Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America

[Paul Mackin]

Yes, the 70s were when events of lasting importance occurred.   Opec  
gasoline squeeze,  Sexual revolution, Roe/Wade. Watergate. Pynchon's  
writing coming of age.

Maybe the 60s actually took place in the 70s.

That or in the 50s--Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, sit-ins,  
On the Road, Howl.

The 60s themselves were kind of a washout. Obviously no lasting  
lessons learned from Vietnam. The student revolution and anti-war  
demonstrations didn't do much to stop the war--the grownups got fed  
up with it of their own accord.


On Apr 16, 2006, at 9:44 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> The San Francisco Chronicle
> The '70s -- America's low point
> Reviewed by Joshua Spivak
>
> Sunday, April 16, 2006
>
> 1973 Nervous Breakdown
>
> Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties
> America
>
> By Andreas Killen
>
> BLOOMSBURY; 312 PAGES; $24.95
>
> Has America gotten over the '70s? Events from the
> once-overlooked decade still seem to haunt the
> country. Both the Deep Throat revelation and the
> wiretapping controversies bring to mind Watergate. The
> documentary "American Family" that ran in 1973 can be
> seen as the forerunner to the current reality-TV
> obsession. And of course plenty of people see the
> specter of the inglorious end to Vietnam in any
> American foreign activity.
>
> According to Andreas Killen's new book, "1973 Nervous
> Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of
> Post-Sixties America," the decade has had an outsize
> impact on American culture. Killen, an assistant
> professor of history at the City College of New York,
> locates the unlikely year of 1973, which he refers to
> as a low point in American history, as a watershed
> year. Arguing that a number of current cultural trends
> had their loci in the early 1970s, and especially in
> 1973, Killen explores some of the bizarre and
> sometimes overlooked events of the era: skyjackings,
> POWs, conspiracy theorists, cults, the early
> forerunners of reality TV and Andy Warhol's obsession
> with celebrities. Using Nixon's paranoia and the
> growing Watergate scandal as a thread throughout the
> year, Killen writes an entertaining, if not entirely
> convincing, cultural study.
>
> The book works well in its primary goal of tracking
> cultural trends, and ends in 1976 with the Patty
> Hearst affair and trial -- the ultimate amalgamation
> of celebrity, POWs, conspiracies, cults and reality
> TV. However, those expecting a full-out historical
> analysis of the early '70s will not find it here.
> Killen is heavily focused on the arts and
> personalities. For example, there are extended
> discussions on movies of the period, Warhol's
> superstar Edie Sedgwick and the glam rock band the New
> York Dolls, but the OPEC oil embargo and its
> devastating effect on the economy are barely
> mentioned.
>
> The work is divided into chapter-length explorations
> of trends. Some trends are fully presented and serve
> as a good study of the period. He takes the revelation
> of the Watergate tapes and connects them with a rich
> cultural brew of conspiracies, including some
> conspiracy-minded movies and the year's top literary
> work, Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." He also
> examines the bizarre fascination with cults, in which
> Lyndon LaRouche, the Moonies and David Berg (founder
> of the Family) all get to make an appearance. The
> focus of the chapter on cults is not on the bizarre
> and frequently dangerous ones but on the strange
> behavior of one of the leaders of the anti-cult
> crusaders, Ted Patrick. Patrick is quoted as
> describing the cult's mind-control technique as "an
> energy from the brain waves that comes down through
> the eyes. ... This is what E.S.P. is. They're teaching
> this in all the universities."
>
> However, others chapters lack both a full explanation
> and a historical perspective. A look at how POWs
> responded to being released after the Vietnam War
> splits the returning veterans into two groups: those
> who continued to support the war and America (in
> Killen's retelling, primarily the elite pilots) and
> those who were disenchanted after their experience --
> the drafted Army grunts. That there was a split in the
> POW ranks is definitely worth exploring. But outside
> of a few isolated quotes, Killen does not provide any
> real evidence that the second, disgruntled group was
> actually a significant minority rather than just a few
> people who could be quoted.
>
> In the same vein, Killen spends a chapter on power
> shifts. A major example is how political power moved
> away from places like New York City and began to be
> concentrated in the Southwest, especially southwestern
> California. While he provides an interesting story on
> the growth of Orange County -- and especially on how
> the city of Irvine was built -- he does not seem to
> fully appreciate that the migration of political power
> was a long-developing trend that had already
> manifested itself much earlier. In the 1964
> presidential race, both political candidates were able
> to claim Southwestern roots. In reality, the Northeast
> had been steadily losing power for years.
>
> Both of these chapters point to the hole in Killen's
> central thesis. Are the '70s more important,
> culturally or otherwise, than any other decade? Sure,
> some events had an impact. Some people use Vietnam as
> their reference point to advocate avoiding war and
> foreign interventions. Others look back several
> decades to the appeasement at Munich. Wiretapping?
> Look at the LBJ tapes. POWs, cults and brainwashing?
> All part of the Korean War. Did glam and punk rock
> have more of an impact than 1980s hip-hop? The reality
> is that it is pretty hard to single out any time
> period as a dominant one. And while Killen provides
> some good examples, it is easy to provide some
> counterpoints.
>
> A further flaw in the work is that except for the
> chapter on movies, the book mainly uses
> contemporaneous commentators, rather than people
> looking back with some perspective. Some of the
> comments are completely unhelpful. New Yorker critic
> Pauline Kael is cited for her comment that "the
> country has never been more star crazy that it is
> right now." Couldn't that have been said any time in
> the past hundred years? And, in the only sports
> reference Killen makes in a year of several noteworthy
> sporting achievements (the Dolphins' completion of the
> NFL's only undefeated season, Secretariat, the Ya
> Gotta Believe Mets, the A's), there is the obvious
> error in quoting a hagiography of Roberto Clemente,
> who died on Dec. 31, 1972, calling him "perhaps the
> most complete player of his generation." No. As every
> Bay Area resident can attest, that would be Willie
> Mays.
>
> It is clear that the '70s, like every other decade,
> had a real impact on America. In "1973 Nervous
> Breakdown," Killen provides and traces to the present
> some good examples of this impact. He also gives the
> reader an interesting primer on the American culture
> of the time and some nice vignettes on some otherwise
> forgotten phenomena. However, the book is a bit overly
> ambitious in its goals. Killen does show that the '70s
> were important, but there's no need to inflate its
> influence on America.
>
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/16/ 
> RVG2KI4PIN1.DTL
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com