Some people say that the 1970s were a trivial interim between the Glorious Youth Revolution of the 1960s and Reagan’s triumphant Morning in America election. I’ve always said this underrates the Seventies (even just for the social advances in ‘women’s lib’ and ‘gay pride’, which were not trivial even for those of us not female or LBGT). Then again, the degradation of American political culture by the self-styled Moral Majority in th Eighties remains, IMO, second only to the Reconstruction in its awfulness. So I was intrigued by Dahlia Lithwick’s latest:
Last week Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia each grabbed headlines with controversial late-summer comments about the dysfunctions of the current Supreme Court. Speaking to a Montana meeting of the Federalist Society last Monday, Scalia—evidently alluding to the recent marriage equality decisions—opined that “[i]t’s not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.” (There is no transcript of the event, as usual, so we have to rely on contemporaneous newspaper accounts and Twitter reports). Then, in a rare and wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Adam Liptak later in the week, Ginsburg offered up the view that this past term’s Voting Rights Act decision was “stunning in terms of activism,” and that the Roberts court, “if it’s measured in terms of readiness to overturn legislation … is one of the most activist courts in history.”
Predictably, the left-wing blogosphere reacted with horror at Scalia’s implication that the courts had “invented” a homosexual minority. And equally predictably, the right-wing blogosphere exploded in umbrage at Ginsburg’s suggestion that the Roberts court is “activist” and that the Voting Rights Act case was wrongly decided. It’s not hard to spot some important parallels between the two free-range justices—the most famous legal frenemies of their time—and their controversial public statements about the Roberts court. Both Scalia and Ginsburg are among the most senior members of the court. Scalia is 77, and Ginsburg is 80. Each is doubtless beginning to feel that there is much they will not accomplish in their remaining time on the bench, and each appears ever more willing to achieve with dissents, speeches, and interviews what can’t be done in the four corners of a majority opinion.
More importantly, both seem to be longing for some long-gone judicial era: Ginsburg evidently missing her own activist days as a women’s rights litigator, and Scalia missing the Ed Meese Revolution when everyone agreed that judges were utterly useless….
It’s tempting to suggest, then, based on the recent comments of the two, that it’s a wash. If the court’s radical liberal bomb-thrower and equally radical conservative firebrand are equally frustrated, maybe the Roberts court is tacking precisely down the middle. That assessment would be precisely wrong.….
raven
The 60’s didn’t start until 65 and didn’t end until 75.
Schlemizel
@raven:
agreed – I think whatever decade people refer to usually is offset by 5 years in reality. I wonder what the teens will bring us?
raven
@Schlemizel: A world of shit!
TG Chicago
I went to the link to see how wingers could argue that the Roberts court was not activist. Sadly, the link wasn’t an explosion of umbrage at all. I have to believe that they could have come up with a more umbrage-splosiony link.
KG
history, i think, works in fits and starts. there’s progress then there’s some regression then there’s some more progress. some times history forces the progress and some times history forces the regression. at the end of the day, to borrow a line from Nixon, in all of human history, there is no time and no place that i’d rather live, than right here, right now… at least until tomorrow.
jacy
Whatever decade you first had sex is the best decade. ’80s win!
Trollhattan
@raven:
IMHO the ’60s “began” with Kennedy’s assasination and ended with the fall of Saigon.
KG
@TG Chicago: i haven’t been much in the FedSoc circles lately, but I’m sure the argument will be what it has been for a while… it’s not activist because it’s rolling back what activist courts have done previously, so it’s showing restraint. it’s a terrible argument, but it’s the one they’ve run with.
raven
@Trollhattan: There’s a vote.
PeakVT
The speed with which states like Texas and North Carolina sprinted to make voting more difficult in the weeks after the decision suggests that Ginsburg was correct in her assessment: The court badly misread the status quo.
A good piece overall, but Lithwick is being entirely too charitable here. The court simply made partisan ruling.
raven
@KG: I know this local couple that seem so progressive in so many ways but they are highly placed in the FedSoc. My brother the lawyer says they have to be evil.
Comrade Jake
All I have to say is: disco sucks.
Betty Cracker
The Moral Majority was heinous in its own right and professed themes, of course, but its true horror lay in its effectiveness in camouflaging the aims of its bank-rollers, which was wholesale theft of our national wealth and prospects. All the stuff about sluts, welfare queens, gays, etc., was just bread and circuses for the rubes.
Alexandra
@Comrade Jake:
You can ring my bell. Disco rules.
Anoniminous
Any decade bringing this to market as appropriate clothing needs to be buried in a nuclear waste landfill.
