The 70's: I Lived Through Them But Don't Remember Much

David Frum's book How We Got Here: The 70's . . . The Decade That Brought You Modern Life-- For Better or Worse takes a "conservative" look at the decade when the radical ideas of the '60s completely permeated American life, but it's an older brand of conservatism, one of "pragmatism, character, reciprocity, stoicism, manliness, hardness, vengeance, strictness, and responsibility"-- not the new corrupt, Machiavellian Trump/McConnell version-- so Frum acknowledges that great progress was made in many areas of human rights and expressiveness, but he also takes a hard look at the costs; Frum begins by running through the crime, the corruption, the many many scandals-- Watergate was the tip if the iceberg-- and the secrets: the Pentagon Papers, the revelations about JFK (wiretapping MLK) and Lyndon Johnson (starting the Vietnam War over the Tonkin incident) and Nixon, of course-- and the many many more from Tuskegee to plots with the Mafia and CIA to overthrow Castro, and J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA working without oversight, the FBI monitoring many many Americans-- often at the president's behest-- scandal upon scandal, crime upon crime-- this is when 60 Minutes was the number one program and for good reason . . . it made me realize that I grew up in the hangover of this tumultuous decade, the Reagan years-- so I missed out on all the fun, the sex and drugs and new age lingo, the superstition and narcissism and disco-- my generation got AIDS and video games and Reaganomics-- but we also got free markets and deregulation (for good and bad) and missed out on crime and terrorism and gas-lines and horrible inflation and general paranoia . . . Frum blames the turmoil of the 1970's, the terrorism, the smashing of values, the conflict of a demilitarized children vs. their militarized parents, on three things-- the Vietnam War, desegregation, and inflation . . . and while he acknowledges that many things in America were worse in the past-- the racism, redlining, the homogeneous society, the lack of economic creativity, the treatment of the environment-- he also takes the pragmatic conservative position that family and employment, and things like loyalty and conformity gave a purpose to many poor and embattled people, and that assimilation instead of fragmentation, while oppressing diversity, does help with order .. . the 70's was when modern America emerged, technological, diverse, environmentally conscious, litigious, regulated, rights-oriented . . . and while the pendulum may have occasionally swung back, the 70's moved the nexus and so "the past never returns, no matter how lovely it was-- but onward, away from the follies and triumphs of the 1970s and toward something new: new vices, new virtues, new sins-- and new progress."