Strange Days Indeed -- The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen was first published in Great Britain in 2009, amid the early days of the Great Recession following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008. (I remember being far removed from the tumult of the 2008-09 cycle as I spent much of it off traveling on my wanderjahr trek across Australia.) Apparently Wheen felt that a recounting of the Golden Age of Paranoia was relevant to the then-present. As the book jacket describes it, “since the Great Crash of our generation, barely a week has passed without some allusion to the 1970s.” The U.S. edition of Strange Days Indeed was published a year later in 2010, and I read it that autumn, when incidentally, I was supremely depressed, having returned to the States and coming off the initial high of my backpacking adventures. The book’s chaotic subject matter reflected my equally chaotic state of mind,. Truth be told, I was well into my mid-twenties and aimless in my pursuits, so I really thought the world was ending, at least it was for me. Francis Wheen’s incisive examination of paranoid times in the 1970s provided me with plenty of escapist fantasy to enjoy at my reading leisure. In present day October 2024, the world feels like it is worsening in its unraveling. Especially a year into the shock treatment of the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, the war on terror in Gaza and Lebanon, and the reverberations of antisemitic activity on college campuses and in urban centers here stateside.
Under these circumstances, rereading Strange Days Indeed is a much less pleasant experience. It feels negatively ironic poring over tales of wars, military coups, and terrorism that happened fifty years ago, painted with an edgy and almost humorous glow. For wars, military coups, and terrorism abound today, and it is plain ugly. I shudder at wondering how within the next half-century any author will depict the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and their effect on the rest of the world, with the same kind of scholarly glow as Wheen depicts the urban guerrilla adventurism in Uruguay, the lethal I.R.A. bombing campaigns and British retaliatory strikes in Belfast, and the massive bloodletting in tinpot dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea.
Francis Wheen begins his history of the reputedly paranoid 1970s with his questioning of what main event signified the end of the idealistic 1960s. I’ve read other authors pondering that same question. The certain events that Wheen served up are the usual suspects. He points to August 9, 1969, when Charles Manson’s cult followers hacked to death Sharon Tate and four others in L.A. Joan Dideon apparently saw that as the death of the ‘60s. Or, Wheen writes, “the public burial of peace, love and flower power” was the tragic Altamont concert later in 1969, when Hells Angels hired as security guards killed a young attendee, Meredith Hunter. Or else, the ‘60s ended on May 4, 1970, when the national guardsmen gunned down four antiwar protestors. This could make for a keen game to play on long road trips: coming up with the exact event that ended the ‘60s. There are two events that Wheen doesn’t mention, like, for a lot of people it was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in June, 1968, after winning the California primary.
Personally, I am partial to the idea that the real death of the ‘60s was on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. After all, the ex-Beatle was the last remaining symbol of idealism for the Left, and Chapman was plenty disillusioned after John’s religiously blasphemous “we’re bigger than Jesus” comment. Maybe I see it as the best analogy because I wasn’t born until the early 1980s, and yet my musical tastes are frozen in the 1960s. I have been a beatlemaniac since childhood. I have a distinct memory of feeling a sense of terrible alienation coming of age in the mid-1990s and absolutely hating the crap music everyone else was into. Lousy lonesome childhood indeed.
More tomorrow
Comments