Trollhattan
@Comrade Jake:
Noooo, it was misunderstood, undervalued and brought people toge…who am I kidding, it sucked.
jeffreyw
What I want to know is: Who the fuck thought that squid ink flavored puppy chow was a good idea?
raven
@Alexandra: Disco sucked, some of the music is pretty good now!
Well I’d like to know. . .
Amir Khalid
@raven:
When I hear Americans say something like that, they usually see the JFK assassination as the start of the 1960s and the fall of Nixon as their end. What do you see as the bookend events for the 1960s?
raven
@jeffreyw: Look at the little fella. . .
I like your Owl too!
Chris
@Trollhattan:
Interesting; I’ve always seen the sixties starting in, well, 1960, because to me (and many more), President JFK is one of the most iconically “sixties” figures there is. (This is the pop culture influenced vision of someone who wasn’t born until the late eighties, mark you).
raven
@Amir Khalid: The day I went in the Army in 66 and the day we unassed Vietnam. That’s just me.
Trollhattan
This certainly raises the bar for polite and open discussion of historical people and events.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/26/laura-ingraham-celebrates-march-on-washington-5/195590
Ha-ha-ha, what a cutup she must be at parties.
jeffreyw
@raven: I got a rash of shit for using a flash to shoot that owl. Probably deserved.
SFAW
@jacy:
Well, if that’s the determinant, then I’m REALLY looking forward to 2021+.
I hope.
Anoniminous
@raven:
And me.
People’s reaction, opinion, etc. to that goddamn war laid the basis for everything else.
raven
@jeffreyw:
Mine
with flash
without, under attack
Comrade Jake
@Trollhattan: on any other network, she’d be fired for that. At Fox, they’ll throw her a party and use any criticism of her behavior as more evidence for the plight of whitey.
SFAW
@jeffreyw:
Jeffrey –
Well, I ‘spect it’s better than puppy-flavored (or puppeh-flavored?) squid ink pasta.
Soylent Puppeh? oops, wrong thread.
raven
@Anoniminous: My drill sergeant laid the basis in my ass.
Trollhattan
@Chris:
FWIW, while a wee lad I wuz I think of the Kennedy years as the ’50s set on “11.” Daily and pop culture were an extension of the Eisenhower era, which his murder essentially all ended in a single stroke.
Somebody more erudite than I, such as David Halberstam, will have a far more nuanced take. For me it seemed as though 1964 kicked a large boulder off the summit of a very tall mountain, with Vietnam the main theme woven throughout all that happened afterwards.
Rex Everything
The 70s kicked the 80s’ ass by most measures. The only things that were better in the 80s were hip-hop and videogames.
The 80s sucked, and in many ways they never truly ended. We’re still in a Reagan-dominated nightmare. The anti-government, anti-labor, pension-eating, bubble-inflating, deregulating, public good–despoiling, Ayn Rand–worshipping bloc has only gained strength, momentum, and dominance.
KG
@raven: there’s a rather big split within the FedSoc. There is a very strong libertarian streak there (see Ted Olson, for example). There’s also a very strong traditionalist streak. But mostly, it’s just lawyers who want to meet other lawyers, maybe some judges, network, and get some MCLE credits taken care of.
SFAW
@PeakVT:
That implies that they didn’t do it on purpose.
Comrade Jake
This TPM headline is a piece of work:
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/video-pat-robertson-says-san-francisco-gays-deliberately?ref=fpb
lamh36
MEDIA ALERT: TONIGHT ON PBS, THE PREMIERE OF THE DOCUMENTARY: THE MARCH…commemorating the 50th March on Washington with archival footage of the March and video from organizers, speakers, and others who were present at the march. WATCH IT WITH YOUR KIDS.
THE MARCH | Participant personal remembrances | PBS
lamh36
Media Alert: PBS Documentary: THE MARCH…commemorating the 50th March on Washington with archival footage of the March and video from organizers, speakers, and others who were present at the march. WATCH IT WITH YOUR KIDS.
