"Short, gorgeous bisexual feminist w/hips like a truck, seeks similar for talking, thrifting, wheat pasting, obsessive emailing, drinkin' and china pattern shopping. Must be happily trapped in non-profit ghetto, emotionally available and so small it hurts. No biphobic lesbians, boy crazy bis or diva trainees. Blood curdling sarcasm also completely unacceptable. Quakerism a plus."
My son James sent me this classified ad from the current issue of the Washington City Paper. That "Quakerism a plus" is the sort of touch that can't be faked. The ad is hilarious for a moment, and then sort of touching — toothsome and loathsome and (in some bizarre way) wholesome, all at the same time.
A strange world. Conservative critics (Robert Bork, for example) have said that it originated in the Big Bang of the '60s. But in a new book called "HOW WE GOT HERE — The 70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse)" (Basic Books, 418 pages, $25), David Frum offers a more interesting and more nuanced thesis.
There can't be many who remember the '70s with anything but amazement and disgust. In 1974, the columnist Joseph Alsop said glumly: "I have begun to think that the seventies are the very worst years since the history of life began on earth..."
When the '70s pass before my eyes, I feel myself sink again into the murk, sucked back into the violence and stupidity, the sleaze and failure, the narcissism and paranoia. It all comes back: riots at the gas pumps, terrorists on every flight, double-digit inflation, the last ignominious helicopters out of Saigon, the explosion of crime, the lousy cars from Detroit, Nixon's sweating upper lip as he says good-bye, the Club of Rome's gaudy apocalypse, the massive dumbing down of everything, and the perfect denouement — the Ayatollah and the hostage crisis.
Painful enough to think of all that history pratfalling like Chevy Chase; excruciating to remember the fashions (the collars and ties, the ultrasuedes, the double knit bell-bottoms and medallions, the comic blow-dry haircuts) and the charlatanism of the self-esteem indulgences (est, gestalt, bioenergetics, Krishna Consciousness).
Popular memory recalls the '70s as the bummed-out aftermath of the '60s, as if the '60s were the real circus. Frum, however, sees the '70s as the true transformation, the turning point when old America ended and new America, such as it is, began.
Frum seems to hate the '70s, but at the same time, to regard the decade as a necessary social shaking-out. He says the decade "left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant, less deferential, less self-confident, less united, more socially equal, less economically equal, more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual, less literate, less polite, less reticent."
True. But I think Frum may not be sufficiently aware of just how much has been lost in the shaking-out. In a way, the John McCain phenomenon registers a nostalgia for discarded virtues (duty, honor, endurance) — for an authenticity that the '70s did their idiot best to destroy.
I'm not sure which decade I would want to return to, if I had a time machine. I've lately gotten fascinated by the late '40s. But if someone ordered me to return to the '70s, I would pour sugar in the machine's gas tank.