“Next we have Baby Jessica stuck in a Texas well…”

I remember sitting in the bleachers of my high school gym when Mr. Archer, my chemistry teacher who side-gigged as the public-address announcer at basketball games, extended a time-out to let us all know that Baby Jessica had been rescued from that well in Texas.  Everyone broke into emotional applause.  All of us in the cheap seats, the players, the coaches, the cheerleaders, the pep band, the referees… Everyone.

In retrospect—especially after things like Oklahoma City, 9-11, the financial meltdown in ’08, and the whole “invading the wrong country after a terrorist attack” matter—a toddler stuck in an eight-inch well seemed weird at best and inconsequential by any other standard.

But like I said, this was the 80’s.  And also, like I said, the 80’s were boring.  Epic Billy Joel songs aside.  Okay, the Challenger explosion was definitely a big deal. 

And Regan’s shooting, also a big deal.  Mostly because the assassination attempt generated a wellspring of sympathy for the President, and every member of Congress who thought Supply-Side Economics was the dumbest fucking idea since the Ford Edsel enthusiastically voted in favor of it.

People were outraged when John Hinkley, Jr. landed a sweet “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict.  And yeah, attempted murder is bad… But indirectly causing four decades of corporate feudalism ought to be worth at least a life sentence spent bagging produce, beer, and personal lubrication products at Walmart for a buck or two more than minimum wage.

Quickly I tried to place myself when Mr. Archer made the Baby Jessica announcement.  I couldn’t recall if I was still in high school or I had returned to the gym as a college freshman.  Most likely it was the latter.  Having struck out at every attempt to get laid on campus I threw on my senior letter-jacket one more time, crossed my fingers, went to that ball game.  That didn’t work out, either.

“Then we have the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas…”

Of all the things about the Waco-Whacko incident that still befuddles me, it’s hands-down the “whacko” part.  As soon as Paul finished speaking, I placed the moment in history.  April of 1993.  April the 19^th, to be specific.  That’s an easy one to recall.  First because the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City happened on the second anniversary of Waco, for obvious, and symbolic reasons.  And second, because I was sitting in the maternity ward at Ephraim General waiting for Bart to be born.  While my ex-wife groaned, occasionally screamed, and sunk her fingernails into the flesh of my hand, I watched the Branch Davidian Compound burn with rapt attention.

When James Jones lined everyone up in ’78 for that big Kool-Aid party, we later learned that hundreds of the would-be disciples actually wanted no part of a mass suicide.  Alas, held in line at gunpoint, they downed their “Black Cherry” and “Tropical Punch” Dixie Cups and wondered how in the hell they had gotten themselves in French Fucking Guyana with a couple ounces of dissolved cyanide at their lips.

By the same respect, I watched that hideous barn in Texas shoot torrents of fire out of the windows wondering how many of those poor bastards regretted the moment they threw themselves at David Koresh’s feet.

Coincidentally or not, one of the TV’s suspended over Grendel’s bar had shifted from Duke’s freshly completed thrashing of Wake Forrest and had switched to the news.  There, a replay from last year’s rally filled the screen.  And there, I watched again as the Republican nominee for President of the United States cocked his arm at and odd angle, let his wrist fall limp, and mocked the disabled Washington Post reporter who had called him out on his bullshit.

Behind him, hundreds of his followers gawked in admiration.  A pair of white-haired grandpas in thirty-year-old Arrow shirts under beige Carhart jackets grinned while dozens of middle-aged women sat next to their fat, bald husbands wildly shaking their “Make America Great Again” signs.  Rounding out the spectacle were the handful of Paul Ryan wannabes—draped in dark blazers which accentuated their groomed crew cuts—forcing smiles and masking their horror all those modern Alex Keatons must have clung to the dearest hope that…

1. This guy would lose, and…
2. If he won, he would grow up.

Yeah, I thought to myself.  Fat chance of that.  Those dumb bastards are going to be dropping their cyanide in Coors Light, decaf coffee, and sweet tea.

“And finally, we have the fall of the Soviet Union…”

In retrospect, those of us alive in the early ‘90’s all saw the U.S.S.R.’s implosion happening on a weird sort of slow-motion, instant-replay reel.  Sitting at my girlfriend’s house watching the cast of some long-forgotten ABC sitcom spinning an episode in the Soviet Union at the height of Glasnost, I laughed at the dumb, 80’s jokes, prompted by the cheap, canned laugh track.

But the fact that I was even watching this was profound.  Growing up the U.S.S.R. had been a kind of haunted house, a place you watched guardedly from the fence by the sidewalk and hurried past as quickly as possible.  Now we were seeing it.  The veils were lifted.  Sure, the placed looked alien in some respects—the dilapidated infrastructure and outdated cars standing as “Exhibit A” in that regard.  But the people walking those far away streets seemed all too normal. Many bore expressions of irritation, their eyes screaming, “Get your damn camera out of my face.”  Others turned profile to the cameras, let the film roll, sucked on their unfiltered smokes, and said, “Welcome to our shitty lives” with an ambivalent shrug.

I watched the news unfold from a TV mounted to the wall of my first classroom, during the first year of my grown-up life.  It was a day or two before school, and the old guard’s coup had failed.  In his victory, Gorbachev had all but declared that the “Evil Empire” was finished.

I suppose that was probably the catalyst that started all which followed.  I looked across the table at Jordan.  His face still lost in the glowing sheen of his pixelated lobotomy, he sat there unaware how different his world was from mine.  Here sat the sum and total of falling skyscrapers, desert wars, crashing stock markets, and oafish despots running for office.  I wondered what the kid would have been like had we sat at the same table thirty years earlier.  He’d probably still be the same swirling mixture of genius and stupidity that sat in front of me now.  Only, I’d be able to make more direct eye-contact with him.