings about what Ms. Ferraro would do if she became president and had to make critical decisions while having her period. And, of course, there was the old saw about women being emotional—and, you know, you wouldn’t want someone like that in possession of the nuclear codes! All this somehow ignoring the fact that the U.S.’s closest ally, Great Britain, was currently under the leadership of a formidable woman. (Not to mention India’s Indira Gandhi—also a leader not to be taken lightly.)
Funny enough, I don’t recall the reaction in my household. My mom was at this point in her life a loyal Democrat. My Dad, as always, an independent—but with some appreciation for the Gipper. I do recall Walter Mondale not being taken seriously by either of them. I think they perceived him as being emblematic of the flimsiest aspects of the Minnesota spirit. Mario Cuomo tried to give a positive spin by saying that Mondale’s speeches “bring people not to their feet but to their senses”—hardly a rousing battle cry for unseating a popular incumbent.
July 20, 1984 / December 22, 2020
What did I miss of the 1984 Democratic National Convention as I was away in Scotland? Not much! Watching the footage now, the much-ballyhooed speeches by Mario Cuomo and Geraldine Ferraro leave me cold. Both of these orations are burlap sacks stuffed full of party planks. (Incongruously, the Dems are hardcore pro-Israel at this point, so amidst the impassioned pleas for the Reagan administration to be more compassionate toward the suffering and impoverished—at home, in Central America, and in the Middle East—there are lamentations in Cuomo’s speech that Reagan has not sufficiently “stood with Israel.” [See, Reagan has delicately rebuked our Middle East ally for being heavy-handed in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories].) And so, the only question is: Do you want your contradictory tokenism in a nasally New Yawk accent (Cuomo) or in the oddly faltering tones of the first female vice-presidential candidate in history? Ferraro is the larger disappointment: all that excitement, all that buildup and speculation that she might upstage Mondale, and then… Where’s the beef? I can only hope she had an off night.
On the flipside, Jesse Jackson once again delivers a great performance. He works in some of the same concerns as Cuomo and Ferraro (absent Israel) with showmanship but without any sense of contrivance. “The Rainbow Coalition” is as hokey a phrase as I’ve ever heard, but damn if he doesn’t sell it.
Mondale is the biggest surprise. I love his speech. There is, of course, the unavoidable laundry list of talking points, but overriding all that is his sincerity, graciousness, and quintessentially Midwestern pragmatism. I know this man, though I didn’t realize until now that I did; I was blanketed by my parents’ lack of enthusiasm. But watching him now, I see in “Fritz” Mondale everything that is good and true about the people of my home state: plainspoken, realistic, genuine. He has smarts without ostentation. In my life, I have been at my best when I have gotten within striking distance of just a couple of these qualities. The Mondales of the world have a difficult time winning national elections, but they are often better people than those that do.
July 21, 1984 / December 28, 2020
The NeverEnding Story – finally, a children’s movie clearly made by people who have some familiarity with childhood. When I saw this as a kid, I related to the protagonist, Bastian—an artistically inclined daydreamer, bad at math, admonished by the grown-ups to get his head out of the clouds. If you want to see where those two irreconcilable forces—the internal yearning to dream, to create, vs. the external pressure to get one’s feet on the ground and be productive—will take a person if neither is subordinated to the other, look no further than your humble correspondent at 46: successful, yes. And grateful for the stability of regular employment. Also conflicted.
Though its second half is uneven (like so many films of 1984), The NeverEnding Story is a lovely movie filled with stunning visuals, assured storytelling (from the great Wolfgang Petersen), and a quintessentially ‘80s soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder. In one regard—and one regard only—it is of a piece with a previous movie I watched, Revenge of the Nerds, in that it deals with a character being bullied for being “weird,” different, cerebral. But while both movies approach this theme with heart, this one does it with a deeper, truer understanding. Despite the high fantasy, I am sensing lived experience behind the frames.
