Um…no.
More like this:
Or this:
I feel so foolish - why did I think this was a Poe story?
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And now I need to go back and watch that one again…
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Never saw it.
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Some uncomfortable animation:
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“Unemployment insurance is extremely important, but it is not designed to encourage you to stay home; it is designed to get you through a trough until you can get back to work,” McConnell said. “I think you can certainly assume we will not be paying people a bonus for staying home in another bill.”
In other words, “I need the poolboy to get back to skimming the leaves out of my pool.”
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and “if he dies, he can be replaced.”
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All you lazy fucks that just lost your jobs in this pandemic that we congressmen clearly saw coming and did nothing to stop need to just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!
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Like these modern day Horatio Algers:
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Not Nixon? 
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Nixon always seemed to me to be more of a petty criminal compared to the kind of “let’s tear down the whole country” mindset of Reagan and Gingrich. The seventies seemed (to me) to be a period of hope for the country, but it all went to hell. Maybe I was just younger.
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Yeah, but a lot of the movers and shakers in the Bush 2 white house started out with Nixon…
As a historian of that period… it was not.
I feel that way about the 80s, but I also study that period, too… so…
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I have to wonder what a compare-and-contrast analysis of the periods would look like, but that would probably be an impossible undertaking given the variables and possible biases. 
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Good question… it’s probably not an easy question to answer. There are good and bad in both decades, and how historians measure “decades” isn’t necessarily in the 10 year chunks we think of… and given the two decades are so close together in time, and there are still interconnected processes playing out over that period (the end of detente for example, and the subsequent rise in tensions between the US and Soviets… the economic uncertainty of the 70s playing a role in how Reagan was able to make his arguments for deregulation of banking, for how the music history of the period overlaps, etc. I guess you can make an argument that at least the first couple of years of the 70s are more like the 60s, and postwatergate, it’s kind of a changed period?
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And all of that is before you get into looking at regional variations, since the country isn’t entirely monolithic, and some parts of the country probably have ongoing influences from other parts of the world that would change things…
On the other hand, something that actually tried to take all of that into account might be a heck of a read. 
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It would… Most people are still obsessed with the 60s, but some are starting to study the 70s and 80s more.
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For me, growing up during the 80s, it was a time of bright colors and optimism. Everything was Rad, but hadn’t yet gone eXtreme, we were past the muddy 70s and had flashy trapper keeper art and hadn’t yet plunged back down into the earth-tones and grunge 90s. And it was the time of yuppies, who could, thanks to Reagonomics, go on to be super successful because there would be plenty to go around for everyone. I could be one, any of us could, that’s how it felt.
Of course, in retrospect, we can see how badly Reagan’s policies failed us, but at the time there was no ‘tear down the country’ mindset. More the opposite. He was telling Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. It was all a very upbeat vibe. We were winning the Cold War, everything was going to be great.
20-30 years later, we would start to see the effects of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, and how awful they were, but at the time, it mostly all seemed good. Hindsight’s 20/20, but it seemed like even people who disagreed with him just thought he was being dumb or senile, not actively malicious.
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There was a dark current, though. Fears about nuclear war, homelessness, the war on drugs, the AIDS crisis… Of course, if you’re a kid growing up, you’re going to see much less of all that kind of stuff, but it was still there.
Also… MTV?
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Perhaps I saw the 70’s better because I was younger and less cynical.
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