Spencer Ackerman reminds us of one important Reagan legacy:
" [F]or a large portion of those under the age of 30 (I'd push that up another decade, though my high school was far from normal. - Martial), their portrait of Reagan emerged through another of Reagan's gifts to the country--one that went almost completely ignored throughout [the] memorials. ... [N]o accounting of Reagan's cultural legacy is complete without noting a simple truth: Ronald Reagan is responsible for some of the best punk rock ever recorded. ... If Reagan embodied everything sunny and inspiring about the United States to his supporters, to the preternaturally angry punk rockers of the early '80s, he represented anomie, arbitrary authority, and an ignorance that was socially acceptable, even valued. "
But punk rock wasn't the only of Reagan's artistic legacies to go unremarked.
Cyberpunk - genre, style, sensibility - forced its way into the mainstream during the 80s, largely because its examination of contemporary capitalism hit the right notes both high and low1.
Under Reagan, capital's long, cold truce with American labor ended. Framing corporate responsibility as narrowly as possible, managers self-righteously deferred to the concept of "shareholder value", and the business community began a much needed (if almost entirely unthought out) reevaluation of priorities and practices - but did it in a way that shocked the public imagination. Ruthless corporate downsizing in manufacturing emphasized that this was no longer our parents' friendly capitalism; corporate conglomeration built larger and larger entities, each of which seemed poised to dominate all of our supermarket options - and perhaps more; corporate greed at the management level plundered companies for personal gain and divorced the company from the satisfied customer, the loyal worker, and the very concept of stewardship. The rules were changed, were in fact effectively set aside, in the name of market efficiency and a horrified, fascinated public was simultaneously bombarded with propaganda about the golden future and daily headlines about sharks in a frenzy.
Also contributing to our anxiety - and to the wild thrashing of America's corporations - was the new, burgeoning fear of global competition. America's economic preeminence was no longer assured. While this was enough to provoke a mild and electorally convenient xenophobia among many, some of us with a longer term view saw Reagan's laissez faire inclinations paving the way for a decentralized, global capitalism in which America would be just one more source of cheap, alienated labor.
These economic currents were combined with (and in part led to) a heartlessness that turned away from people on the ragged edge between hope and despair, that turned thousands of mentally ill onto the streets, and turned a blind eye to the epidemic of AIDS. Homelessness became a feature of the American landscape and no urban center was without its wandering population of the muttering, the begging, and the hopeless.
When we read Neuromancer it didn't look like the future. We could see it on any channel, on any street, right now. The cyberpunks were the only ones writing realistic fiction.
" I never felt that I was writing about the future. I always felt that I was squinting at the present in a peculiar way and describing what I saw. Reality has become such a deeply problematic situation that we can't comfortably look at it as it really is, and the tool kit of science fiction includes something like a set of oven mitts with which we can pick up our red-hot, protean, ever-changing and worrisome present and look at it objectively. "
. . .
1 Union rules say that if I'm going to discuss cyberpunk and capitalism in the same post then I have to include Frederic Jameson's authoritative 1991 footnote that cyberpunk fiction is "the supreme literary expression ... of late capitalism itself".
Posted by Martial