(Admittedly, I was a teen-ager.) If there was any theme to that decade, it was the lack of a theme, of any higher meaning to events. I mainly remember longing to be somewhere else-it didn’t matter whether it was the future or the past. It’s as if the years had simply dropped out of one’s life and all that remains are bits and pieces of recollection.” In my memory, the seventies began in an atmosphere of antic nihilism- Mad, “ratfucking,” Richard Pryor-and ended on the downer of “malaise” and the hostage crisis. “The decade itself lacks a distinctive historical flavor. Preparing for a thoroughly ironic fin de decade party, Zonker Harris, of “Doonesbury,” raised his mug: “To a kidney stone of a decade!” “Try to retrieve the seventies and memories crumble in one’s hand,” the critic Irving Howe wrote in his autobiography. Unlike the decades that preceded and followed, the seventies seemed to have no plot: a mishmash of musical styles and fads, a blur of failed Presidents, a series of international fiascoes, a mood of cynicism and farce.
Photograph by George Rose/Getty.Īnyone old enough to have lived through the nineteen-seventies knew them as a long and often embarrassing anticlimax-a shapeless, burned-out interregnum between the high dramas of the sixties and the bright, hard edges of the Reagan era. His closing speech brought delegates to tears, and left many with a sense that they’d chosen wrong.
before the 1976 Republican National Convention.
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