The 1970s: two views, poles apart

(Another repost from my own blog)

As I was a teenager during the 1970s, I have a fondness for the decade irrelevant of its actual merits as an era to live in. While working on my 1973-set fantasy Southern Discomfort I reread one book on the decade and read a new one.

They present such different perspectives they make a useful reminder that decades are not easily summed up. Black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, right-wing, left-wing, they all shape our perspective. Geography too. Richard Linklatter’s acclaimed Dazed and Confused was set in 1976, the year I graduated high school. It’s Texas students might as well have lived on Barsoom for all I connected with them.

The reread was Thomas Hine’s The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (On a Shag Rug) In the Seventies. Hine’s view of the decade is that the repeated blows of stagflation (stagnant wages + inflation), Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis left America uncertain about where it was going. But for a lot of people that was an opening: if the old ways weren’t working, why not try something new instead? New styles (“The seventies weren’t about bad taste, they were about rejecting taste as yet another form of authority.”), women’s liberation, sex manuals, mysticism and interest in the paranormal (one of the decade elements I played with in Southern Discomfort), consciousness raising, fashion revolutions (when the big names in fashion declared the miniskirt was dead, nobody listened), Our Bodies, Ourselves (“The book’s message is that the system has failed us, so we must come together to fix things, and our feelings while doing this are as important as the hard facts.”) and being open to people who wanted to go in a different new directin than you did. Even allowing for nostalgic bias, Hine captures a lot of what I like about the decade.

By contrast, Ron Perlstein’s  The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (part of a series looking at the American right wing through the decades) points out that faced with a chance to try new ways of doing things, a big chunk of America insisted they weren’t going to, and the hippies couldn’t make them. They wanted to believe America could and should be like the 1950s and hated being reminded otherwise. Nor did they want to deal with the implications of Vietnam, Watergate or the Congressional investigations that showed the CIA and FBI had spied on American citizens in defiance of the law.

Enter Ronald Reagan. As Perlstein sees it, Reagan’s genius was that he divined what voters wanted to hear and gave it to them (while Perlstein was writing pre-2016, it’s hard not to see a parallel with Trump). Yes, America was the greatest country on Earth. Yes, we could be proud of what we’d done in Vietnam. No, Nixon was not a bad man (in an eerie echo of 2019, Reagan even compared impeachment to “lynching.”) No, the FBI and CIA were great American institutions, it’s the people questioning them who are bad. Never mind that his stories were often lies and also made no sense (if unelected goverment bureaucrats are bad, why are the unelected bureaucrats running the FBI and the CIA so wonderful?), they reassured people they were right not to doubt, right to think there was no need to change and try new things.

Reagan got a considerable boost from PAC financing (they were new at the time), and from more sophisticated operations for polling and staying in touch with voters (it seems Sen. Jesse Helms was cutting edge with this back in the day). When Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the nomination in 1976, it came right down to the wire at the convention before Ford won, only to lose to Jimmy Carter (whom Perlstein sees as offering a similar feel-good snake oil to Reagan, though with a Southern flavor).

At 800 pages, the book is a densely detailed read — the blow-by-blow of Republican infighting was more detailed than I really needed to know, though as I’ve said before, that’s a matter of taste, not a flaw in the book. One detail that might be a flaw is that while Perlstein portrays Roe v. Wade as a flashpoint issue for the right wing, there was a lot of acceptance and support for legalized abortion on the right; it didn’t become the Big Issue until the 1980s.

What is a flaw in both books is the effort to shape pop culture to their themes. Hine argues that Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist both reflect the baby boom’s ambivalence about settling down and having kids. Perlstein sees The Exorcist as putting the modern woman in her place (even an independent single mom needs traditional Catholic ritual to save her little girl!) and lots of movies prove the 1970s sucked. Conspiracy theory films (e.g. The Parallax View) prove nobody trusted anyone any more; nostalgic films such as American Graffiti proved everyone wanted to live in another decade.

I don’t buy it (even though I’ve also described Parallax View as a product of its time). There were child-centered horrors before the 1970s and cynicism wasn’t new either; the entire noir subgenre of the 1940s and 1950s shows a corrupt world that can’t be completely redeemed. Not everything fits neatly into a worldview or an interpretation.

Reading both books make me very glad I didn’t try to make Southern Discomfort any sort of statement about the era because that would be way beyond my abilities. Decades are big and complicated … but in a way, that’s liberating for writers. All we have to do is carve off one small slice and make that real, not the entire thing; Dazed and Confused may not have worked for me, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true to Linklater’s past.