Epitaph for a Decade

By LANCE MORROW

A lost war, a discovery of limits--and good cause for optimism

The decade was erected upon the smoldering wreckage of the '60s. Now and then, someone's shovel blade would strike an unexploded bomb; mostly the air in the '70s was thick with a sense of aftermath, of public passions spent and consciences bewildered. The American gaze turned inward. It distracted itself with diversions trivial or squalid: primal screaming, disaster movies, jogging, disco, Perrier water, pornography. The U.S. lost a President and a war, and not only endured those unique humiliations with grace, but showed enough resilience to bring a Roman-candle burst of spirit to its Bicentennial celebrations.

Americans found it harder to live with the more profoundly threatening possibility that they might lose a way of life. From the Arab oil boycott of 1973 onward, the decade was bathed in a cold Spenglerian apprehension that the lights were about to go out, that history's astonishing material indulgence of the U.S. was about to end. Possibilities seemed to contract. Americans tutored in the gospels of progress began for the first time to peer at the future as a possible enemy. A few of them started waving pistols in the gas lines.

Gradually, the nation absorbed difficult lessons about the limits of its power and resources. The unprecedented defeat of American arms in Viet Nam coincided with other descending trends: the shrinking of the dollar (gold went from $36 per oz. in 1970 to a record high of nearly $520 per oz. last week), the nation's abject dependence on an imperious OPEC for two-thirds of its oil, a failure in the nerves and muscles that used to make friends and enemies docile.

Many of the themes of the decade were woven around the idea of diminution, of things running out. Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve Board, said last fall it was his view that the American standard of living would have to decline--a serious crack in traditional capitalist optimism. The '70s reverberated with dark prophecies. In 1972 the Club of Rome proclaimed "the limits to growth." Economist Robert Heilbroner preached the Hobbesian nightmare, hell on earth as resources vanish and social systems deteriorate. Another economist, Harvard's Wassily Leontief, gave the world only 20 years for a kind of last fling before its primary sources of energy are exhausted. That was the apocalyptic streak.

Yet, in a morally confusing contradiction to their mood, Americans for the moment never had it so good. Despite two recessions, their real disposable income rose 28.5% during the '70s (vs. only a little more, 30%, during the booming '60s). The wealth and variety of things they could and would buy were a wonderment: boats, Winnebagos, hair transplants, facelifts, sensitivity training, hot tubs, snowmobiles, automatic garage doors, video-tape recorders, sound systems, breast implants, tennis ball servers, openly sold pornography targeted to the most elaborate perversions. If an underclass was being left behind in the South Bronx (and the fire in the civil rights movement guttered out), most American consumers lived in a world of far greater opulence, variety and mobility than any generation in history. The economy, a $1.4 trillion-a-year wonder, pumped out enough goods to make the U.S. a seemingly endless bazaar.

In a sense, life-styles (a very '70s preoccupation) were the distinguishing characteristic of the decade. Social Critic Tom Wolfe, in a 1976 essay, called it the Me Decade, a term that caught the epoch's dreamily obsessive self-regard. The '70s were given over to building private, not public morale. Younger people at the end of the '70s, says Theologian Martin Marty, "have a beleaguered sense in their bones that the old order is dying. Very few want a radical alternative, but few also are working to develop a rationale for the system we've got."

The idea of self-respect (a quality that Americans collectively may have felt was slipping) was injected like hormones until it turned into truculent self-assertion; Robert Ringer's bestseller Looking Out for No. 1 was part of an entire I'm-terrific library of aggressive narcissism. Waves of self-awareness disciplines--est, Arica, Transcendental Meditation, Esalen, transactional analysis--set about fumigating, refurnishing and redecorating the inner space of the American psyche. A procession of shamans and gurus filled the air with earnestly fatuous vocabularies of psychobabble and mellowspeak that were the linguistic equivalent of artificial coloring in foods. It sometimes did not even avail to scream at the blissful; they would reply serenely: "Thank you for sharing your anger with me."

More sinister impulses flourished. While organized religion revived, the decade also felt insistent tremors of a low-grade chronic religious insanity:'young men and women were swallowed up by cults, a few then kidnaped back and "deprogrammed." This darker strain of American religious enthusiasm reached a culmination at Jonestown, where 912 of the Rev. Jim Jones' followers drank cyanide with Kool-Aid (or, a few of them, had death injected) and lay down to die with him in what looked like a Satanic summer camp. The Manson killings were emblems of the '60s' evil reaches; Jonestown had a similar black inexplicability in the '70s.

If much of the Me Decade's awareness crusade became a satire upon itself, the women's movement was serious about self-fulfillment, and had substantive results. The Equal Rights Amendment foundered three votes short of becoming law, but women went far toward transforming their roles in American life. They became miners, priests, jockeys, West Point cadets, ship captains and astronauts. They flocked to medical, law and business schools, and as they started to rise in their fields they began to change the sexual balance of power.

