THIS 70's Show

When I think of the 70's a myriad of images comes to my mind.  On the one hand there's the fashions, like the leisure suit, platform shoes, spread-collared shirts unbuttoned to the waist with layers of gold chains handing down onto hairy chests, the smell of Aqua Velva, Brut, Hai Karate, and other best selling fragrances, etc.   There's also the images of John Travolta in his white polyester suit and black shirt disco dancing across the screen or bopping down the streets of Brooklyn in his leather jacket and long hair, movie s like Jaws, Star Wars, and more.  And who could forget Charlie's Angels and that poster of Farrah Fawcett in the swimsuit?  But, not all the images I recall from the 70's were as good.  I also recall the long lines at gas pumps, double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, and events like Watergate, The Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis, etc.

I can't decide which images disgust or frighten me more.  There is the image of my parents decked out in the fashions of the day practicing their disco moves in our basement with their friends, or the ones that showed up on the television night after night on ABC's "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage" which propelled Ted Koppel to stardom and served to create the long running "Nightline" series on ABC News.  There were the conversations about the latest fashion trends, esp the ones that took place at my house when Dad put on his first leisure suit, and the ones I remember about how they were going to pay the bills this month because everything seemed to cost so much more than it had a few short weeks ago.  I remember the discussions about whether my Mom should take extra shifts at the hospital or whether Dad should get a part-time second job.  I also remember my grandparents talking about what became of their money as well, and they were what I considered "rich" at the time.

As you can see, the 70's was not as it is shown in the popular sitcom "That 70's Show."  Sure the hairstyles and clothing are somewhat accurate, but there seems to be no mention of the economic and social malaise that plagued the country from the late 60's until the early 80's.  Notwithstanding the fact the the show at issue is a sitcom, still you would think there would have been some allusion to the realities of that decade.  If I had to guess a reason for these critical omissions, I would imagine it had something to do with the fact that the writers of that show were either not alive or not old enough to really REMEMBER the 70's. 

The same must be true of the writers of textbooks used by middle and high school students today, because I find the same lack of historical accuracy present in those tomes.   But this is not by accident.  After all, if you distort history when teaching it to those too young to have experienced it first hand, eventually those young people will outlive the ones that actually lived the history, so the only recollections to survive will be the distorted ones learned through the schools effectively re-writing and thus changing history.  If those who cannot remember the past are truly condemned to repeat it, then we're in for a nightmare of epic proportions.  

In all the reasearch I've done on the history of the 70's I can find any number of references to Watergate, Nixon, the evil Republicans, the Vietnam War Protests, Kent State, etc.  What is surprisingly absent from these historical references is any mention of the double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, out of control drug and sexual behaviors, the anarchy of groups like The Black Panthers and even The Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, ring a bell?).   Also missing is any suggestion as to the CAUSE of the economic miseries endured throughout the 70's.  It is our own "lost decade" and this fact seems to have been "lost" to the liberal writers of history.

Fortunately for me, I don't have to rely in these libral historians for my recollection.  When the 70's began, I was a student in elementary school.  When they ended, I was graduating high school.  I was too young to get into the discos and lose myself in the cocaine and casual sex of the disco era.  I didn't get my first fake ID card until after I had graduated from high school and was on active duty in the US Navy so I actually REMEMBER the 70's quite well.  I also had the good fortune to take one of the only economics courses in college I was able to stay awake in  from a professor who was so hell bent on discrediting Ronald Reagan's economic policies, that he was forced to look honestly at the economic misery of the 70's and at it's root cause.  That root cause, in a nutshell, was the rampant overspending by the US Government in the 1960s.

Now let's disect that statement a bit because I realize it is a loaded one.   That said, look at what was taking place during the 1960s.  At the beginning of the 60s, Kenendy was President and in the first year of his term we had the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the beginnings of the Vietnam Conflict.  You also had the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and other such societal changes.  After Kennedy's assasination in 1963,  Lyndon Johnson took over the Presidency and in relatively short order, the conflict in Vietman was escalated to a full blown war, necessitating great increases in spending, and at the same time, you had the creation of the welfare state, ironically referred to as "The Great Society."  Wars are expensive, as we've just had a recent remider of, and social engineering is, likewise, very expensive.