THE MARCH | Participant personal remembrances | PBS
jeffreyw
@SFAW:
SFAW
@KG:
Microsoft Certified Legal Eagle?
gogol's wife
@raven:
Right.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve always thought the basic horror of the religious right lay in the fact that it was a blatant 2.0 version of the old segregationist power bloc and cultural values, suddenly made presentable again after the most half-assed repackaging in history, which didn’t fool anyone, but provided the paper-thin veneer of respectability that allowed polite society to openly take them seriously again.
gogol's wife
Akhmatova famously said that the “real twentieth century” began in 1914.
lamh36
Tonight 9/8c
PBS Documentary: THE MARCH | The day of the event | PBS
SFAW
@jeffreyw:
I’m more of a cat person, but that is one cute puppy. Thanks very much for the photo!
lamh36
Tonight 9/8c. PBS Documentary:THE MARCH
THE MARCH | Harry Belafonte organizes March attendees | PBS
THE MARCH | Kennedy administrations’s concerns | PBS
KG
@SFAW: mandatory continuing legal education. FedSoc events usually are in places that serve alcohol…
SFAW
@Comrade Jake:
The Onion files for Chapter 7, says “reality” is more fucked up than their parodies.
gogol's wife
@SFAW:
What’s Chapter 7?
SFAW
@KG:
That explains why some of Nino’s “opinions” seem like he wrote them while shit-faced.
SFAW
@gogol’s wife:
Liquidation
gogol's wife
@SFAW:
Never mind, I googled it. Another popular misconception? It’s actually Chapter 7, not 11?
gogol's wife
As for 70s versus 80s, I had a lot of fun in both decades. Music was better in 70s than 80s, but not as good as 60s.
Chris
@Rex Everything:
I kind of like the movies of the eighties. Star Wars and the new Star Trek movies technically started in the late seventies, but shaped the eighties movie scene quite a bit… then Indiana Jones, Back To The Future, Lethal Weapon, Terminator… even quirky little movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit that have no equivalent today.
And a lot of my favorite TV shows, too. MacGyver, the A-Team, Airwolf, Magnum.
Horrific as they were from an economic and political point of view (especially when viewed from 2013), the eighties produced a lot of my favorite pop culture.
(The hairstyles were, of course, atrocious).
SFAW
@gogol’s wife:
I think 11 is for protection from creditors while you try to get your act together, but one of the pettifoggers here will perhaps correct me
Suffern ACE
I kind of think the fifties started when the Soviets got the bomb and ended with the Cuban missile crises. And the sixties ended with OPEC, and pretty much everything since then has been about people whining that gas used to be a nickel.
jeffreyw
@SFAW: Here! I have for you a kitteh! Freshly fluffed!
lamh36
Ugh…!
The Clearest Sign Yet That Hillary Clinton is Running
bemused
@raven:
Wow. I love, love the owl without flash photo. Stunning. I’d definitely put that on my wall.
Keith G
The 70s were every bit as revolutionary and consequential as the 60s. Starting with Kent and Jackson State shootings, the resultant campus disruptions nation wide, Busing riots, longshoreman and coal miners strikes, the UFW’s Salad Bowl strike.
There were a lot of things to do, a lot of fights to fight. Stonewall in ’73. By ’76 a judge in Columbus, Ohio ordered the police there to stop arresting gay folk for simple PDA’s. The fight for the ERA
The (cultural) end of the 70’s has a double exclamation point for me.: January 1981, Reagan is sworn in and the first patient in the US to die of AIDS.. Later that year was the first time that I read an account of a deadly, little known “Gay” illness.
Botsplainer
@jacy:
Yeah, but in the 70s, we had a buncha unsafe, dirty ol’ casual sex and D&Cs were freely available. No worries about resistant infections, AIDS was unknown and the herpes epidemic was way off in the horizon.
gogol's wife
@raven:
Those are amazing.
gogol's wife
@Keith G:
Good summary. That’s true to my recollections.
You really have to live through history to understand it! It makes me realize how little I understand of the nineteenth century, even though it feels to me as if I live there.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Keith G: The 80’s started in 1978 with the Briggs Initiative and Prop 13 in CA.
Rex Everything
@Chris: I don’t hate 80s movies. But I have far more favorites from the 70s. I enjoy the movies you listed, but I don’t really like how dominant they became, how post-1977 they went very quickly from being a novelty to being the typical movie. Have to disagree with your assessment of Roger Rabbit as a “little movie”: its budget of $70 million exceeded anything made the previous decade.
Also, maybe it’s just possible that Roger Rabbit has no equivalent today, but the other movies you mentioned—Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Back To The Future, Lethal Weapon, Terminator—not only have current equivalents: they’re virtually the only kind of movies Hollywood makes anymore. Whereas the great films of the 70s are practically a lost art.
bemused
@Comrade Jake:
At least Robertson isn’t an elected legislator such as Louis Gohmert who spouts just about any crackpot conspiracy theory out there.
Keith G
@gogol’s wife: I have a lot of affection for early 80s Post Punk, New Wave, and New Romantic movements in music. I think they fit the mood of the time very well.
