To have watched all of this unfold, on the big screen, right in the middle of puberty, was simply not fair.
If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun spoke directly to you. And what it said was: "You're gay now. Good luck." Immediately, a sweatier-than-usual Tom Cruise spins a volleyball on his finger— you know, the way nobody does—yells "Let's go," and your chest says "Yes, Tom, let's." And right away, we see that these boys play beach volleyball with the same steely-eyed intensity that they bring to showering. The stakes are high, because these are proud and sweaty men. They are being watched by their flight-school peers, who are as into it as they are, as into it as you are, though maybe for different reasons, but maybe not, the movie never really makes it clear. Consider them the cornerstone of your warm-weather wardrobe. The future's so bright... The Sex Pistols didn't invent punk rock. That honor goes to American upstarts at CBGB. But the Pistols deserve—and accept—the blame for bringing it to the 'burbs. When a teen turns up with spiky hair, a dog collar,and a leather jacket, the response is "What are you, the Sex Pistols?" It's a generic term now, like Xerox or Kleenex. The band blazed that trail. With flamethrowers. For use at a campsite, at the beach, or in your own backyard. These small but mighty items make hitting the road a whole lot easier.  On October 22, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson was signing a bill that he had shepherded through the Congress. It was not everything he'd wanted, but it was a significant bill addressing a significant national problem. Ever since the previous spring, when the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had deepened the national shell-shock, the country had been calling loudly for some kind of gun-control law. (There hadn't been one passed since the 1930s.) There had been a gun control act kicking around the Congress for several years, bulldogged by Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. Now, LBJ put his shoulder to the wheel. Several of the provisions he really wanted got lost in the sausage-making; there would be no federal national gun registration, nor would there be a national license requirement. But, in his address on the occasion of his signing the bill, Johnson was quite clear about what he perceived to be the magnitude of the problem, and about the nature of the political forces that forced the dilution of the eventual legislation. |
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