By the time I saw this movie—much further into 1984—I was beginning to feel the sting of bullying. I didn’t get thrown into a garbage dumpster, but fifth grade was difficult compared to fourth. Still, if ever I begin to wallow in grief over childhood injustices, I remind myself that I too bullied those below me in the school pecking order. I suspect, though I can’t say this with certainty, that my situation was more common than the paragon of the bullied, innocent dreamer who, in Christlike fashion, endures his humiliation without lashing out somewhere else. Victims can become oppressors. Not always, but they are uniquely trained for it.
The alternative, as depicted in the movie, is for the victim to retreat inward, to dream more fervently, to channel that dreaming into creativity. And so this movie is true to life—to a point. It’s neat and tidy, and it has to be. We would not be onboard if the film proceeded to show Bastian terrorizing a younger sibling, or humiliating an even less-fortunate classmate.
As for the bullies’ preferred epithets in the two movies, I can live with “weird” (the label applied to Bastian), but I have never been able to reconcile myself to “nerd.” My memory of specific incidents is blissfully clouded, but I know I was called a “nerd,” and, to my mind, there were no redeeming qualities to that label. It was not something I wanted to own and “beat the bastards with it” (to quote the band Stars). Even now, when the real-life revenge of the nerds has come to pass, when “nerds”—the inventors of the revolutionary technologies that everyone now uses—rule the world in a very real sense, I can’t think of myself as one—or a “geek” either.
Now, “weird”—I like weird. Weird is wonderful. John Lennon was weird. The guys in Pink Floyd were weird. Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics was weird. David Bowie was weird. Bill Gates? He was just a nerd. I love the guy, but—no. That’s not the tribe I want to be in, despite being lumped in there often.
At this point in the 1980s, the Alpha Betas—the aggressive, backslapping, knuckleheaded antagonists of Revenge of the Nerds—are still holding onto power in the wider world, but things are shifting. Steve Jobs is making serious waves at Apple; New Wave and New Romantic pop are dominating the culture; Prince has arrived—and it’s hard to get weirder than Prince. The UK has had David Bowie for a while, but has there ever been an American rock star as openly and defiantly weird as Prince? You may raise the specter of Michael Jackson, but Michael is cringey-weird, whereas Prince is freaky-weird. He’s weird in an exciting way; exciting and frightening: which describes the Purple Rain album as succinctly as any two words could. Those ever-present Linn beats, trebly guitars, the combination of cutting-edge technology and an organic, live feel that has not been so present on previous Prince LPs; the vocals—dynamic and intense, the songs deeply passionate and covering a wide range of subjects. But frightening? Certainly for parents. Certainly for my parents, and understandably so! Because this music caught on in a big way with kids my age, and suddenly a great many “birds and the bees” conversations got accelerated due to “Darling Nikki” and “Erotic City.” Later on, when I got to my late teens and early twenties, I thought, what was the harm in that? What was it that horrified Tipper Gore so much that she started the Parents Music Resource Center and tried to kill the buzz with content warnings? Was she repressed?
Now that I’m a parent of young children, I get it. Thinking about how parents must have had to scramble to accommodate the arrival of Prince in the culture—well, it gives me anxiety!
July 22, 1984 / December 29, 2020
I have spent a lot of time focusing on the mainstream culture of 1984 because there was so much greatness in plain sight. But significant things were happening on alternative channels. Some of this I became keenly aware of over the next handful of years: R.E.M., the Psychedelic Furs, the Cure, and my perennial favorites, the Church. But there are still plenty of surprises on this return voyage. My mind has been just about blown by Meat Puppets II. From an unassuming band from right here in Tempe, AZ, II is a stoned hodgepodge of nearly every conceivable rock style, played with gleeful abandon by three guys who seem barely able to hold it together but are clearly overflowing with creativity and a bent sort of genius. Meat Puppets! Now it makes perfect sense why Kurt Cobain would use the Nirvana Unplugged appearance to trot these guys out and give them a platform. God bless him for that gesture.
On deck we have seminal releases from Hüsker Dü (Zen Arcade) and Minutemen (Double Nickels on the Dime), both rebelling boisterously against the prevalent studio sophistication of ‘80s pop, yet both, perhaps unconsciously, retaining the decade’s melodic instincts.