SFAW
@jeffreyw:
Beautiful. But doesn’t running the kitteh through the dryer lead to so much static electricity that the kitteh defibrillates itself? And isn’t that dangerous if the kitteh isn’t having a cardiac “event”?
scav
Hey Pat Robertson! I hear Christians deliberately spread lies with their sharp tongues!
scusi. needed a randomrant.
Steeplejack
@Amir Khalid:
I would go cultural rather than political: the ’60s really started with the Beatles (’63-64) and ended with disco (’73-75?). But that’s close enough to Kennedy’s death and the fall of Saigon to match pretty well.
gogol's wife
@Rex Everything:
Yes. I was naive enough to think this was going to be the norm.
MomSense
I have learned that people do not experience decades the same way.
MomSense
@jacy:
Ha! What if it wasn’t good sex?!
Higgs Boson's Mate
The Sixties were over by late ’67. That’s when Lord and Taylor began selling hippy-influenced clothing, love beads could be bought at Woolworth’s, and “hippies” began to appear in shows like “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie.” By then Hashberry had become a sewer of opportunists and shops dedicated to selling genuine hippy stuff to the tourists.
gogol's wife
@MomSense:
Good question!
Steeplejack
Damn, the New York Times Web site has been down for a few hours, and TPM says it is experiencing an “external attack.”
In what I am sure is a related phenomenon, I got an “Account has been suspended” message when I tried to come on here an hour or two ago.
Rex Everything
I first had sex in 1987, but Physical Graffiti was on the turntable. 70s win.
jeffreyw
@SFAW: Kitteh has learned to discharge static buildup by touching the puppeh.
raven
@bemused: It was pretty low light.
Rex Everything
@Steeplejack:
I got that too.
Keith G
@MomSense: If one is a teenager and it’s consensual, is there such a thing?
raven
@Rex Everything: My knee-jerk was always that 70’s movies sucked until I watched “A Decade Under the Influence”.
JGabriel
@Rex Everything:
Politically, the 80’s sucked and we’re still suffering. No argument there. But as a college DJ in the 80’s, I gotta say the indie/alternative music scene was pretty great, along with the hip-hop scene you already mentioned. So it was a pretty good decade for music.
Pretty much everything else about it blew rancid chunks though.
.
Rex Everything
@raven: “70s movies sucked”—are you kidding?!
I will NOT make a list. I won’t. I won’t. It would just be too fucking long…
Trollhattan
@raven:
It’s The Owl of the Damned!
Have had owls fly past me out of the dark (GODDAMN WHAT WAS THAT?!?), have seen them captive, and have listened to them while camping, but have never spied one just hangin’ out in a tree. Darn it.
Chris
@Rex Everything:
“Equivalents” yes, but rarely as good as the originals, IMO. This may just be a case of saturation, and movies following in the footsteps of the eighties movie franchises instead of blazing their own (cue criticism of the mania for sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots and adaptations).
Also in the movie department, forgot to mention, the long overdue turnover from Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton (still my favorite Bond, Daniel Craig before Daniel Craig was cool).
raven
@bemused: Look what they did to the back of his head. They attacked him all day.
Rex Everything
@JGabriel:
Yeah, that’s true. Good point.
SFAW
@jeffreyw:
Clever girl. (so to speak)
Cacti
The 70’s reaped the first real harvest of the Southern Strategy, which Nixon rode to 48-state romp of George McGovern. Watergate merely slowed its ascendancy for about 5 years.
raven
@Trollhattan: This was weird, he was in the area for a couple of days and then, one morning at daybreak, there was an incredible ruckus outside. I contacted a wildlife friend and he explained that it was “mobbing” behavior. I guess owl’s eat lots of other birds so they gang up to chase them away. He got nailed by crows, bluejays and all kinds of other critters and I just stood and watched. They’d dive bomb him (I keep saying him but I have no idea) and whack the shit out of him and he’d just take it. Every now and then he’d move. Next day he was gone.
bemused
@raven:
I like it…doesn’t have to be technically “correct” to be beautiful to me. It has an ethereal feel.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Jake:
That’s nice, but the 1970s had slightly more music than disco. Unless you’re going to dismiss Zeppelin and Floyd, you need to get a better criticism of the 70s than its music.
bemused
@raven:
Oh my…poor stubborn owl.
I have to show these to my youngest son who is constantly taking outdoor/animal photos. He really wanted to take some photos of a rutting moose destroying a tree in their campground on Isle Royale late one Sept night but didn’t dare make a sound. He and his girlfriend plus two other camping parties didn’t take a breath until they were sure the moose was far away. Pretty scary.
