Bad times pass into better ones. Although the current gens music doesn't enthrall me. Although there are awesome performers.
Just 69 here! Obviously the 60s had the trauma of assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon. And the best decade of music, necessary and positive political protests and change.
My 70s also had great music, personal computers, internet, email and the start of millions of travel miles everywhere, and marriage 46 yrs ago. Vietnam ended.
President Carter I believe began the recovery of American self-healing. Gets no credit for it. The Arab oil embargo caused inflation. Ending Vietnam caused unemployment. Out of his hands. But ny wife and I were very optimistic then.
The right wing extreme conservative policies will not stand either. They are negative. And America is still a positive people.
.Happy 4th of July.
Lee retreats from Gettysburg, as the greatest man not on Mt. Rushmore, U.S. Grant, defeats the bad guys at Vicksburg. Read the best bio ever, Ron Chernows Grant.
That sounds more like my parents' '70s as well, which never seemed to square with the modern narrative of the decade. They got married and managed to launch successful careers.
Sounds like you are familiar with Ketamine. I work with Veterinarians. And the leading clinical and investigation vets using Ketamine infusion for chronic pain.
Very interesting! My vet may be interested in this. She gets students from UC Davis rotating through so is more academically-oriented than your standard community veterinarian.
If she is going to AVMA, the national conference, my business is hosting 4 1 hour CEs. On Ketamine and chronic pain. Clinical and science.Next week in Denver .
Study: musical taste typically consolidates circa age 33, for me w/Baroque at age 14 in 1945, later adding a few Romantics & early 20th-C expressionists. Nothing post-Satie ever grabbed me. What nu styles duyu anticipate for 21st C, now that syntelligent composition has emerged?
So I played solo Oboe in jrhigh and HS in WVa 1960s. Heard a wee bit Beatles but most of HS I was into classical music.
In college 70s I broaden to all the 60s and 70s, Beatles, Elton John, Queen. My wife loved the Stones.
I don't think much good music has been written after Elton John, Queen and Phil Collins.
I honestly don't know Satie. Over the last 20 yrs, I've migrated to contrast the Pianists like Rachmaninoff to Richter to Horowitz on the Concertos. Love how concertos highlight an instrument with the orchestra
I am sixty-eight years old which is my excuse to be up now. (I am in Chicago.) Hope you are in Europe or Asia or someplace which explains you being awake, but in any case much appreciate your response.
Love your work, from the thoughtful analysis to the easy reading style to the optimism…especially the optimism, as it’s so rare in America these days.
This from a friend I sent the student debt piece to:
“OMG (as the Millennials say), what a sane piece! Work productively, buy a home, save a little. Welcome to America. What’s so remarkable is how refreshing a sane piece is today.”
Couldn’t agree more! Same reason I enthusiastically recommend Noah to my friends. Even where you might disagree, it’s nice to read someone who is making their arguments and forming their theses in good faith. Makes me wish I had stuck with journalism. ☺️
Thanks! I haven't read that one yet! I did read "It Seemed Like Nothing Happened", which was good but somewhat myopic as it was written in the early 80s.
This period certainly does rhyme with the late 60s/early 70s period, but I feel as though we're still battling through a period of upheaval unlike anything my parents' generation faced. I talk to them about this all the time, and both say today's broken political system with threats from the far-right and extremism infecting local neighborhoods is simply worse than anything from that period.
Having said that, there are promising portents ahead. As you call out, Noah, this administration seems to be investing in America's future, not groveling over how to divide the pieces right now. So, there's at least one promising sign. And there seems to be a lot less insanity in the spotlight in 2023, as opposed to any of the last 3 years. I hope that trend continues!
Interesting take, and I appreciate the optimistic tone. But one important difference between the 2020s and the 1970s is extreme partisan polarization. The Nixon/Trump analogy is revealing -- Nixon was ultimately tossed out by his own partisans, but Trump, for much worse sins than Nixon ever committed, is on his way to the GOP nomination in 2024.
