WILL AMERICANS TURN INWARD? (Study The 1970s)

If you think the national mood is low now, go back to 1973-76. Gas prices doubled in 1973. Stocks fell 48% between January 1973 and December 1974. The American vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned in disgrace in November 1973. President Richard Nixon followed in August 1974. Saigon collapsed in April 1975 after U.S. armed forces withdrew from a war they were not permitted to win.

In November 1976, Americans elected as president a man almost no one outside of politics or the state of Georgia had known just one year earlier. Democrats captured 61 seats in the Senate, some of them such pacifists they wanted to shut down the Central Intelligence Agency. The Democrats took two-thirds of the seats in the House.

Economic growth was distinctly out of favor during the 1970s. America’s bellwether state, California, had a governor, Jerry Brown, who spouted Zen Buddhism and slept on a mattress on the floor. Jerry Brown liked to recommend a book called Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher.

A “consensus” among correct-thinking scientists and environmentalists during the 1970s was the world’s oil reserves would run dry soon, possibly by the 1980s and surely by the 1990s. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, worried about the resource drain, told college students that getting married and having babies was immoral. Newsweek ran a cover on the latest boogeyman, global cooling.

Thus does our current mess look like the 1970s more than anything. There are some notable differences, of course: House speculation, poorly understood credit derivatives, crazy leverage, bad accounting rules and lax SEC enforcement created today’s woes. In the 1970s, it was oil shocks, inflation, tax bracket creep and a growing welfare state. Those differences aside, we seem to have wound up in the same place. We are led by a government that once again (1) distrusts markets, (2) embraces oddly contradictory Keynesian deficit spending for growth and Malthusian limits to growth (except for the government) and (3) is run by a president with a deep regard for his own virtue.

Then as now, the U.S. economy will recover. But it is hard to imagine anything stronger than a tepid recovery–occasional bright periods of growth interrupted by numerous mini recessions, oil shocks and so forth. On the whole, this will produce European-style growth of 1% to 2%. If you doubt this, then think of the American industries whose top companies will shift capital and creative energy from growth investment to regulatory compliance: banking, for one. Automobiles. Oil and gas. Electric utilities. Pharmaceuticals. Picture yourself at a board meeting at any top company in these fields. You will hear defensive talk overwhelming growth talk.

How did ordinary Americans cope in the 1970s? Many turned inward. Writer Tom Wolfe captured the decade’s mood in a 1976 essay called “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Wolfe used the term “awakening” as satire. What Wolfe described was far from the religious awakenings led by Jonathan Edwards in the early 18th century or by the abolitionists of the 19th century. Rather, the great awakening of the 1970s was a national plunge into self-absorption.

These were the years of psychological analysis, self-therapy, the jogging craze and cults. “Everyone, it seemed, had an analyst, adviser, guru, genie, prophet, priest or spirit,” writes the Web site, eNotes. The 1960s sexual revolution hit Main Street in the 1970s, and divorces exploded. So did sexually transmitted diseases.

What happened during the 1970s was that the first wonder of the world, human energy and creativity, got diverted from serious economic pursuits to trivial pleasure pursuits. Tax, regulatory and inflation hurdles made economic pursuits, on balance, too bothersome for too many during the 1970s. I am reminded of the movie Cabaret, about debauched and inflation-ridden Germany during the 1920s. Hollywood period movies are never solely about the historical period portrayed on film. They are also statements about present. Cabaret debuted in 1972.

Not all Americans wasted their energies chanting “om” or swapping spouses. Some brave souls started companies. Federal Express, Southwest Airlines, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, Apple, Genentech, SAS Institute, Oracle and others were launched into the headwinds of the 1970s.

The same thing could happen again. One hopes, anyway, and crosses his fingers. As feckless as President Jimmy Carter turned out to be, he had the virtue of being an entrepreneur himself–a peanut farmer. He had the wisdom to know that deregulation could be better than regulation. Hence, Carter deregulated America’s airline and trucking industries and let them compete on price.

Barack Obama is not an entrepreneur. No one close to him is. Not a single aide, adviser, Cabinet member or House committee chair. Obama almost never mentions small businesses in his economic speeches. It is clear that he would like to divert some portion of America’s human creativity away from private economic pursuits and toward community building. That’s just who Obama is, and it can be a noble goal. But Obama won’t achieve it. The lessons of the 1970s are clear. When you put barriers in front of private economic gain, you won’t get more community gain. You’ll send a nation off a cliff of self-absorption and trivial pursuits.

The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening

... She had repressed the whole squalid horror of it-the searing peanut-until now. The trainer had said, "Take your finger off the repress button!" Let it gush up and pour out!

And now, as she lies here on the floor of the banquet hall of the Ambassador Hotel with 249 other souls, she knows exactly what he meant. She can feel it all, all of the pain, and on top of the pain all the humiliation, and for the first time in her life she has permission from the Management, from herself, and from everyone around her to let the feeling gush forth. So she starts moaning.

"Ooooooooooooooohhhhhh!"

And when she starts moaning, the most incredible and exhilarating thing begins to happen. A wave of moans spreads through the people lying around her, as if her energy were radiating out like a radar pulse.

"Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhl"

So she lets her moan rise into a keening sound.

"Oooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

And when she begins to keen, the souls near her begin keening, even while the moans are still spreading to the prostrate folks farther from her, on the edges of the room.

"Eeeeeeeeeooooooohhhhhhhhheeeeoooooooh!"

So she lets her keening sound rise up into a real scream.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiai!"

And this rolls out in a wave, too, first through those near her, and then toward the far edges.

"Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeohhhhhhhhhheeeeeeaiaiai!"

And so she turns it all the way up, into a scream such as she has never allowed herself in her entire life.

"AiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!"

And her full scream spreads from soul to soul, over top of the keens and fading moans...

"AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHaiaiaiaieeeeeeeeooooohhheeeeaiaiaiaiaiaiaaaaAAA AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!"

… until at last the entire room is consumed in her scream, as if there are no longer 250 separate souls but one noosphere of souls united in some incorporeal way by her scream....

"AAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!"

Which is not simply her scream any longer... but the world's! Each soul is concentrated on its own burning item... my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other until there is but one piercing moment of release and liberation at last-a whole world of anguish set free by...

My hemorrhoids.

Another bit which grew out of the 1970's:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

"I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

I remember the 70’s as a grade schooler, sitting in my darkened school room, half the lights shut off by Government edict, shivering in my coat as the thermostats were set at 55. Adult members of my family split their day between unemployment lines and gas lines. My parents struggled more each month to give us the basic necessities, and the daily news was all about the Soviets, Iranians, or some other international thugs pushing us around.

And oh yeah, there was that Disco thing....

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?! You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

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