An Eighties Flashback

There's something inherently funny about Larry King saying in his most somber, most serious voice: "Terror: Day Three," as he did tonight. One pictured Larry's suspenders slipping off his shoulders and snapping into a knot around the base of his scrotum, cutting off the blood flow to both of his heads, as he grouchily informed us that he's off to Duke Ziebert's for crab cakes and he can't imagine the Toronto Blue Jays ever winning a World Series.

It took me back to the eighties. Those of you who remember his old radio show will know exactly what I'm talking about. For those of you don't, all I can say is, you had to be there. That was back in the Dark Ages before the internet, when Newseek and U.S News and World Report were hot snot, as opposed to lukewarm, vanilla swill flavored by NutraSweet (known to cause cancer in laboratory rats). (Those magazines sucked then, too, but I didn't know any better.) People actually watched Dallas and Dynasty and Tom Selleck did commercials for The National Review. Burp. Ron and Nancy were in the White House and the Soviets, bless their red hearts, were still around to make the Olympics more exciting than they are now. Oh, happy times. I'll never forget hearing the Nicaraguan Contras compared to George Washington and learning that ketchup was, indeed, a vegetable. Who says you can't go home again?

Who knew that my salad years were spent beneath the shadow of an insidious Texan cactus whose poisonous flowers are just now blossoming to kill us all? How was I to know? I was only sixteen. I just wanted to get laid! While I was mooning over some girl who wouldn't give me the time of day, a pre-cancerous lesion was growing, mushroom-like, in the dank manure of the American aristocracy. It was called George W. Bush, and it was absorbing the lessons of Reagan in their crudest, most simplistic and most logical form, biding its time until it could hammer them into our nuts with the sweating fury of Grover Norquist masturbating to a portrait of Barry Goldwater.

The music wasn't even good. Cindy Lauper? Madonna?

I want my youth back. I've been cheated!

Okay. I'll settle for having a rational country instead. Is that a fair trade?

Thank you, Larry King. Your dusty old lungs just took me back to the prom.