Recessionary nostaglia

With unemployment levels reaching numbers we thought we’d left behind in the 80s, there has emerged a sort of nostalgia for the other things we left behind a generation ago. The ever excellent fashion journalist Hadley Freeman was recently asked to discuss the return of shoulder-pads in her column in the Guardian’s “G2” supplement, and in the same supplement Sam Leith later wrote about how apparently we were all happiest in 1976. The problem with nostalgia, however, is that we sometimes tend to remember fondly things that really should have stayed forgotten. It is therefore worth looking at various aspects of a generation past that could possibly find themselves exhumed, regardless of whether or not they should be.

Rubik’s Cubes

It’s hard to see this fad returning. It was utterly pointless in the first place, and you had to be a super genius to complete it anyway. Sure we have Playstations now.

Great bad music

Absolutely essential! We’ve become far too clever with our musical tastes since the Noughties, what with our Kings of Leon and Band of Horses or some crowd equally brilliant but not so much that most people have heard of them. I sometimes wonder if we deliberately seek out obscure bands just to seem cool when other people ask, “who?” I’m not for an instant saying I’m above this (or below this, depending on your perspective). My favourite band is Lambchop. On the other hand, we award mass-popularity to insufferably bland acts that for the good of humanity need to stop (© Coldplay, Snow Patrol or any Scrubs soundtrack). We’re a bit self-congratulatory when we remember music from the 80s, in that we consider it naff compared to our more sophisticated contemporary ears. Regardless, few can honestly deny the toe-tapping appeal of these songs and this is something we really need to get back. There has, admittedly, been some move in this direction recently, with the likes of Lily Allen and that Katy Perry song about a poor lad who’s hot and cold all the time (he should get a nice cardie), but I really don’t think these stand up to Grandmaster Flash and Kids in America, et al. We need bands to save pop music from Louis Walsh and reclaim the naff as an art-form again. This being said, there is absolutely no need to return to the television of the 80s. Recession or not, Knight Rider was always shit and we have The Wire now.

MTUSA

The rest of the world may have had MTV, but for the paddies it was all Music Television: USA. This was a show that guided 80s kids on the coolest new sounds and latest trends. We do have plenty of similar outlets today, but few that are free from unwitting self-parody and ironic bullshit of NME and whathaveyou. A music show that avoids being too clever for its own good would be very welcome in today’s age. However, the problem with MTUSA is that it was a product of an age when America was seen as a refuge in recessionary times, rather than, say, the sources of it. Today “MTUSA” provides an unfortunate acronym that may serve to reflect the state of the US Federal Reserve.

Moustaches

What I remember most from MTUSA was the presenter’s impressive lip-fuzz, a seemingly popular trend of the day. I recall several uncles who sported similar face-fungus at the time, as well as Kevin off Coronation Street. It’s impossible to say with certainty what caused this trend (it might have been Mangum PI, but who can be sure), so it would be foolish to think we’ll never see another outbreak. We can only hope this horrible condition is behind us.

U2 recording an album worth listening to

Irrelevant. It’s not going to happen.

Custard Creams

I recall biscuits in my formative years being a very simple affair. The criterion for a good biscuit was something mildly sweet that you could dip into a cup, and so custard creams, bourbon creams, or perhaps a Rich Tea satisfied us perfectly. If we wanted to splash out we’d opt for a digestive with cholocate on it, or perhaps even a Jammie Dodger. However, things changed when we started using the term “cookies”. Suddenly the simple biscuit wasn’t good enough. We demanded niceties with chocolate chips in them. They started putting hazelnut bits in them and we weren’t even satisfied with that. We demanded whole hazelnuts, in biscuits the size of saucers. The less likely that it would fit in a cup, the better. In a way, our tastes in biscuits symbolise our universal greed during the Celtic Tiger years. As the money came rolling in, we blew in on chocolate-coated trifles (figuratively but perhaps also literally). One hopes, now that our priorities are shifting, we will once again regard the humble custard cream with fondness.

Mullets

On last Monday’s Questions & Answers, one of the Dragons Den Dragons (I forget which one) argued that we’re wasting time squabbling over who’s to blame for the financial downturn, and that we should instead unite to concentrate on finding a cure. It’s a nice thought, but one easily dismissed. If we fail to establish the crisis’ causal factors, we’re only setting ourselves up for another bubble burst. I’ve already given an indirect example of this, by highlighting the continued risk of a resurgence of the moustache craze. Well, proof may come in the recent spate of Mullets around our city centres (I’m surely not the only one who’s noticed this). The trend stopped so we thought it had gone away for good. And now it’s back because we failed to address its root causes. Haircuts have as much to teach us about the recession as biscuits do.

