Skeptic Project

Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia
by Francis Wheen

Public Affairs, 352 pp., $26.95

Human beings happen to come equipped with two hands, each of which ends in five fingers, whereupon most cultures have constructed numbers on a base of ten. On top of that, journalism trades in stereotypes. So here we have biological and cultural reasons why the habit of branding the decades with adjectives is well-nigh irresistible. No sooner does a year end in a nine than the media are already chatting about what the decade meant, what defined it—there must be a theme in any ten-year-long pudding. The ’20s roared, the ’90s were gay (the 1890s, that is). This is a game everybody can play.

But not everybody can play it as a spirited romp. Francis Wheen, one of the brighter lights in English lit-journalism these days, makes a potent and rollicking case that the ‘ ’70s shrieked.’ Paranoia was the zeitgeist. From the spring in 1970 when Nixon invaded Cambodia, to 1979, when the Islamic Revolution drove out the Shah and Mrs. Thatcher threw the Labour Party out of power, everyday order went smash almost everywhere from strike-damaged Britain to culturally revolutionary China, from Idi Amin, who while murdering 300,000 Ugandans took time out to declare himself “Member of the Excellent Order of the Source of the Nile, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire,” to Frederick Forsyth’s African coup attempt to promote a novel (or was it the other way round?). The ’70s were a horror show, a pastiche of “apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever,” a freak show as crazy-sublime as it was murderous.

Full article: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-age-tackiness