THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511171416
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRIS LAMB
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
You've read about it in the newspapers, seen it on television, and, worst of all, heard it on the radio. If we had recognized the signs earlier, maybe we could've done something. Now it's too late. We have to face the music - and the music is bad, really bad.
The '70s are back.
This was the decade the music died. This was the decade of disco. You thought that disco was dead, didn't you. So did I. We should've nailed a wooden stake in disco when we had the chance. Now it's too late. Could a Village People reunion tour be far behind?
Unfortunately, it's not just the music of the '70s that's made a comeback. It's the whole fabric of the decade: polyester. What's next - leisure suits? If you're not concerned by the sight of lime green leisure suits, then you weren't alive in the '70s. I was there, and take my word for it, it wasn't pretty. The whole '70s wasn't any prettier.
The 1970s were a period of transition between the liberalism of the 1960s and the conservatism of the 1980s. As writer Candi Strecker put it: ``The '70s were more than a feeling, less than generation: between LSD and MBA.''
But the '70s weren't just a layover between the weed of the '60s and the greed of the '80s. They had their own identity; unfortunately, it ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous. The '70s were banal and inane, but most of all the decade was ``mellow,'' to use the vernacular of the day.
But the 1970s weren't really a decade. The '60s, in spirit anyway, didn't really end until Richard Nixon resigned as president in 1974. The 1980s began when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. So the '70s only had about six years. What they lacked in time, they also lacked in substance.
The '60s had JFK, RFK, LBJ, Martin Luther King Jr., The Beatles, Bob Dylan, women's liberation, campus unrest, civil rights demonstrations, the Great Society, Kent State, Woodstock, the moon landing, and the '69 Mets.
The '70s had two words: Leisure suits.
Depending on your preference, the greatest contribution the '70s made to society was the designated hitter, disco music, light beer, right turn on red, and the swine flu - which killed more people than it cured. What the swine flu vaccine did for medicine, the lime green leisure suit did for fashion.
And what the leisure suit did for fashion, the American Motors Gremlin did for automobiles.
The Gremlin looked as if it were put together with spare parts whose warranties had all expired. In that respect, the Gremlin was the perfect metaphor for the '70s.
The '70s had the Chevy Vega, the Ford Pinto, the Mayaquez incident, Legionnaires' Disease, Three Mile Island, Studio 54, kung fu, platform shoes, mood rings, bad haircuts, biorhythms, CB radios, trucker slang, really bad haircuts and ``Have a nice day'' - arguably the most annoying phrase to become a part of our country's lexicon.
On July 4, 1976, the United States celebrated the bicentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In 200 years, the country had gone from the sure hands of Thomas Jefferson into the fumbling hands of President Gerald Ford, which blows another hole in Darwin's theory of evolution. The whole '70s were an evolutionary aberration, the result of chronological inbreeding perhaps.
Presidents often reflect their times. The '30s had Franklin Roosevelt. The '40s had Harry Truman. The '50s had Dwight Eisenhower. The '60s had JFK and LBJ. The '70s and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
But Ford and Carter never really seemed like presidents. They seemed more like substitute teachers, earnest but temporary, who merely kept an eye on things until there was a return to the natural order of things.
Nobody had to do homework during the '70s. Nobody had to do much of anything. Except get a bad haircut and drive to a disco in a Gremlin, listen to our CB radio, check our mood ring, and dance in our leisure suits between swine flu shots. A cup of buttermilk has more culture than the '70s. And now we read, see, and hear that the '70s are back.
Have a nice day. MEMO: Chris Lamb is an assistant professor of journalism at Old Dominion
University. by CNB