Some skeptics predicted a backlash against the women's movement, but it is yet to come. Abortion, which the Supreme Court made legal in 1973, became a bitter moral issue that provoked a powerful "right to life" movement. But other changes brought by the movement met less resistance, partly because they meshed with new economic necessities. Fifty-nine percent of U.S. women 18 to 64 now work, either because they wish to or have to in order to keep the household going.

The '70s did not destroy the family, but they permanently altered its structure. Everywhere, women--and increasingly, men --found themselves redesigning their lives as single parents. New sexual rules came into play. With a speed at least startling and at worst scandalous, the decade absorbed the '60s' extravagantly experimental sexual mores into the main currents of American society. Marriage became only one extreme of a range of possibilities from the casual date through living together and only then, more remotely, to marriage.

According to Joseph Epstein, editor of the American Scholar, "a few things ought to be said on behalf of the 1970s --not least among them that they weren't the 1960s." But for a number of years the 1970s were the 1960s--at least until, say, the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975. The '60s, which are often said to have begun on Nov. 22, 1963, lingered messily into the '70s, through Kent State, the Pentagon papers case, the McGovern campaign, the long, slow-motion parallel collapses of the Nixon presidency and the South Vietnamese Republic. The Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnaping of Patty Hearst also belonged in spirit to the '60s.

More typical of the '70s was the repeated theme of greed and corruption. In one poem, W.H. Auden described the '30s as "a low, dishonest decade." That verdict would apply to numerous episodes in the '70s: the various thuggeries of Watergate, the offenses that led Spiro Agnew to resign, Lockheed's worldwide bribery, the office employment policies of Wayne Hays. One of the more bizarre spin-offs of Watergate was its literary industry; almost everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, the Deans, Haldemans, Jaworskis, Ehrlichmans, Colsons and so on, sat down at tape recorder and typewriter and produced books to cash in on the scandal. A headlong rush to excess profits was joined in the '70s by oil companies, sports stars negotiating multimillion-dollar contracts and writers whose most meretricious junk could command seven-figure advances.

Fanaticism stained the decade as vividly as greed did. The U.S. cooled after its own violent '60s. The rest of the world suffered a long siege: 17 died in the Palestinian terrorists' attack at the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972. Twenty-five died when terrorists opened fire in the Tel Aviv airport the same year. The Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy turned life for European executives into a routine of paranoid precautions. Former Premier Aldo Moro was kidnaped and executed. With grotesque ingenuity, Italian terrorists practiced "kneecapping"--blowing holes in their victims' knees. Hijackers in the '70s forced every major airport in the world to search passengers and X-ray luggage.

The decade also had madmen working on a grander scale: Idi Amin, who slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people in Uganda; the Emperor Bokassa, who brought other homicidal variations on the heart of darkness to the Central African Republic. Millions of Cambodians and Vietnamese boat people were caught in the lethal politics of Southeast Asia.

For all its murderousness and mediocrity, the decade recorded numerous accomplishments although, typically, a lot of them went unnoticed in the undiscriminating cultural uproar. U.S. scientists enlarged the boundaries of knowledge in nuclear physics, biophysics, particle physics, biochemistry and electrooptics, among other fields. American plant biologists continued to develop the hybrid corn that remains one of this century's most important contributions to agriculture. Although the moon program was dismantled during the '70s, the two Vikings and two Voyagers probed Mars and Jupiter; now the Voyagers are proceeding to Saturn and then to even remoter reaches.

Material progress advanced handsomely enough, but the psychology of the decade seemed to follow a downward trajectory. A consensus was lost, and authority seemed to operate only erratically. The nation split into single-interest power factions. The screws of the American machine jarred loose; the whole thing rattled. Yet any such bleak view of the decade is not entirely justified. Norman Mailer has observed that Americans are obsessed by the question of whether they behave virtuously or not; the ambiguities of the '70s may disturb their moral self-image, and with it, their yearning for clear-cut conclusions. In fact, the U.S. on the whole behaved with considerable virtue, facing up to crises (a lost war and a broken presidency) that might have turned other societies rabid or anarchic. The U.S. has not been at war since it left Viet Nam, and if it has not brought conclusive harmony to the Middle East, it has led Egypt and Israel to live in peace. It has, more over, the forbearing and civilized in the midst of all the Ayatullah's provocations.

There is an impression now of national unity, a feeling that the U.S. is emerging from the privatism and divisions of the Me Decade. The lunacy in Iran has a lot to do with that, of course. But it may not be entirely wistful to hope that the mood will last, that the '80s may even prove to be the Us Decade.

--Lance Morrow

On the following pages TIME presents the decade's memorable moments and fancied faces. The collection ranges from the triumph of the Bicentennial to the debacle of Saigon; from the grotesque suicides of Jonestown to the burlesgue success of Evil Knievel's Snake River plunge; and from the worst of Hearst to a terrific Tiegs.

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