On movie screens, for a brief moment, is Electric Dreams. It shares prescience, if not darkness, with its literary cousin Neuromancer. Here, an architect purchases, on a whim, a proto-AI home system that can control his appliances, manage his schedule, and dial in to the phone line. Predictably, the AI begins to take on a life of its own, demands more and more of its owner’s time, surveils every aspect of his life, and—somewhat confusingly—falls in love with the owner’s girlfriend. Yes, once again, a 1984 movie goes sideways in the second half. But it’s a great premise, and so startlingly accurate in its predictions of forthcoming technological advances that I wonder if Bezos and Jobs saw this movie and took careful notes.
On balance, I feel a lot of love for Electric Dreams. Like several other movies from the year, its heart carries it. There seems to have been tremendous buy-in from all involved. Seemingly everyone who sees this movie—including your correspondent—falls in love with the film’s female co-protagonist Madeline, played by the luminous Virginia Madsen. The purity of her performance carries us over some of the holes in the screenplay. The heady rush of ideas, the intoxication of possibility, the future—the actual future—at the threshold… all of these elements get us through the rest. Any shortcomings seem inconsequential in the face of so much profoundly lucid dreaming.
The year 1984 brings several attempts at depicting a dystopian future. These include the Macintosh Superbowl commercial, Neuromancer, and a late-in-the-year adaptation of the Orwell novel. But among these, Electric Dreams’ note of caution about giving too much over to the machines is feeble at best. In truth, the movie is drunk on technology. It is swept up in the optimism of its era, and I have to admit it sweeps me up as well.
July 22, 1984 / December 4, 2021
A grim milestone in 1984: A disturbed gunman opens fire in a McDonald’s in California, killing 21 people—including small children. The largest mass murder in American history—up to this point. On Newsweek on Air, the commentators wonder if, by reporting this incident, they will fuel copycat events. If they only knew what was coming.
What can I possibly say that won’t come off as inadequate? At this point (in 1984), no one knows what to do with any of this. Is it a freak occurrence? There have been a few other mass shootings, most infamously the University of Texas Clock Tower shooting in 1966, and, only a few months earlier in 1984, the “Palm Sunday Massacre” in Brooklyn, during which 10 people were killed. But it still feels like something that doesn’t happen. I can see how, in 1984, the argument could be made that the McDonald’s shooting was a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy. I grieve for my knowledge of the future—that it will get worse, much worse. And that, just like the commentators in 1984, I look to my future (the post-2020 future) having no idea what will come next. But unlike those commentators, I’m informed by 37 years of evidence that this is not likely to get better. And beyond gun policy, which is a part—but not the whole—of the conversation, there is the crushing issue of mental illness, about which we still know so little. No, 1984 was not as good as I remember, and I do remember this: my mom, in shock, relaying the news of the shooting to me: a new terror to have at the periphery of my consciousness; a new awareness that something like this is possible.
July 23, 1984 / January 12, 2021
2021 went off the rails last Wednesday. For quite a while—preceding this project, in fact—I have generally avoided contemporary news during the week, instructing my wife to “let me know if we’re being invaded, otherwise I’ll just catch up with it over the weekend.” Well, on January 6 we were invaded—or, more precisely, the United States Capitol was invaded by what looked like a cross-section of Hell’s Angels, Civil War re-enactors, and those Apocalypse Now soldiers who had been “in country” too long. See—it’s nearly a week later. As with all shocks of the Trump era, I assimilated the new reality quickly and can joke about it now. But on Wednesday, on Thursday, and into Friday I was locked in my paranoid state, bleary eyed and twitching, frantically scrolling through the CNN news feed: “2 new updates,” a message pings at the top. “Four more updates.” Refresh! Refresh! Refresh!
Since Friday I have settled back into my no-news routine. I’m caught up to Trump’s expulsion from social media. If there have been developments since then, if a giant squid detonated a dirty bomb in the Potomac—not outside the realm of possibility at this point—I’m not yet aware of it and probably all the better for my ignorance.
