Real culture wars

Glenn Reynolds points to this excellent Austin Bay article which notes the similarities between today and 1983 when leftists were braying about Pershing missiles. The Soviets and their useful idiots were at full cry on that one. And there were some interesting developments on the cultural front that year too.

Remember 99 Luftballons by Nena? It was probably the last song here in the US that was available in two languages but was more popular in its original German. In English:

99 Red Balloons

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'till one by one they were gone
Back at base, sparks in the software
Flash the message "something's out there"
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
And focusing it on the sky
The ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine decisions treat
Ninety nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The President is on the line
As Ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine knights of the air
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a super hero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
Ninety nine red balloons go by

As ninety nine red balloons go by

Ninety nine dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If i could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go

In the same year we also had WarGames

In director John Badham's WARGAMES, Matthew Broderick stars as David Lightman, a young hacker who accidentally logs on to the Department of Defense's network. Thinking that he's found a cool new computer game manufacturer, David plays checkers, chess, and other more intriguing games like Global Thermonuclear War. Realizing that their system has been tampered with, military operatives arrest him. However, the computer continues to play the "game" of thermonuclear warfare without David and generates the very real threat of World War III. In an attempt to prevent global disaster, David and his girlfriend, Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), search desperately for the scientist who designed the system before the goverment computer initates a full-scale nuclear war.

Are we picking up a message yet? And why didn't we ever see protests about the Soviet missiles?