AlterNet: Blame It All on the '70s?

[marmar]

Blame It All on the '70s?

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted December 30, 2007.

Author Thomas Hine argues we're still suffering from that "slum of a decade" that brought us gas lines, pantsuits and shag rugs.




If the left and right agree on almost nothing else, we agree at least on this: America's in terrible shape. Such shocking shape that -- how did we come to this? -- it might not actually survive.

And there our dialogue dissolves. The things about America you diagnose as lethal are the very things your megachurch-belonging cousin with the rifle rack in his truck prays might save its life. And vice-versa. Gay rights. Abortion rights. Prayer in the schools. Environmentalism. Corporations. Porn. There the shouting, and possibly shooting, begins.

How did we come to this? It's the '70s' fault, writes Thomas Hine in The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007), a richly if incriminatingly illustrated book about a traumatic "slum of a decade" in which "the country was running out of promise."

Well, the '60s were a hard act to follow.

"Only a decade before," Hine muses, "as the nation anticipated the conquest of space, the defeat of poverty, an end to racism and a society where people moved faster and felt better than they ever had before, it seemed that there was nothing America couldn't do." Flash-forward through Watergate, gas crises, helicopters escaping Saigon -- and "to live in the seventies was to live in a fallen world, one of promises broken and trust betrayed." Hine ticks off that decade's insults to heart, mind and eye: "The politicians were awful. The economy was awful. The insipid harvest gold and avocado kitchens were awful." Ditto gas lines, AMC Pacers, and pantsuits.

Nearly everyone who lived through those years would nod, flinching.

An eternal question about any era during which one was young is: Was the whole world embarrassing, or was it just me? As regards the '70s: It wasn't just you. A longtime design critic -- thus more sensitive than most to beanbag chairs and Bicentennial-patterned carpeting -- Hine painstakingly skewers pyramid power and Virginia Slims in chapters whose pop-culture-referencing titles evoke the chronic inferiority complex of those disappointed times: "Running on Empty," for instance, and "It's Too Late," and "Not Ready for Prime Time?"

http://www.alternet.org/story/71914/

[hobbit709]

1. It's Disco Duck's fault

:rofl: :rofl:

[bryant69]

2. Oy. The late seventies also brought us punk

And Disco wasn't as bad as people pretend.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[marmar]

5. Agreed. I like a lot of disco.....

I was born in '72, so my first strong memories of the 70s are of the disco era....and I sometimes wonder if the great backlash against disco was tinged with racism and homophobia. Disco united the races and sexual orientations, and I'm sure that didn't sit well with a lot of people.


:think:

[bryant69]

7. I've been thinking that too - the biggest stars were largely black, gay, or european. n't

[ixion]

3. you can't pin it on a single decade

You can point to items in ANY decade that have been precursors of our ultimate downfall, all the way back to the Pilgrims landing near Plymouth Rock.

There were good things and bad things about every decade. The reason we are standing on the brink is that, collectively speaking, we are craven idiots.

[SpiralHawk]

4. Expect a stern letter from the AMSADD*

*AMSADD = American Society Against Disco Defamation

[Didereaux]

6. the 70's might very well have set the stage for the present predicaments...

Social activists are noted not only for their zeal and fervor, but more darkly for their lack of staying power. Many of the social reforms of the 60's were half-baked or unproven, most needed lots of twiddling and fine tuning. Education being the BIG loser was thrust into a downward spiral of yearly adopting the latest fad 'method' and so never quite got around to educating again...as one example. Unfinished civil rights was another. Whatever the changes they were left adrift in the 70's when the reformers ran out of steam and their short attention spans redirected what was left. SO how did this set the stage for the horrors of the Neo-CONS?

It energized them, they wrote plans, but most of all the general disgust of the public allowed them to recruit and indoctrinate. The mindset of individuals who subscribe to 'security over freedom' have the opposite character flaw of the social reformer, the fascist does not quit, they hide, plan and wait for their opportunity, the followers wait for the leaders to signal. The fundamentalist religious fervor got a double injection of adrenalin when not only did the public excesses of the 'flower children' bring on the strong oders of brimstone, but most strangely of all so did the search by the psychadelic crowd for a god of some sort...Beatles Mahareshi days for instance. When the drugs ran out their psychological needs did not and a large number crossed over into the evangelical realms. The old saw about the 'reformed whore' is couched in a great deal of truth.

So all in all when you factor in that there always is a percentage of religious-fascist personalities in our society, together with the serendipitous appearance of a large number of drug hung over 'enlightenment seeking' types you hve well and truly set the stage for Dick Cheney-Donald Rumsfeld, the talking chimpanzee et al.

[bemildred]

8. The 70s were the70s because of the Vietnam debacle.

The waste, the corruption, the killing, the destruction, it all came from the stupidity of the wannabe imperialists and the crappy job of running things they did. And they still blame the people, not themselves, the ones who had the power.