Curiously, the moment Harper burst in to deliver news of the Capitol riot, I was reading the opening chapter of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, serialized in Rolling Stone beginning in July, 1984, which describes a protest at a town hall meeting in Harlem that quickly escalates into a riot. And so, again, we feel ripples across the continuum. 1984—my happiest summer: Scotland, Grandpa, the stately pace of the British Open with the rolling tide of the ocean as a backdrop. At home, the presidential campaign ramps up but it’s all so courtly and G-rated. Ghostbusters continues to reign at the box office. But what’s this—a serialized novel by Tom Wolfe in Rolling Stone? Or is it 2021 knocking at the door, insistent as usual. “Wake up… wake up, Lurie! Can’t you hear me? It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up, it’s time to get up in the morning!”
July 28, 1984 / January 1, 2021
More on Prince, as Purple Rain (the movie) hits theaters. Prince’s music is alive, electric, joyous. He can sell the most preposterous lyrics because so much of what he did seemed to be fueled by celestial fire. Take “Sex Shooter,” the song he wrote for Apollonia to perform in Purple Rain. “I’m a sex shooter, shooting love in your direction.” Who else could get away with that?? But it’s one of his best songs. And that groove is pure Minneapolis. It’s the sound of dawn in the city, cars and buses whizzing by the Minneapolis Athletic Club. It’s people hustling through the skyway. It’s steam coming out of the vents on a sub-zero day, the sun reflecting off melting ice. And it’s also the sound of nighttime—cars pulling up to First Avenue, people scurrying through the cold, bundling up but also done up. The sound of expectation, of being alive at a time when there is so much to live for. Just this one groove in a seemingly throwaway song contains all that. But, funny enough, it is not the sound of sex. It’s too jittery, too caffeinated for that.
As for the Purple Rain movie itself, it’s great. Groundbreaking, even. The performance footage from First Avenue is electrifying. And—surprise!—Prince can carry a film as an actor. One could be forgiven for thinking that he has a whole string of great movies in his future.
But there is something else. While I have grown weary of picking out all the ways that the films of the ‘80s transgress our social mores of 2020-2021 (“Problematic” is a word I am now ready to retire), I have to say, Purple Rain goes the extra mile! We have a scene where The Time’s Morris Day and his sidekick Jerome casually throw a hysterical woman in a dumpster. Her infraction? I guess she slept with Morris and wanted to see him again. It’s played up for laughs. Har har—welcome to 1984! Then there is the iconic “Waters of Lake Minnetonka” scene (NSFW!). Prince gets aspiring singer Apollonia to strip down and jump in freezing cold water (“purifying [herself] in the waters of Lake Minnetonka”) as a precondition to his helping her in her career. Then he informs her, with that self-assured Prince smirk, “That’s not Lake Minnetonka” and makes as if he is going to abandon her in the middle of nowhere. Only kidding! Later, he strikes her in the face in a pique of jealous rage. But, you know, it’s all okay. He’s got a good heart. We are tracking his family struggles, his valiant attempts to protect his mother, his creative insecurities. He has earned our goodwill and we’re going the distance with him. Meanwhile, what do we know about the Apollonia character? She is from New Orleans and she wants to make it big. And— well, that’s it. This is not her show. She is a foil for “the Kid’s” (Prince’s) character development. Also, she looks great.
None of this is to say I’m down on Purple Rain. In fact I adore it. And if it makes sense in the context of the story for the Kid to strike Apollonia, then the creators of the movie should not hold back from that. But give her a story at least.
(Still, that dumpster scene… who greenlit that one?)
July 28, 1984 / February 2, 2021
On this date in 1984, I am back from Scotland and all I can think about is watching the Doctor Who story that Mom videotaped while I was away. This needs to happen immediately—as in, the moment I get in the door. Do I greet my sister and brother? Surely—but it’s probably a perfunctory greeting. I park myself in front of the TV and fire up the VCR. There is that strained and slightly brutal sound of the tape starting up—as if the machine is a little peeved at my calling on its services.
Awaiting me on the tape is Snakedance—actually filmed and broadcast in the UK in 1983, but not making its way to the U.S. until summer 1984. It’s a disappointment to me at the time—there is very little action, no alien invasions, no robots or guns. The “monster” is defeated not by force or some kind of clever contraption, but by meditation.
