We will probably have a Tattered Cover event at some point, but not for a while. So get a copy now!

Yes – photos by Zach Lipp, my bro-in-law. ZachLipp.com

About 3 hours a night. Not good.

I didn’t write the book when we had my son, Isaac. He’s just 4 months old, so I finished the bulk of the writing before he was born. That said, just EDITING the book was a lot harder with a child – so I assume it’ll be that much harder to write. But that’s OK – he’s the priority.

I sure hope so, but it’s harder to do events on the road now that I host a morning radio show and now that we have a 4 month old son.

And I don’t fault you at all for feeling that way. But this was the inevitable – and unavoidable – problem of writing a book about a decade. Everyone’s individual experiences in a decade are different. I’m not sure how to get around that when writing a book on such a big topic.

Yes – the reason I wrote the book, I think, is out of optimism. The book underscores how the 1980s represented a radical departure for America in terms of the stories we started telling ourselves. We moved, for instance, from a culture that valued “we’re all in this together” to a culture that now values “greed is good.” The reason I wrote the book was to show that the 1980s was a big change – and in showing that it was a CHANGE from something, rather than the long-term norm, I try to make the point that there are alternatives.

Additionally, the last chapter of the book shows how on some issues the 1980s zeitgeist seems to be fraying – or at least the possibility of it fraying seems to be there.

In my set of chapters called “The Jump Man Chronicles” (named after that iconic Nike image of the individual Michael Jordan soaring above everything else), I go into the data that shows how those social bonds broke down. It’s fascinating – and disturbing. And it’s really incredible how empirically you can document that cultural shift.

The answer is that a book is finite, and that a decade is infinite. What I mean is that a book can only give proper due treatment to a certain set amount of issues, and that an infinite number of things happens in an entire decade. That’s not a cop out – what I’m saying is that I basically had to draw a line somewhere, and my book takes a look at the huge issues of historical revisionism of the 50s/60s; the rise of greed, narcissism, rogue glorification and mass conceit; the intensification of militarism; and the reshaping of our discussions about racism. These are massively huge issues that were themselves difficult to condense down into 300 pages, and I just didn’t have the space to take on another set of issues. That doesn’t mean I don’t think other issues are hugely important from the 1980s – they sure were, as you allude to, and if I was writing a multi-book anthology of the 1980s, I’d certainly have a whole book on what you are talking about. But I was only writing one book.

I don’t know the exact figure, but check this out from Air Force Times:

http://www.airforcetimes.com/entertainment/movies/military-battle-los-angeles-movie-031111w/

The ramrod stiffness has an explanation: The Marine Corps gave the filmmakers what looks to be an MEU’s worth of support — most of it out of Camp Pendleton, Calif. — in personnel, equipment and transport aircraft.

Interestingly, the aircraft are all older Sea Knights, not newer Ospreys; official Corps largesse seems to extend only so far.

That kind of military support has a steep price: Pentagon script approval. So what you get is a square-jawed, born-again-hard recruiting poster with no mention of oil checks, credit card swipes, abuse of duct tape — no hint of the unique grab-assery that makes Marine camaraderie so dementedly entertaining.

Yes, I think so. Ronald Reagan was the master of the dog-whistle on racial politics – a guy who kicked off his 1980 campaign with a call for “states rights” at the site of the murder of civil rights workers, a guy who berated “welfare queens” and yet a guy who regularly cited Martin Luther King’s words as proof that we supposedly live in a “colorblind” society. So I think when you look at a Republican Party that still very much aspires to follow in Reagan’s footsteps, and you see a Republican politician doing what Haley Barbour is doing, you can’t look at it as some accident – it’s quite deliberate.

I think the link is that since the Reagan Era, televisual semiotics have been seen as more important in presidential politics than anything else. So the meta-idea of “mimicking Reagan” is for a president to be far more of a two-dimensional TV icon and far less of a serious, deep policymaker.

I’m not sure how it will play electorally – but I do think that it comes from his fear of being portrayed as an icon of “The Sixties” (ie. the 80s manufactured idea of the 1960s). We saw this on the campaign with him running away from Bill Ayres and Jeremiah Wright, and we saw it with his constant refrain of wanting to get away from the “old battles” of the 1960s. So my concern is that even though decriminalization/drug policy reform so clearly should be a bipartisan priority, he’s not willing to touch it because he’s still afraid of being tarred and feathered with a fundamentally 1980s attack on “The Sixties.”