Ironically, it was the latter, the welfare state, that so bloated the federal budget that we were in deep deficit spending before the end of Johnson's first term of office.  The argument for the Great Society was that with the new found freedoms earned as a reasult of the civil rights movement, the US had a duty to help care for and support minorities as they were integrated into our society.  While this sounds good, as most liberal social engineering programs do, it was a LIE.  Lyndon Johnson, like Andrew Johnson (no relation) before him, was a rabid racist.  He did not want minorities integrated into society, but rather wanted to keep them segregated on their side of town without using the "S" word and offending his liberal constituents. 

The whole premise of the welfare state was to say to minority citizens that if they would agree to live where the government told them to, and vote the way the government told them to, that the government would see to it that they would have everything they needed to live comfortably, if not well, and that all they had to do was to behave and stay out of everyone else's way.  Rather than integrating minorities into our society it had just the opposite effect, as most social engineering programs do.  It created a welfare dependent class that contributed nothing but debt, illigitimate children, and drugs to our culture.  This resulted in increases in welfare recipients and the prison population all of which were spiralling out of control until the system was finally reformed by one William Jefferson Clinton.  But the evils of welfare is the subject for a whole different article altogether.

The point of the comparison was that the spending of the 60's was what caused the double digit inflation and unemployment of the 70's.  Now the difference between the spending then, and the spending now is that in 60's we were spending our own money.   We weren't borrowing it from the Chinese or anybody else.  Also, the social security trust fund was still intact and not a Ponzi scheme like it is now.  Add to that, the amount of spending then pales in comparison to the amount of spending now, even after you adjust for inflation, cost of living increases, etc.   If spending our own money caused us to lose a decade, what do you think spending borrowed money will do? 

%o put it in the form a model everyone can relate to, this would be the equivalent of attempting to save money by not paying your monthly bills with your salary, but rather by taking out a credit card for each such bill, paying the bill with the credit card, and making the minimum interst payment on each card every month.  In the beginning you would save money by making only those minimum payments instead of paying the full amount of the bill, but how long would it take for you to max out that card and have the minimum payment ballon to where it exceeded your regulary monthly bill payment?  Now imagine doing that for every bill you have each month.  Eventually the minimum payments would exceed your bills, your cards would be maxed out, and the bills would keep on coming.  No one in their right mind would do that, would they?

Well, you might think that, but in my 10 plus years working as a bankruptcy paralegal I saw exactly that same scenario over and over again.  This is exactly what our own government is doing as we speak.  If spending REAL money caused us to lose a decade, imagine what we're looking at with what's happening today? 

Every time I hear some politician or political pundit talking about today's economy being the worst since the Great Depression, I want to scream at my TV "What about the 70's you Moron?" Sometimes I even DO, because most the politicians and pundits ARE old enough to have some memories of that "lost" decade, even if they were too busy doing coke and having rampant casual sex in the local disco to remember ALL of it.    But for those of whose only reference to the 70's is the sitcom "That 70's Show," or the distortions of liberal historians, THIS 70's show is not going to be a sitcom and it's going to last a lot longer than half an hour.

Thanks in no small part to this admininistration's unrealistic attitudes towards the production of domestic energy, we're likely to see a repeat of another familiar icon from the 1969s. I remember very well the long lines at the local gas station or the sign "Sorry, Out of Gas" that appeared at the most inopportune of times.  Like it or not, gasoline is the life blood of this country and as long as alternative energy is not in our foreseeable fugure, we're going to have to provide the oil we need domestically which would help solve the unemployment problem to some extent, pr we're going to have to continue to transfer massive asmounts of our wealth to nations that do not have our best interests at heart.  We can no more stop using gasoline than we can stop using oxygen and if you think the French went wild over lack of bread, wait til you see Americans without affordable gasoline or other energy.   Exploiting the tragedy of the gulf  rig explosion  to artificially reduce the supply and increase the cost of energy to the average citizen is reprehensible at best. Likewise, closing down offshore oil rigs will only lose many more jobs, result in the rigs being dismantled and taken to a more user friendly location, and the oil that should be ours will be lost to the Chinese now drilling off the cuban coast in SHALLOW waters.  Where's the sense in any of THAT?

Unlike the REAL 70's which we got through in discos, snorting coke, and boffing our brains out with any partner that would stand still and let us, this generation is not going to have such pleasant diversions.   But, for the benefit of those that missed the original "lost decade", thanks to our failed war on drugs, the coke supply is still up to meeting the demand, and thanks to liberal social engineering in our schools, casusal sex is as plentiful today as it was then.  Finally, thanks to "Mama Mia" you can still hear ABBA on the radio, in FM stereo instead of AM mono this time. Who says you can't improve on an original?