Archives

1980: Events and Inventions

Mar25

January, 1980. Over 5000 gold-diggers arrive in the interior Amazon jungle of Brazil, having heard about the discovery of a gold nugget at a place called Serra Pelada.

January 22, 1980. Andrei Sakharov, a prominent Soviet physicist and dissident, is jailed and exiled by the Soviet government.

“Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell—with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or the exchange of information.” ~Andrei Sakharov

'Mugabe' photo (c) 2011, neal young - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/March 4, 1980. Robert Mugabe is elected prime minister of Zimbabwe. Mugabe continues to rule in Zimbabwe to this day, although 2008 elections forced him to share power with two other men.
I read Peter Godwin’s book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, and was appalled by the tales of torture and suffering that make up a good part of that book.

April 12, 1980. Samuel Kanyon Doe takes over Liberia in a military coup, ending over 130 years of democratic presidential succession in that country. Doe and his associates kill President William R. Tolbert, Jr. and later execute a majority of Tolbert’s cabinet and other government officials. “President” Doe will rule Liberia for the next ten years until his assassination in 1990.

April 25, 1980. An American attempt to rescue the 53 hostages being held by the Iranians in the American embassy in Tehran fails when an American helicopter crashes in the Iranian desert. The rescue attempt had already been called off because of equipment failure, but the helicopter crash resulted in the deaths of eight American soldiers who were in the process of withdrawing from Iran when the crash occurred.

May 22, 1980. Pac-Man (the best-selling arcade game of all time) is released in Japan.

'PAC-MAN CE_screenshot7' photo (c) 2007, Gamerscore Blog - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

September, 1980. Polish workers win the right to organize trade unions and set up the central organization called Solidarity under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. Solidarity is the first non-communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact country.

September 23, 1980. Iraqi troops attack western Iran. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein hopes to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran and and has his army attack without formal warning. The Abadan oil refinery is blazing after being bombarded by Iraqi artillery and bombs. The United States and the Soviet Union are both remaining neutral in the conflict.

November 4, 1980. Republican challenger and former Governor Ronald Reagan of California defeats incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter to become the 40th president of the United States of America.

November, 1980. The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn, when it flies within 77,000 miles of the planet’s cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth.

Gringolandia by Lyn Miller-Lachman

May11

I must say upfront that the political agenda in this YA novel made me uncomfortable. Maybe that’s a good thing; we all need to have our assumptions challenged at times, especially political assumptions. However, I don’t know enough about the historical and geographical setting of the book, late twentieth century Chile, to know whether the author was portraying events and government actions accurately and fully or not.

That said, the book is set in Chile—Pinochet’s Chile. The CIA is the villainous corporation in the background, and protagonist Daniel’s Communist father, Marcelo, is the good guy. In 1980 when Daniel was only twelve years old the police arrested Marcelo because he was the publisher and primary journalist for an underground newspaper written in opposition to Chile’s military regime.

After his father’s arrest, Daniel, his mother, and his younger sister Tina flee to Wisconsin while his father remains imprisoned in Chile. Although the small family tries to influence the Chilean government to release Marcelo and other prisoners of conscience, they are also making a new life for themselves in Wisconsin and becoming part of “Gringolandia”, a land their father hates because of its support for Pinochet and his thugs.

When Marcelo is released from prison and rejoins his family in the U.S., there are problems that seem to keep multiplying. How can Marcelo recover menatlly and physically from the years of imprisonment and torture? What is he to do with his life now that he is free? Is Daniel Chilean or American, chileno or gringo? What about Daniel’s gringa girlfriend? Will she ever be able to understand what it means to fight against a repressive and dictatorial government? Can Daniel and his father restore the father/son relationship that was interrupted by his father’s arrest? Can Daniel’s mother return to a traditional marriage relationship after six years of independence in the U.S.?

The story edges into a kind of racism or xenophobia that implies that someone from another culture or country can never understand or relate to a native of, for instance, Chile. This premise is never stated, but it is there under the surface. Also, the ideas that Salvador Allende was a hero, the socialist saviour of Chile (questionable) and that Pinochet was a power-hungry and thuggish dictator (probably quite true) are basic to the story, and again, I’m not really prepared to evaluate the evidence for and against those characterizations. I have heard of the “desaparecidos” during Pinochet’s rule, from 1973-1990, and I’m sure that the imprisonment and torture described in the book were tragically common and standard practice in Chile at the time.

Altogether, Gringolandia was a good story, a useful look at one family’s immigrant experience, and an education in the politics, history, and culture of Chile. I didn’t like the ending of the story very much, but I felt it was realistic and probable for the characters as I’d gotten to know them over the course of the book.

Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt

Nov10

Better late than never, I just finished reading my fifth book for Carl’s RIP Reading Challenge, the challenge that was supposed to be done by the end of October. Now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure how “gothic, scary, moody, or atmospheric” it is. I’d describe it as more Victorian meets Post-Modern, and Victorian wins —maybe.

This tension between Victorian ideals and post-modern cynicism runs through the book because it’s really set in two time periods. A pair of 1980’s academics are investigating a mystery involving a pair of Victorian poets. The world of post-modern academia is shown to be cutthroat, sexually confused, and filled with social and intellectual angst. The Victorian literary world, on the other hand, is depicted as genteel, sexually confused, and filled with religious confusion and doubt. It’s the sexual confusion that’s the common denominator. For instance, witness this conversation between two female/feminist scholars:

Maud: Just at the moment, I’m trying celibacy. I like it. Its only hazard is people who will proselytise for their own way of doing things. You should try it.

Lenora: Oh, I did, for a month, back in the fall. It was great at first. I got to be quite in love with myself, and then I thought I was unhealthily attached to me, and should give myself up. So I found Mary-Lou.

The Victorians aren’t much better, but if I go into the details of their tangled affairs, I’ll give away some of the mystery. So, I’ll let it suffice to say the Victorian poets are no more straightforward and unambiguous about love, sex and marriage than the post-modern academics.

Another theme is that of how over-analysis destroys life. The Victorians analyze their faith and weaken its power to comfort or guide behavior. They also engage in the much more concrete destruction of life as they dissect insects and sea creatures and then use them as images and symbols in their poetry. The modern-day academics feel they must know every detail about the lives of the poets, but realize that in dissecting the biographical materials, they risk destroying the life of the poetry. The most intelligent of them also see that self-analysis, ala Freud, has inhibited the ability of men and women to respond to one another naturally almost to the point of extinguishing the possibility for romance. To the very end, the book explores the tensions between autonomy and commitment, between romantic idealism and hard-headed realism, between fatalistic determinism and individual choice.

Finally, though, it was the mystery that kept me reading. These Victorians and denizens of academia were foreign to me, even though I understood some of their concerns. I was, however, quite interested to find out the answers to various mysteries and questions raised in the course of the novel. In fact, I understood the characters’ obsession with finding out, with knowing the ending to the story, as well as I understood any of the complicated motivations in the novel.

One of the Victorian poets is writing a poem based on the myth of Melusina, a sort of mermaid/water spirit. The words that the other fictional poet writes about the Melusine myth are also true of this novel:

What is so peculiarly marvelous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic —and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales —the best of them— are solid— depicting the life of households and the planning of societes, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children.

Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. It was made into a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Ehle, Aaron Eckhart, and Jeremy Northam in 2002. I found the book to be intriguing and mysterious, even if the characters were a bit too tangled up in their post-modern anxieties and inhibitions to be truly sympathetic. If you’re looking for a “literary mystery,” it’s much better, and less gory, than The Dante Club, which was the first of my RIP books.