Recycled, or more likely reprinted, 1980 presidential campaign T-shirts? Seriously. People are wearing them.
I question whether the real reasons have been adequately explored:
1. Some people made up their minds in 1980 and have not used them since...sort of like the way my husband made up his bed, in the 1990s, and then announced that for his back's sake he was reclaiming his Indian heritage and sleeping on the floor. Except that that decision was good for my husband's bed and back. Minds need to be used and changed.
2. Seriously, some of us felt better about voting in 1980 than we have ever felt since. W Bush was cracked up to be the candidate most likely to restore the good things about the Reagan era, but nobody seriously believed he had a hope--nor had he. I'm not sure whether even a majority of Trump voters like Trump. I don't know how many Clinton or Obama voters really liked them, either. But Reagan just had too many unfair and unbeatable advantages when it came to being liked as a President. He aged well; he looked and sounded like the grandfather every family needs. He embodied the wit and physical courage and other good things we celebrate about being Irish. He presided over a period when every young American who was willing to work or study could get a job or go to college, often at the same time, conceivably even using the job to finance the college. And he was blessed with the chance to preside over the end of the supremely boring Cold War. It was impossible not to like Reagan and, in some ways, he could even be said to deserve his popularity. Nobody will ever crack jokes about his own near-fatal medical conditions, nor shed a tear of sympathy about someone else's untimely death, so well again.
3. Prior to 1980, political campaigns weren't advertised on T-shirts. If there had been Eisenhower or even Herbert Hoover T-shirts, some people would want to wear them.
4. People who voted for the first time (or two) in 1980 (or in 1984) were in demographic fact part of a baby bust, not of the baby boom itself. Some of those people identify as freshman or sophomore class baby-boomers, some as early Generation X, depending on how old our parents were and whether we spent time with older or younger siblings. As the image of baby-boomers now looks like the age of people who were born in 1946, some people who are currently between ages 55 and 65 want it to be known that we were the very last of the baby-boom generation, and came of age in the Awesome Eighties. Of which an iconic image was the Reagan campaign T-shirt.
Pooh. The message T-shirts I owned in 1980 said "Shape Up, Shape Up, Shape Up, Super Shape" and "The Best Girls Are From Gate City, Virginia." (I had outgrown a handed-down Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fan shirt, and my brother didn't want to wear it because I'd been seen in it.) I might still wear those but I will not be buying a reprint Reagan campaign shirt. Though my first presidential vote was for Reagan.
Not everything about the Sixties was terrific nor was everything about the Eighties awesome. The Eighties were, for example, the years when millions of us naively threw away the good old boring Ekco can openers that had been in our homes for fifty years, and bought new, trendy-looking can openers instead. Little did we know that the reason why these horrid objects looked so new and trendy was that they weren't built to open even a hundred cans before they stopped working.
The Eighties were also years when women who were actively aggravating their cramps by wearing high-heeled, pinchy-toed shoes transitioned, in just two or three years, from furiously denying that their job performance suffered in any way at an particular time of the month to furiously demanding that everyone else tiptoe around their disabling PMS. Those were interesting years to be a husband, child, or even parent of one, not to mention actually being a young woman..
Also, for part of the Eighties, nobody knew exactly what caused AIDS or how to avoid it. The Eighties were the decade when we lost Arthur Ashe. The decade when it took real physical courage for Dr. Fauci not only to study AIDS but to admit that the disease interested him because he was "gay." Because he'd been brave some people wanted to imagine that he was either honorable or intelligent. In some places it still took fortitude to claim friends on the other side of the color war, too.
Name a period of time in history, whether a decade or an afternoon, and if anyone remembers it that person will be able to feel nostalgic about it. Oh, the Thirties, when so few people had any money and your parents weren't among the few, but your family were rich because this one, that one, and the other one were still alive. Ah, the nineteenth of December of 1976, when a bundle of loud noise with a wet diaper on it started to grow into Tracy Smith. And sigh, at this time last week I was admiring a huge flock of female Blue and Tiger Swallowtails, with a few hangers-on from other species, flapping around a field of thistles, and realizing that this rare and lovely sight was a consequence of declining male populations of both species; these female butterflies had time for a kind of lekking behavior because they weren't finding mates and laying eggs. This sort of thing is natural and proper as long as it doesn't interfere with enjoying, and improving, the present.
"Say not thou, 'What is the cause that the former days were better than these?', for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this."
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