Today’s top stories: Cheer up, you miserable gits

Today’s Sunday Tribune was just the most bizarre thing I’ve read in months. Ok, I can appreciate what they were trying to do, and given the moaning I’ve had about constant pessimism in the media I’d be a hypocrite for attacking a newspaper just for taking a positive stand. Some optimistic reports on this recession were certainly welcome. But jasus, they went a bit mad with the happy rays of sunshine.

In case you missed it, they called it “Guaranteed Positive”, complete with a suitable play on the old Guaranteed Irish logo. “Remember, the future we see is the future we’ll get,” warned Miss Hegarty’s editorial, which rather dramatically appeared on the front page. At least the splash was comparatively more composed in its buoyancy, with a headline declaring, “We’ll return to full employment within six years, ERSI predicts.” Uplifting, perhaps, but we really have to wait until 2015 to find a job. The front page item that really caught my attention, however, was a banner on the very top declaring the paper to be “an issue dedicated to positive thinking and a fresh perspective on the Great Recession”. So it’s the Great Recession now, not some silly, everyday recession unworthy of capitals. This was the most depressing angle on the recession that I’ve encountered so far.

The content within the newspaper did little to cheer me up. There were some interesting pieces on people whose businesses are picking up in recent month, second-hand clothes shops and renewable energy companies and the like. The problem with this is that, logically, if the economy does pick up, as they promise, these companies can expect a drop in their revenues. Worse is the “Why Irish eyes should be smiling” segments, where various Irish dignitaries provided a few paragraphs on the positives or our current condition. These range from somewhat qualified, highly specific reasons to be happy to downright fantasies.

I don’t have room to discuss them all, so I’m just going to highlight what I feel was the worst, that being one by businessman Gerry Robinson (I’m not sure if I’m supposed to have heard of him, but I haven’t). He claims, “We’re like a rowing boat badly rocked by a big storm that was not of our making.” Not true! This is a big storm that we are very much responsible for. In fact, we should grateful to the big storm for punishing us for sailing in waters we had no business in to begin with. After opening with the “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” paragraph from A Tales of Two Cities and asking if it sounds familiar (it doesn’t. This isn’t an age of wisdom in bad times. It’s an age of desperately groping around dark looking for exits but finding only deeper holes), he points out, “We’re hurt and we’re looking for someone to blame.”

He goes on, “Probably there are some people in Ireland who carry a bit of blame, but not many.” Wrong again. We are ALL to blame, every one of us. We allowed ourselves to be blinded by easy credit-based (ie, non-existent) wealth and as a result bankrupted ourselves. We also recognised the failures of our government in providing to our society’s weakest members (sick, elderly, schools, etc) yet voted for them anyway, because we were sure this was the crowd to keep us in pocket money. We tolerated wasteful spending of public money because, well, there was plenty more where that came from. And now there a backlash against the government because their bubble has burst. But guess what, we’re as much to blame as they are.

Of course Gerry highlights the inevitability of all this. “Things have gone wrong. They were always going to. The kind of success that Ireland has enjoyed simply couldn’t last forever,” he claims, admittedly quite correctly. However, if it was that obvious why did the government continue to rely on a housing market that was clearly heading for a downturn for its tax revenue? Why did we continue to raise wages under the guise of “social partnership”, fuelling inflation and making the country uncompetitive for multinationals? Why did we place blind faith in Seanie Fitz and the likes for our banking system? It’s true that there is an international banking crisis, yet even with this our banks look like that of a third world country. Even years before this banking crisis hit, foreign investors knew to stay out of Ireland.

The highlight of the paper for me is the “20 people who will save Ireland,” unbelievable as any superheroes yarn it’s made to resemble. I mean, Brendan Drumm, the man who couldn’t fix the health service during the good years, is now going to do this in bad times? There’s Bono, who they feebly speculate will move back the businesses U2 shipped to the Netherlands to avoid paying tax. And as for Giovanni Trapattoni, that’s just taking the piss.

I really hate to sound so cynical. I know there’s too much of that these days and I know the Trib was just trying to combat some of this. But devoting the entire paper to such up-beatism smacks of propaganda, the worst “Kitchener’s Army” kind of propaganda that sprung up during world wars to assure people everything will be tickity-boo if you just do your part. A level of this is of course needed, but the way it appeared in today’s Sunday Tribune is just misleading.