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After lurking on my list of books to read for a couple of years, Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed finally came home with me from the library recently. Well worth the read.

Subtitled The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia, Wheen’s semi-casual stroll through the the decade just before I started to become aware of the world around me was fascinating. The author gives emphasis to America and Britain, but works in an adequate sampling of paranoia and conspiracy from other parts of the globe to support his theme. All of it recounted in a very engaging manner.

The most remarkable thing about the book is how affecting it was, despite my familiarity with much of the content. I’ve grown up knowing about Watergate, of course, and over the years have picked up a fair amount of the other scandals, CIA dirty tricks, social and economic upheaval and general malaise chronicled in Strange Days Indeed. But none of this ever really created a sense of the context, of living day to day while all of this was unfolding. The fact that I grew up aware of Watergate kind of illustrates what I mean: it was part of American history, like the Mayflower or Washington crossing the Delaware, and in many ways nearly as remote.

I’ve heard or read older people referring to the idea of America losing a sense of “trust,” in government or simply in general, after Watergate, for example. This concept always seemed quite abstract and even a bit dubious; were people ever really that dopey to begin with?

But maybe you had to be there. Living one’s whole life in a world where it’s taken for granted that the President can be a crook, where journalism has for good or ill abandoned entirely old notions of gentlemanly behavior, where certainty in anything whether economic, social or governmental seems foolishly archaic… maybe it really is too easy to underestimate the impact of a decade or so of sharply increased weirdness and chaos.

I have to admit, after reading this, that I may be just a bit too hard on the generations that preceded me. I recall another interesting exploration of historical context in reading a collection of London Times Obituaries, earlier this year, and really putting together the pieces in considering the unnerving cluster of high profile assassinations during the 1960s. And just a couple of weeks ago I had a DVD from the library about Lee Harvey Oswald and the legacy of the Kennedy assassination; again, reading about something in a history textbook must be rather different from watching live bulletins on television about all reason and order seemingly breaking down.

Thinking about the twentieth century as a whole, it occurs to me that the first twenty years of my own life were arguably, at least in the United States, the most peaceful, orderly and in some sense dull decades since the nineteenth century. There was scandal, but it didn’t break much new ground, other than perhaps Republicans setting new standards of desperation in the 1990s as they tried to foment world-shaking outrage from, all things considered, astonishingly trivial and banal misconduct. And what was the big disaster from 1980 – 1999? The Challenger explosion? Oklahoma City? Not to trivialize them of course, but I don’t think either would have made the same impression in the most recent decade.

Likewise, they might have fit right in with the decades prior to 1980. And if the 1980s and 90s were, for America at any rate, something of a “holiday from history” I have to confess that people had probably earned one by that point. I made a comment recently about a theory that America kind of “gave up” sometime in the late 1970s, and after reading Strange Days Indeed I feel that the idea may well have something to it, and furthermore that people may have had something of an excuse.

I still think things should have been done differently, and that we would all have been better off for it, in fact. But, after being so thoroughly freaked out, it’s hard to entirely condemn the fact that a lot of people may have simply “got off the boat.”

Of course, ready or not, America saw an end to the “holiday from history” not quite nine years ago. And if Wheen’s closing observations about themes and concerns from the 1970s suddenly seeming familiar once again are less than surprising, they are fitting.

The Canadian chanteuse Emm Gryner sings “the seventies are dead and gone,” but this is wishful, if catchy, thinking. It seems that the haunting notion of William Faulkner holds sway, instead; “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” I was particularly struck by quotes Wheen used, in a couple of his book’s chapters about Britain:

A 1973 television documentary… began with a charming tableau of [Paul] Johnson sitting at the breakfast table with his wife and children. ‘I wonder how far Britain’s gone down the plughole this morning,’ he said, picking up his Daily Express. ‘Has Britain had it?’

And then a quote from Margaret Drabble’s 1977 novel The Ice Age:

All over the country, people blamed other people for all of the things that were going wrong — the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody.

Does that not encapsulate the so-called tea party movement, lacking as it does any coherent ideas or agenda but still pissed off and looking for someone to attack? Even some of the same targets from the 1970s still fit.

And the question of how far the country has “gone down the plughole” today is rarely far from my mind when I get up and check the news in the morning. I certainly hope that we haven’t “had it,” but the notion is difficult to push away entirely.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.