The answers are at the bottom of the page. The first quiz follows.
Which Decade Is It, Anyway?
The object of this game is to guess to which decade--the 1960s or the 1990s--each of the following statements applies:
2. Extremists commit acts of violence in the name of a higher cause.
3. A Democratic president promises to keep American troops out of a foreign war. (Special bonus point if you can name two other decades to which this applies.)
4. Law enforcement officers are compared to Nazis for their handling of extremists.
5. Films and popular music reach new levels of violence and explicit sexuality.
6. Rock stars die of drug overdoses.
7. The deep South produces a political leader who uses flamboyant rhetoric to appeal to angry white voters.
8. The following, according to many social critics, are declining: family values, the environment, civility, taste, American manufacturing, race relations, and the middle class.
9. No matter what you think of their politics, talent, or intelligence, you have to admit that Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Joan Baez, and Warren Beatty look terrific.
10. Television is a vast wasteland.
11. Commentators fill the airwaves and the press with complaints about biased media.
12. Everyday speech is, like, littered with meaningless words and phrases, you know?
13. The Raiders play football in Oakland.
14. Taxes are too high, government is too big, and we really ought to do something about bad schools, declining cities, and a crumbling infrastructure.
15. There is a major African American march on Washington
16. There is a political crisis in Italy.
17. Hopkins searches for a new president.
18. The Woodstock rock festival is predicted to fail.
Lifestyle in the '90s Bonus Quiz
This quiz consists of a series of statements, followed by three possible ways of completing the sentence. Your response will be at least as useful as watching daytime television in helping you understand life-events in the 1990s:
2. The happiest moment of a parent's life is:
3. You know you are not aging gracefully when:
4. Teenage boys think the word "sucks":
5. You are not an intellectual if you read the following for its coverage of sports:
The bonus point is 1910s and 1940s, and probably other decades I was too lazy to check. With one exception, the answer to all of the questions is "both" in quiz 1 and "all three" in quiz 2. The exception is question 10 in the first quiz. The correct answer to it is "1960s." Television in the 1990s is a vaster wasteland.
Guido Veloce is a Johns Hopkins professor.