Make America the 1990s Again |
Looking back 30 years is like looking back into a different world, except it's a world that looks very much the same. Like many of you, I suffer from the nightmare of streaming fatigue, where I'm exhausted by the never-ending litany of NetfliHuluPrime series about plucky transsexuals fighting against cisgender patriarchy or plucky female-identifying women who are rarely attractive fighting against cisgender patriarchy. As we've discussed before, there's a lot of woke garbage out there, at least until they make my new "People's Republic" novel, "Panama Red," into a series. That's why Irina and I started rewatching "The X-Files," and what we noticed was kind of remarkable.
You probably remember "The X-Files," the Fox TV show that ran for nine seasons, starting in the early '90s, about a couple of FBI agents before the FBI became a nightmare fascist Gestapo – something that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are in the process of fixing. The series follows intrepid special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (played iconically by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) as they investigate mysterious stuff, such as aliens, monsters, and psychic phenomena. The overall theme is that the government is secretly hiding knowledge of alien plots against mankind. It gets convoluted and silly, like most government conspiracy theories. I don't generally believe in government conspiracy theories because, after working for the government for 27 years, I don't think the government is competent to pull off a conspiracy of any significant magnitude. In any case, "The X-Files'" paranormal paranoia was refreshingly iconoclastic, particularly given the direction Hollywood would later take when COVID came along, and the brave, nonconformist truth-tellers of Tinseltown decided to rage for the machine, rather than against it.
What was remarkable about watching the show was how familiar, yet different, America was just 30 years ago. When I was a kid growing up in the late '70s and early '80s, if you went back 30 years, you were looking at the late '40s and early '50s, and that was a very different era. The cars looked very different. The buildings and signage looked very different. The people looked incredibly different, including wearing hats. Obviously, you also didn't see women or many minorities out in the workplace in jobs........