everything old is nuclear

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, January 9, 2003 2:03am

You know what? I really love retro! I just can't get enough of all that old stuff!

I know that saying that may brand me as "square" and "wack" (these terms themselves are retro ? I can't stop!), but sometimes I like to take a break from all that newfangled stuff and relish the good old days.

That's why I was so happy to see the recent Grammy nominations, specifically those for best male rock vocal performance.

Looking at the list of nominees ? David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, and Bruce Springsteen ? one can't help but notice that someone in the Recording Academy loves old music, too. Radical!

I mean, let's face it, rock has only gotten worse since we were young.

Which doesn't explain why Lenny Kravitz has won the best male rock vocal Grammy for the last four years in a row, given that he's no Don Henley or Eric Clapton in terms of rock.

But in today's topsy-turvy world, there are more important things than rock or roll, such as who exactly it is we're going to bomb the crap out of in the coming months.

Fortunately, if there's anyone who's a bigger retro fan than me, it's our president, George Bush.

I mean, we already had a George Bush presidency, so his being president is like some sort of magical time warp for all us retro fans. It's enough to make me want to coin a term like "pretrosidency", but that doesn't really work, you know?

Anyhow, check this out: Bush is such a retro fan that his cabinet is chock full of political blasts from the past such as Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Anthony Principi, Andrew Card, and Dick Cheney. It's like some sort of Circus of the Political Stars, but twenty years later! Awesome!

Which, of itself, isn't enough to earn Bush a True Retro-Lover^TM's membership card. Lots of politicians are as averse to new people as they are to new ideas.

But what really pushes Bush into the inner circle of ?ber-retrophilia is his saber rattling of late.

Not only are we currently embroiled in disputes with two countries we've already been at war with (and while I can't say I was really impressed with the Gulf War, I'm so psyched about having a Korean War II, because that almost definitely means M*A*S*H II), but Bush has gone so far as to bring the spectre of nuclear war back into our lives.

Sure, like most people, I'm totally psyched about the possibility of pre-emptively nuking the crap out of Iraq. (I mean, remember how cool those "daisy cutter" bombs were in Aghanistan? Kaboom! Well, think, like, a thousand times more kaboom than that!)

But as a retrophile, I'm not so concerned about the future as reliving the past.

And one of my favorite memories of the past was fearing nuclear war. I remember seeing on the TV news that the USSR and the USA were always tense, threatening each other like in a Charles Bronson flick or something. Tubular!

Some nights, I would look out my window at the Braniff airplanes flying overhead and worry that they were actually nuclear missiles coming to destroy my hometown.

I treasure those memories, which is why I'm so psyched that Bush is committed to bringing them back to reality! It's enough to make me wet my parachute pants!

I can only hope that Sting (who also deserves to win a Grammy because I really loved The Police) will rewrite his gnarly hit "The Russians" for this new era, just like Elton John did for that song about Marilyn Monroe. If you think about it, there was all sorts of great music that dealt with nuclear war.

So in lots of ways, this is shaping up to be a great decade. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades, as they say.