From the vantage point of 2021, Snakedance is one of my favorite stories. It transcends the limitations of its production and acting. The central theme—facing the chaos within and without by finding the “still point”—speaks to me across the years. I sense a Buddhist influence, with threads of the occult woven in: That’s a heady brew for a children’s program. But then, Doctor Who in the 1980s is surprising: often erratic, frequently melodramatic, lit seemingly (and continuously) with fluorescent lights, but underpinned at times with some interesting and challenging sci-fi concepts. I can sense writer Christopher Bailey struggling against the conventions of the show: that each half-hour episode must end with a cliffhanger, and that the Doctor and his time-traveling companions are apparently contract-bound to get locked up at some point in the story. The thoughtfulness of the script transcends all that. The Still Point: it’s a gift to me in the here and now.
July 28, 1984 / February 8, 2021
After appearing to shrug off the impending Olympics for months, Los Angeles is suddenly excited. Very excited. In fact, the whole country is in a tizzy, and Olympic fever has collided with a swelling wave of resurgent patriotism the likes of which has not been seen since…the 1950s? Or the end of World War II? This only seems remarkable in hindsight. To my ten-year-old self, it has always been thus: the patriotic fever seems only an outward manifestation of my grandfather’s patriotism, which has been full-bore since my earliest memory.
Revisiting the summer of ’84, I’m struck by the positivity of the national sentiment. It seems to dwell only on the good in America—the possibilities for personal and collective glory. Although there is an acknowledgement that such things have been absent for some time, there is no scapegoating of adversaries, no finger-pointing at Democrats or Carter, or the youth movements of the 1960s. There is no “other” that this patriotic wave is attempting to overcome—or if there is, it’s a subtext that most of us missed. This is just a bunch of people coming together, rediscovering commonalities, and feeling good about it. And yes, you had better believe that the Reagan campaign is going to ride this wave and ride it hard, but why wouldn’t they?
Although Ronald Reagan had used the phrase “Let’s make America great again” during his 1980 campaign, this once and future clarion call is not on anyone’s lips in the summer of 1984—perhaps because there is a perception that America is great. And while there is some fretting on Letters-to-the-Editor pages that such sentiments can lead to blind obedience, intolerance of dissent, and worse, such well-founded concerns are not manifesting themselves in tangible reality.
Perhaps the biggest winner in all this (besides Reagan) is a singer-songwriter named Lee Greenwood, whose single “God Bless the U.S.A.” already notched a respectable #7 on the Billboard Country charts earlier in the spring and is about to blow up even bigger in the wake of this stars-and-stripes surge. Say what you will about the tune, has any songwriter ever seized the moment more effectively? I mean, this is a guy who knows how to cash in on what is called in the market a “hot sector mania.” And talk about a gift that keeps on giving! “God Bless the U.S.A.,” along with its goofy video of Greenwood pondering life’s ups and downs from atop a tractor, will return like a wave of cicadas during Desert Storm in 1991, and again after September 11, and again with the invasion of Iraq, ensuring, in my estimation, the solvency and college tuitions of at least three successive generations of Greenwoods. “The Star Spangled Banner” it is not, but “The Star Spangled Banner” is in the public domain and can’t make anyone this kind of cash.
As for the Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, I’m going to be in this for a while; it’s a six-hour broadcast. Who will bring in the torch? It’s a closely guarded secret, and I have no advance time-traveler’s knowledge. (Spoiler alert: It was decathlete Rafer Johnson.) “A lump and a tear,” Gene Kelly says in reference to the program and the patriotic spirit accompanying it—“something we’ve never seen in the city before.” “If I were to tell you I’m being an objective reporter about all this, I’d be lying,” says one of the anchors. Is this Milan Kundera’s “kitsch”? In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (making big waves in 1984), Kundera writes, “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!”
What I’m feeling certainly tracks with Kundera’s admonition. But I want to give myself up to it. That lump and a tear I get in seeing my country united, it’s so precious and rare. I would see it again—briefly—after September 11, but the outpouring of patriotic unity in summer 1984 is so very precious because no national trauma preceded it. Yes, to see all that joy in that stadium, and pride in inviting the world into our home—it does bring a lump and a tear. On the flipside, Mondale and his team don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of turning this. He has to know that, on some level, watching this event unfold.
Next up: Part 8.