Should we fear be as fearful of those who "hate our freedoms" as much as our leaders say? Or are our leaders themselves the ones whose motivations and actions we should be skeptical of? It's about as blunt a post-9/11, Bush-era message as you could promote.īut Bodeen never runs with it like she should. Bodeen's debut young adult thriller The Compound is the question of where to direct our paranoia now. But pay close attention to the lyrics, and they communicate what was - in the 80's, if not 1999 itself - a genuine anxiety. Everybody thinks Prince's "1999" is just some wildass party song. It's a far cry from the omnipresent, existential tension experienced from thinking that the whole world could really come to a fiery, nuclear end in just an hour's time simply through the pressing of a handful of big red buttons. These days, global terrorism still manages to feel like a series of odd, isolated occurrences, and even when they strike catastrophically on our own shores, we see them as aberrations of the norm. I was a teen in the Reagan era, and it can be difficult to communicate to people who are 20-somethings twenty years on that in those days, one really did live with the lingering fear that one fine day the missiles might fly. Every generation breeds its own paranoia.
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