I think the left did understand this in the 1960s and 1970s. There were some great films of real progressive social commentary in the 1980s that were hugely powerful. We have them today, as well – but they are still overwhelmed by films with quite conservative themes IMHO.

In the chapter on militarism in my book, I go into how the naming of military missions before the 1980s was done with computers, which basically spit out random names. But then in the late 1980s, political leaders changed that so that they could name missions with specifically politicized/propagandized names.

I agree with Obama that Reagan was “transformative” but the idea that Obama wants to be similarly “transformative” is so ridiculous as to be laughable. The reason Reagan was “transformative” was because he was using the presidential bully pulpit to join in the effort to reorient America around a whole new narratives like “greed is good,” militarism is critical, The Fifties Were Great, etc. Obama hasn’t introduced any new narratives – he’s played within and even promoted most of those 1980s narratives.

The Military-Entertainment Complex – ie. the direct financial connections between the Pentagon and Hollywood – was one of the most eye-opening and disturbing parts of this book for me. I just couldn’t believe what I was finding – and you are right to key in on the most disturbing part of that connection of all. The Pentagon quite literally grants access to its facilities to Hollywood studios on the basis of what’s in those studios screenplays. If a screenplay is “pro-war” or “pro-military,” the studio can expect to have access to whatever military hardware it wants, and at rock-bottom (read: taxpayer subsidized) prices. As just one example, note this passage from my book:

According to Maclean’s, Paramount Pictures paid just “$1.1 million for the use of warplanes and an aircraft carrier” for the Pentagon-subsidized Top Gun, far less than it would have cost the studio had it been compelled to finance the eye candy itself.

The flip side of the coin is that screenplays that have anti-war or anti-militarist themes can expect to not be granted access to military hardware when shooting their movies.

Put the two together – the Pentagon subsidization of pro-war movies and blocking access for anti-war movies – and you have an entertainment industry economy that disincentivizes the production of anything that questions the military. Indeed, as the director of “The Hunt for Red October” recounted, this new reality prompted studios in the eighties to start telling screenwriters and directors to “get the cooperation of the [military], or forget about making the picture.”

The problem in trying to fix this politically is two-fold: First and foremost, our political establishment is still lockstep behind militarism since the 1980s, and therefore it’s going to be hard to find a politician willing to say that the Pentagon should start granting filmmakers equal access to its facilities regardless of whether or not the filmmakers are questioning the military. Second, because this is on its surface about granting access, it doesn’t seem at first like a taxpayer subsidy. It just seems like an access question – but as described above, it ends up being a HUGE taxpayer subsidy on the basis of content.

I think the hope for fixing this lies in the court system. As I show in the book, this is a legal gray area when it comes to the First Amendment – can the government privilege one kind of speech (pro-war speech) on the basis of content, and discriminate against another kind of speech (anti-war) on the basis of content? That’s a real constitutional question.

Great point – and one I deal with in the book, as well. One of the reasons why whites in the 1980s flocked to the “Fifties Was Great” revision was because that whole revision was infused with themes that resonated as a backlash to the civil rights movement. And why was “The Fifities Was Great” such an effective tool specifically as a backlash to the civil rights movement? Because before civil rights, things were (in relative terms) better for White America, because White America was the majority specifically privileged by Jim Crow laws.

This is a good point – and the 1980s was also the beginning of Reality TV (depending on how you define what “reality TV” is, it either started with COPS or with Star Search and Dance Fever). I have a whole chapter on what this really meant for us – and IMHO, you are right on about the “look at me” culture. I think one of the big reasons we saw a spike in the basic metrics of narcissism is because that me-focused culture was intensified by the quest for television/movie fame which really accelerated in the 1980s.

It’s a good question, but I see it a slightly different way – I think that basically we had a historical era we think of as “The Fifties” (which in our memory was really the end of WWII in the 1940s until the JFK assassination in 1963), we had a historical era we think of as “The Sixties” (which in our memory was post-JFK assassination through to the mid-1970s) and then we had a historical era we think of as “The Eighties, which started with the ascent of Reagan and hasn’t really ever ended. So if you think of it that way – and you see that Reagan was the most popular Republican icon of that ongoing era – then it makes sense that every Republican since has tried to portray themselves as a Reagan incarnate. My guess is this will not change until we truly enter a new era – an era that fundamentally challenges the storylines and narratives of the 1980s. We’re not in that era yet (as evidenced by what I show in the book).