Joe Queenan writes in the NYT:
There are three kinds of revisionism. Marshaling cunning arguments to prove that James Polk is a vastly underrated president is tendentious but doable. Trying to convince skeptics that James Carter is a vastly underrated president is willfully contrary. Contending that James Buchanan is a vastly underrated president is flat-out nuts. But of the three, arguing that Buchanan should be up there on Mount Rushmore is by far the most fun, because if you’re going to be a revisionist, you might as well swing for the fences.
In “The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies,” Thomas Hine, the widely published design critic and author of “Populuxe,” has adopted a cautious, sensible approach to re-evaluating our most maligned decade. Rather than speciously contending that the 1970s were a great period in American history — the way pop historians like to argue that the Huns and the Vandals were classy chaps victimized by negative Roman spin, or that Phil Collins rocks — Hine simply suggests that the ’70s were not as bad as most people think. Conceding that the ’70s were characterized by bad hair, bad clothes, bad music, bad design, bad books, bad politics, bad economics, bad carpeting, bad fabrics and a lot of bad ideas, he reminds us that the decade was nonetheless the spawning ground for many of the attitudes and values that define our society today. This is neither a radical nor an original theory — we all know that feminism, gay rights and a morbid obsession with fuel efficiency grew out of the ’70s — so in the end Hine has succeeded in writing a thoughtful, fair but somewhat derivative book about an era that was completely outrageous. A wild and crazy guy, he is not.
In a certain sense, Hine has exhumed a cadaver that was never interred. Because of cable TV, an innovation that really took off in the 1980s, “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” “Maude” and “The Jeffersons” have never gone away; nor have disco (“Saturday Night Fever: The Musical”), punk (Ramones regalia everywhere), heavy metal (Ozzy Osbourne), bell-bottoms (“That ’70s Show”) or Abba (“Mamma Mia!”). Like the absurdly mythologized ’60s, the reliably clownish ’70s have never been given space to recede into the past the way the ’40s did, in part because ironic hipsters (“The Simpsons”; “Family Guy”; the concept of “jumping the shark,” inspired by the Fonz) are forever going back to heap fresh ridicule on an era no one ever took seriously. Reading “The Great Funk” is like revisiting a nightmare many of us never awoke from in the first place.
Reasonably comprehensive, if not encyclopedic, and filled with pictures that are worth thousands of the author’s words, “The Great Funk” covers most of the major bases: Watergate, the energy crisis, hot pants, drugs, “Deep Throat,” polyester, revolting facial growth, “Star Wars,” Day-Glo baseball uniforms, the Village People, Carlos Castaneda, big hair, streaking, Bobby Riggs versus Billie Jean King, gay rights, geodesic domes, Jim Jones, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” midi-skirts, the decline of classy cars, the rise of Gerald Ford. Unlike the ’60s, dominated by charismatic politicians, the ’70s were dominated by crooks and nebbishes, so it was pop culture that set the national agenda. That culture was narcissistic and silly, its values immortalized in Charles A. Reich’s enormously popular “Greening of America,” the book that best captures the apocalyptic fruitiness of the era. In a passage defending that book, Hine sets forth the central thesis of his own work:
“Reich’s mistake was to interpret minor, transient phenomena as bellwethers of permanent, positive change. Bell-bottoms were, he said, a way of expressing personal freedom, the delight and beauty of movement, and a rather comic attitude toward life. He wasn’t wrong about that, but he seemed to think that people would be wearing bell-bottoms forever.”
Seemingly relieved that this did not come to pass, Hine continues:
“Yet the book does not deserve the derision with which it is often remembered. Though much of his evidence for a cultural revolution proved to be fleeting, Reich nevertheless identified some important and lasting changes in the society. He saw that what emerged in America during the late ’60s was not, as many believed, a political movement, but a social and cultural one. … The openness to experience and respect for differences that Reich observed became so much a part of the American ethos that, today, it’s obligatory to say you share such values, even if you don’t.”
And thus, compassionate conservatism.
