marinelli's miscellany

I began this book in the spring of 1987 in the belief that America was passing through a period that increasingly resembled the moral slackness of the spendthrift twenties, a new Gilded Age, and one that, like then, would extract a price for its excesses. That belief has been borne out, but there the comparison ends. Unlike the twenties, the eighties were not a romantic period, and it’s doubtful that the characters who gave it special flavor will be remembered with nostalgic affection. Oliver North and Ronald Reagan, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Arthur Laffer and his curve, the yuppies and the LBO kings, the hustlers and quick-buck promoters—all typified a self-indulgent and imitative age when entertainers became public leaders and when celebrities, not pioneers, scientists, or artists, became cultural heroes.

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Haynes Johnson, in epilogue to Sleepwalking Through History, America In The Reagan Years.

[Excruciating personal subtext: My mother’s mother was the campaign manager for her county during Oliver North’s Senate run. Yes really.]