Our generation, Heathen, will have much to answer for and much to explain as we grow older. The 80s were an odd time; the west was in thrall to vicious right-wing philosophies promulgated by Reagan and Thatcher, and the world of the arts reacted accordingly. It is possible, we presume, to explain 80s-era covert military adventurism like Iran-Contra and the like as an outgrowth of the culture of fear that thrived in the Cold War. After all, we watched films about how to handle post-nuclear-exchange fallout in gradeschool, and bravely tried to pretend such an exchange wouldn’t destroy the world as we knew it, and that it also wasn’t in some way inevitable. But this, too, is understandable in the socioeconomic and geopolitical wake of the second World War, and the subsequent cooling of the US-Soviet relationship that probably peaked at Yalta.

Still, much remains of the 80s that children today cannot hope to understand or even sympathize with. They will look back on these things with horror and revulsion, and be utterly incapable of reacting in any way that does not include wholesale dismissal and damnation, and there is no excuse or justification we can offer.

We speak, of course, of this guy’s hair, and all sort of related crimes preserved forever by the Intarwubs. Children of today, we’re sorry. Especially for this, too. And also this.

But not for this or this. Not at all.

Update: Final link fixed.