Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America

[Dave Monroe]

>From Vietnam to the energy crisis, we're all still
living with the legacy of a particularly anxious year.

By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, April 30, 2006; BW02

1973 NERVOUS BREAKDOWN

Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties
America

By Andreas Killen

Bloomsbury. 312 pp. $24.95

If you're old enough to remember 1973 -- and if you
aren't, consider yourself lucky -- you know one thing
for sure: It was a bummer. Watergate, busing, white
flight, Patty Hearst, Andy Warhol, "Deep Throat,"
blaxploitation flicks, "Last Tango in Paris,"
Gravity's Rainbow , "An American Family," Vietnam,
POWs, the "Me Decade," Fear of Flying , the economy
down the tube, endless gas lines, "The Exorcist" --
was there anything good about 1973? Here's what
Andreas Killen has to say:

"Taken as a whole, . . . 1973 [was] a cultural
watershed, a moment of major realignments and shifts
in American politics, culture, and society. This year
marked not just the end of the sixties but the onset
of a debate, one that continues to this day, about the
legacy of that turbulent decade. At the same time this
year was alive with a sense of new possibilities and
openings to the future, harbingers of an emerging new
postmodern cultural configuration."

[...]

The repercussions of all this are still with us.
Probably not many people read Fear of Flying anymore,
and it would be amazing if Gravity's Rainbow is now
read anywhere outside of graduate schools or
especially self-flagellating book clubs, but the
sexual revolution of which Erica Jong's novel was
emblematic continues apace, with ever more distressing
ramifications, and the paranoia that is at the heart
of Thomas Pynchon's brilliant and unreadable novel is
still a central characteristic of American culture and
politics.

Nineteen seventy-three is perhaps best seen as part of
the '60s. Whether it was a continuation of that period
or the day the music died is for the likes of Killen
and other cultural commentators to debate, if not
decide. In just about every respect, though, it was a
lousy year, and good riddance to it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/27/AR2006042701958.html

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