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| date | 2001-04-05:11:35 |
| Reading |
Requiem for a Ruined Decade
Coming to terms with one's childhood in all its beauty and complexity and awfulness is one of the basic tasks of living an examined life. So I'm happy that a couple of major novels and movies have addressed the Awfulness That Was The Seventies in recent years. The Ice Storm, which was the first major work to deal with growing up in the 70's, I'll talk about later. Right now I've just finished Jeffery Eugenides The Virgin Suicides, whose empty litany of senseless death serves as a suitable metaphor for the 70's. The book is beautifully written, and the outcome is known from the very first line, and besides, I saw the movie. Like any good tragedy, there's no mystery here. The author uses a wonderful, oblique way of describing detail without supplying meaning: that's up to the reader. For someone who never experienced the 70's through the troubled eyes of adolescence, the book may have quite a different meaning, or none at all. For those of us who were there, who remember the summer of '74 as the aftermath of the oil shock savaged Western economies and the Watergate crisis meandered to its sordid conclusion, the book speaks loudly and clearly. I was 11 years old in 1974, and this was not the world I'd been waiting for. My parent's generation was mired in the defunct certainties of the irrelevant past, unaware and unbelieving of the world my generation inhabited. Like the Lisbon parents in Eugenides' novel, if they had had any idea of the way the world loomed before us, empty and menacing, it would been a huge relief. Instead, they simply refused to see anything wrong, or fiddled at changing minor institutional fixtures while the city burned. In the well-off but lower class world of my youth, like the middle-class world of the Lisbon sisters, sex, drugs and alcohol were freely available to all but the most geeky and fastidious. Being more geeky and fastidious than most, my main interest was alcohol: it was simple and uncomplicated. What the youth of that decade saw was that their parents had no clue, had no idea what was wrong with the world or how to fix it. The Lisbon sisters, caught between and idyllic girl-hood and an unrealized adulthood, distrusted by their parents, pestered by the boys who just wanted to fuck them, that reality was too much. What would be the point of living in a world were childhood ends in such a tawdry and demeaning state? The best thing about the book is that it offers no solutions. There's no panacea, no magic bullet. The characters have all moved on into slightly decrepit middle-age, frozen in the polluted amber of their wasted spring. But the rest of us did better than that. When I look around at the world we've made, I'm pretty happy with what I see. The world is freer now, wealthier and vastly cleaner. The technological promise that seemed so bitterly denied to us who saw human beings walk on the Moon and come home again with nothing, who saw supersonic transports go from a dream to a nightmare, has all come true. Fuel efficiency is up. Pollution is down: it would take 22 cars built today to pollute as much as one did in 1988. Travel is cheap. New aircraft are on the drawing boards that will bring people ever closer together and the first steps are being taken back toward the planets, and I still believe that before I die I will see the first robotic probes launched toward the stars, where human beings will one day follow. And all of this was built on the wreckage of the 70's, by people all over the world who refused to give in to the "malaise" of the times, who understood that free markets and freedom of thought were the keys to the future, and who made those ideas real in spite of the often vitriolic opposition. The capstone of the new technological optimism is the Internet. The first round of homesteading and claim-staking is done, and the second round of settlement and habitation is only just beginning. My children will grow into adolescence in a world where they can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world and look up any fact about anything, getting free and full access to multiple views of reality, and learning to decide for themselves who sees the truth most clearly. To me, the dismal, dreary '70's--not the playful, anarchistic, destructive 60's--mark the continental divide between the post-war world and the radiant future. They were the low point, and while we have a long way to climb still, we have set our feet firmly on the road to the future, aware of our foibles, perhaps a little less arrogant about the ability of centralized organizations like governments to solve any problems, much less all of them. Part of this optimism is the result of personal influences; Caro has helped me put far more of my ugly childhood behind me than I ever would have guessed was still with me, and that makes the future look a lot brighter. But when I look around I see a world full of hope, hope built on the reality that the human mind has been set free by the Internet in a way that no one will ever by able to stop. The genie is out of the bottle. No voice will be silenced. Ever again. |