I do wish more people around today remembered the early seventies, and how tacky, brazen, crass, vulgar and sarcastic those times were in their general tone. Between Kent State being the first major story to emerge in the new decade out of the intensely controversial war in Southeast Asia which seemed set never to end, followed soon after by the breaking of the Watergate break-in story and its subsequent (again, seemingly permanent) daily doses of new misdeeds and their coverups in the Nixon administration, the abduction and apparent flipping of Patricia Hearst from newspaper heiress to domestic terrorist and heist-gangster, the shooting of George Wallace and everything that had come of the very utterance of that name for years, and oh yes, there was terrorism, plenty of it: anti-war groups of American citizens going around blowing shit up, Cuban sympathizers hijacking packed jetliners…..
….all sort of an illustrative tip of an iceberg, as in, there were so many apparent reasons to stay upset and disenchanted with anything and everything which appeared to represent any established or traditional order of things, that such a general sentiment came to affect everything from entertainment to education to politics to family life, not to mention the onset of an epidemic lasting years of the worst tastes in hair, clothing and home decor ever recorded in human history. Anything to give an appearance of pushing back, showing dissent, trying to embrace some murky concept of a better future while aggressively rejecting the past with pure, mocking, consistent, all-encompassing, visible disdain; THAT was the early seventies.
George Carlin’s bit about “seven words you never say on television” in 1972 would have been inconceivable as a pop-culture mantra even a few years before; though the sixties are now remembered in cliched terms as being so rebellious and such a break with norms, the early seventies made the former decade look stodgy and puritanistic by comparison. If after 1972 anyone over the age of twelve could not recite “piss-shit-cunt-fuck-cocksucker-motherfucker-n-tits” to get a reliable laugh out of their peers, such a one would be regarded as hopelessly “out of it, man.” Rock-n-roll lyrics were bristling with lengthy and articulate treatises of rebellion, hedonistic apathy or sexual libertinism, the phrase “God is Dead” came to be as common a sentiment as “war is hell” or “life’s a bitch” as a way of expressing cynicism, as meanwhile returning veterans from Vietnam were greeted as “baby-killers” (a curious slur, in the dawning days of legalized abortion after January of 1973) while big-city police came to be more than familiar with having themselves referred to as “the pigs” in the course of their everyday duties. Publications such as National Lampoon and Mad Magazine made exclusive use of blistering, merciless derision of just about anything or anyone as the only means necessary to build broad and diverse readerships lasting years.
Et cetera.
Honestly, as passing eras of fashionable iconoclasticism go (all the above not even to mention the Prohibition times and their roaring twenties experienced by contemporaries as a time of moral anarchy and widespread lawlessness such as had never been conceived of), this current era of effortless, thoroughly middle-class (after all, this whole exercise is made possible by purchasing expensive technology and having the disposable time to utilize it in such a way) armchair sarcasm and verbal brutishness looks to me like not much of a match for various prior epochs of mass behavioral mayhem.
Not even close.
Certainly not worth taking anywhere near as seriously as folks are prone to do; a weird hobby of getting one’s knickers all in a twist over how bad a thing it is that people are getting their knickers all in a twist seems to have emerged, and no one seems to be applying any sense of proportion or historic context to what is going on today: purely a by-product of too much fingertip technology, apparently, for folks to be able to resist the urge to part company with their manners. By contrast, in such prior times as I mention above, no such buffers or advantages existed; if one were to behave in a way that others might take as controversial or norm-shattering, the only means of doing so were analog ones, and out in the open.
The anonymity and attendant impunity of forgetting oneself online today has no historic antecedents: if I’d wanted to shock somebody in 1972 as a pre-teen by reciting pissshitcuntfuckcocksuckermotherfuckerntits, odds are I would have had to do so in a way that would have my authentic identity directly revealed by the act, meaning that I would have at least needed to have myself convinced that there was a good enough reason to behave that way.
The early-70s sentiments of a world falling apart and nothing to do about it but bitch and whine and party hearty were everywhere: a lost war, a failing and corrupt presidency, an ongoing nuclear standoff with other ordinary people across the planet that nobody had any real reason to hate or fear nor they us, the unending bad-news assault on the senses that the mere act of picking up a newspaper deployed every single day; all these and much more, at least for the moment, in the early seventies passed as excuses to behave like ill-brought-up pre-adolescents with extremely poor taste in everything but rock-n-roll (go figure: the very best amplified popular music ever to emerge came from the times when striped skin-tight jeans, living-room walls of 12" mirror tiles and an endless variety of excruciatingly stupid hairstyles for both sexes, were also in vogue…)
But what is anybody’s excuse today?
Or is it just that folks know, thanks to the extremely sophisticated technology sold to them in bulk by a new generation of plundering monopolists passing themselves off as “progressives”, that they can get away with it?
Like my dad is always prone to say:
“This too, shall pass.”