Trollhattan
@raven:
Do you think he was a resident, or was he perhaps moving through on migration?
Know at least one winery who put owl boxes in the vineyards. They’re apparently very good at pest control.
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
Who were both formed in the 1960s.
Cacti
Speaking of the 70’s, the quintessential 1970’s band was…The Eagles.
Barf.
Trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Oh, yeah, there was a TON of great music. But the latter half of the decade was commercially dominated by disco and country, at least in the clubs and bars where I lived, to the exclusion of all the music that excited my ear.
Which isn’t to say we wouldn’t drag ourselves to the Mabuhay Gardens to see the Dead Kennedys or X, but the drive home was another thing entirely.
Cacti
@Trollhattan:
I’ll never forgive the 70’s for making Don Henley and Glenn Frey famous.
The 70’s were also the decade that killed Duane Allman.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@raven: I peg the 60s as dating from Kennedy’s assassination to Nixon’s resignation.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
So what. They both made their real musical impact in the 1970s. For example, which would you consider a more significant album by Floyd: Ummagumma or Dark Side of the Moon? A Saucerful of Secrets or The Wall? More or Wish You Were Here? Zeppelin released I and II in 1969, and the rest of their discography in the 1970s. Not even close, either way.
raven
@Trollhattan: I really don’t know, we see them from time to time. There are many more red tailed hawks that live in the hood.
raven
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Yea, seems like it’s pretty personal. The night JFK was shot my buddies and I hung out in front of the closed drug store. I peg it by my own experience, I was a punk ass suburban Chicago kid who ended up in the Army at 17. Seeing racism and racial conflict up close started the wheels turning at two years overseas pretty much sealed the deal. America was a lie.
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
You have a stronger argument for Zeppelin.
With Pink Floyd, the band formed in 1965, and released their first 4 studio albums before 1970. I have a hard time calling them a 70’s band when it goes that far back into the previous decade.
If we go strictly by quality of output, the Rolling Stones put out two of their best albums in 1971 and 1972, and The Who in 1971 and 1973.
raven
@Cacti: How bout Lez Zepplin?
Omnes Omnibus
@Cacti: Eh London Calling was one of best albums of the 70s and one of the best albums of the 80s. Released in late ’79 in Britain and early 80 in the US.
Cacti
@Omnes Omnibus:
Same thing with The Wall (released November 30, 1979).
raven
@Cacti: This is my brother’s Floyd cover band.
SiubhanDuinne
@Trollhattan: Yup, those are precisely my own bookends for the ’60s.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Weird, for me, the 60s began the summer after Kennedy was assassinated.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anoniminous: It’s no accident some of us refer to the 1970s as “the decade that Taste forgot.”
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus: I suppose it all depends on your age and experiences at the time. In the summer of ’64 I was newly married, but it (the marriage, my husband) was very wound up with the JFK assassination (we were in the jewelry store ordering our rings when the news came across). It was my personal life and the country’s political life and the dominance of the media all colliding, and it changed everything — far more, I might add, than the usual “everything changed” of 9/11 that we usually hear about. Although again, I imagine that depends on one’s own outlook at the moment.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Well, since I was born that summer, my experiences prior to it were rather limited.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus: I was afraid you were going to say that. You can just shut up now, August 3rd or no August 3rd.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: I was in freshman history class with Mr Hollister at Willowbrook. He broke into tears and cried “Where do we go from here”?
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Sorry.
Stella B.
Disco my ass. In 1974 I was 15. On the seventh day God created Bruce. Bruce would eventually convince Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall. Ronald Reagan my ass. You people don’t no nothin’ about the 70s and 80s.
raven
@Stella B.: Fucking baby-son.
Ajabu
As somebody who was in L.A. making most of the R&B hits of the time, I can tell you that 70’s music was the real deal. LTD, The Manhattans, Marvin Gaye. Not to mention Earth, Wind & Fire, Bill Withers, Michael Jackson & Stevie Wonder.
Music (and politics) all turned to shit when my former governor became president.
And the 60’s definitely began with the JFK assassination. Before that was an extension of the 50’s.
But, hey, what do I know? I just lived through it.
Ajabu
Of course, that’s all predicated on Black music. I don’t know a damn thing about Rock…
SFAW
@Ajabu:
So you’re really talking about the 50s? You know – Elvis? Pat Boone? And the Beach Boys in the 60s, too.
patroclus
To me, the 60’s started with the Freedom Rides and ended with Woodstock. The 70’s started with the invasion of Cambodia and ended with the malaise speech and Thatcher’s victory, which foreshadowed Reagan’s victory.