Is It 1978?
In snarky response to my post of this a.m., CL, emerged from his regeneration chamber of pure evil, snarks: Boy, it sounds positively late-70s here on the FFB. Remember the coming population bomb, stagflation (has there ever been a funnier word?), Desert One, malaise, Dudley Moore? This too shall pass.
He ends with a Morning in America reference.
The weird cognitive dissonance you're experiencing now is that the Reaganesque Bush II has morphed into Jimmy Carter, which means that the next president will be . . . Reaganesque, except we've already had way too much Reaganesque policy, which means that the next president would be . . . Bush . . . except Jeb can't win after his brother has f'ed things up so badly . . . which means that the next president is Clinton . . . but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Plus, . . . weren't all those things true? There was stagflation. The population bomb just had a longer fuse than people realized in the 1970s. The choppers in Desert One did crash. And Dudley Moore (pictured, in bubble bath) made a number of films in the period in question, some of which still play on cable! As for malaise, that sounds like a condition swamping the GOP on Capitol Hill these days.
The other reason that this is not the '70s: the kids. Unlike kids in the '70s, who felt that they missed out on the real fun, in the '60s, and thus were always a bit backward-looking, the kids today . . . it's all about getting ahead, career, the best law school, the best grad school, and so on and so forth. When I was a kid, the hero was the anti-hero, the smart-alecky Bill Murray or Hawkeye Pierce. Now, it's a 179 on the LSAT.
Btw, a much funnier word than stagflation is booby, by which I mean the bird, especially the blue-fotted booby, and not any body part, heaven forbid. That blows the doors off stagflation. Just like the General Lee blew the doors off Roscoe P. Coltrane's car, or the Bandit's Trans Am blew the doors off Sheriff Bufford T. Justice's ride.
If we have to go back to the '70s, at least there's the terrible pop culture as an upside.
posted by Number Three @ 10:03 PM
1 Comments:
Sure those things were true, that's why I mentioned them and then said 'this too shall pass.' American seemed to be in a world of hurt in the late 70s and communism seemed unstoppable. (Hell, if you were on the Harvard faculty, communism seemed unstoppable in 1988.) But everything turned out okay, like that time the meteor was going to hit Springfield and Homer said that it would just burn up in the atmosphere to the size of a Chihuahua's head. That's what will happen this time, too. All our problems will shrink to the size of a small dog's head.
As for the comment on this coming generation, I'm not sure. The idea that all these kids care about are career and high LSAT scores is a bit of an overreach. From where I sit (knee deep in State U), Jay-Z and Fitty are as much admired as anyone else. We certainly don't want for anti-heroes in this culture. And the only person I know who approached a 179 writes this blog.
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