By Beth A. Robertson
It would seem the 1980s have come back with a vengeance, whether judging from the work of a growing number of historians investigating the decade, or pop culture.[1] My personal favourite of such popular reincarnations is the acclaimed Netflix original Stranger Things. The series unabashedly borrows from the 1980s to achieve its unique aesthetic, drawing on themes and plot lines familiar to anyone who’s watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Firestarter (1984), The Goonies (1985) or Stand By Me (1986). This is in addition to a brilliant typography that will genuinely thrill Stephen King readers.
Stranger Things is more than simply a salute to 1980s film and fiction, however. It also seems to capture memories of the eclipsing Cold War and the anxieties it unleashed, as well as the cultural conservatism, militarism and sexual discrimination of the era. The series references the controversial revelations of long-term CIA-funded experiments with LSD on non-consenting individuals in both Canada and the US.[2] It signals at the growing fears over U.S. military intensification under the Reagan administration, as well as government secrecy and surveillance in that period that seemed to mark “a return to the Cold War after the years of the détente.”[3] Combined with the homophobia of the villains in the series, as well as the conspicuously queer-like character “Eleven”, it also suggests the ongoing sexual policing in the 1980s, and the different ways people were forced to navigate their way around it, and sometimes outright resist.[4] When Eleven’s newfound friends dress her up as a “girl” before she goes out in public (reminiscent of a similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s E.T.), it serves as one of many moments when this theme rises to the surface. Here it becomes clear that the source of Eleven’s ‘strangeness’ is not merely the fact that she can throw moving vehicles in the air like miniature toys, but because she does not conform to normative conceptions of appropriate girlhood. Continue reading
More surprising is the way a second newly erected monument, located across the lawn from the Garden (and in the shadow of the War Museum), that also remembers blacks who died in the camps contradicts the Garden’s focus on national unity and nation building, at least if the nation being referred to is South Africa and not the Afrikaner nation. 
I don’t think anyone is going to claim that Neil Young is a philosopher. If he himself is to be believed, his turn to prose as a medium of expression is the result of dope. Or, more exactly, his decision to quit smoking dope which has, he says, had an effect on his ability to write music. And, like many aging — or, at times not aging — pop music icons, his subject is himself. Young’s Waging Heavy Peace (2012) came to me as a gift bought because it was so widely acclaimed. In short, if Young had turned to prose as a way to replace music, his transition had been successful. What interests me about the book, however, is not its snappy title, Canadian content (and Young is all about Canada), or the supposed insight into the rock-folk/country world he crafted over the span of fifty years. What interested me was how Young remembers the 1960s, what he does with those memories and what they might tell us about how the hippie generation has located itself in time. The text is, after all, subtitled “A Hippie Dream.” What was that dream about? And, where did it lead?