Civil rights WAS a huge issue, but I think it would be more accurate to say the 60’s upheavals ERUPTED (was catalyzed and initiated by) a mixture of ingredients, including 1) the birth control pill - which dramatically lowered risk of pregnancy for the first time in history, followed by 2) the Viet Nam war, which not only killed and physically wounded thousands of young Americans, it also brought young people home with PTSD from the atrocities of war, AND the drugs from Southeast Asia (pot, hash, heroin) to medicate their pain... and pass those drugs along to the rest of the young people anxious for a new way to get high, followed by, 3) the release of LSD in the Bay Area in the early 60’s (it wasn’t illegal until 1967), which created was the final ingredient needed in the war-sex-drugs-rock and roll cocktail explosion. 4) Let’s add the assassination of JFK in 1963 - followed by the assassinations of MLK and Bobby Kennedy a month apart in 1968, followed by the spectacle of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
Happy 4th of July!
I’m proud to live in an imperfect but (still) free country where we have an ever-evolving public square that allows us to debate our ideas and vote.
That was a preposterous idea (self-governance and free speech) that (I believe) has been a net positive for humanity.
Keep up the great work you are doing Noah, it’s needed now more than ever.
I am in my early 60s and I absolutely loved the 70s! It really was my time.
1. The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it kicked off a decade of environmental movement actions that were both amazingly successful and frankly a lot of fun. The first vision of what the country could be as a solar nation. As a child in an activist family I also enjoyed the music and environmentalist culture of the time.
2. Architecture and design hit a high point. Actually innovative change in many intellectual fields deeply changed those fields in the 70s. (I do really wish, though, that the architects of the 1970s had chosen more durable materials.) By the 80s there was a reaction, architecture and design got much worse.
3. I learned to program in 1970 and definitely rode the wave. Alan Kay's vision of computing as an expressive, universal community of practice though the programming language Smalltalk (1972-1980). The invention of the GUI interface. Ted Nelson's book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (1974) described a vision that became the web a decade later. A revolution in online communities with Turroff's EIES system (1974-78), and an exploration of what a networked country would mean for human society in "Network Nation" by Hiltz and Turoff (1978).
Yes, the 1970s also had its share of problems. The metastasis of drug culture (horrible), public corruption, violence, and bad political events. But from my teenage point of view the deep disappointments did not show up until 1980. I hope this new era, if like the 1970s, includes some of the good parts too.
I like this essay. It's optimistic. But I also think it's based upon old notions which have been obliterated by religious fanatics who want to force us all to live according to their (various) (mis-) interpretations of their sacred texts. We're still in deep, deep water.
I get the comparisons and you may be right but if Ray Dalio and George Friedman, among others, are correct about several long term cycles all coalescing now the late 1920s may be a more apt scenario to compare with (stock market bubbles, asset bubbles, divisive politics, maybe a Warren Harding/Trump corruption connection).
I think the 1920s are also an OK analogy for the 2010s. The 1920s saw the rise of reactionary white supremacy in the form of race riots, the New KKK, and the anti-immigrant movement. In the 1960s, all the momentum was with the cultural left -- Black Power, women's liberation, the hippies, the New Left, and so on.
The 2010s were the first time since the 1850s that forces on the cultural left and right rose at the same time. That was why it felt more like a civil war than the previous episodes did, even though it was actually less violent overall.
So whatever happened to BLM apart from showing a country can be burned down and hustled by race hustlers,politicians, the media and grifters who go off with the money after taking advantage of tragic events.
Oh I get it. You were just trying for some kind of ‘gotcha’ but when I didn’t take your bait, you took a swipe at my reading comprehension (???) Very weird, but hope this was a nice moment for you.
Pure coincidence that we had Trayvon Martin in 2012, Ferguson in 2014, Charlotte (fizzled) in 2016 and Floyd in 2020- all election years. None of the victims personified were particularly beatific (plenty of other incidents each and every year of more wanton police violence against actually innocent victims), but the timing was perfect!
The difference with the 1960’s is that billionaire tycoons weren’t funding the black power movement (though there were plenty of privileged white Antifa types as there are now, but the weathermen actually thought they were changing things through violence rather than censoring things). Whoever thought anarchists would become thought police?
What happened to "Black Power"? The hustlers settled down and became the likes of today's Al Sharpton. (The right has had its equivalent in corrupt preachers.) So what else is new? ;-)
Sadly, it's obviously not "a jest," but it is "an example" of the thinking that got us here. Having read these comments will help me hide my rage when my neighborhood version of Treeamigo gets drunk at the picnic and starts whining, "What about Portland!!"
Where to begin -- lived through it all, now twice. The differences? This has become a much more predatory country. Tech abuse caused a a lot of it, overtly or covertly, socially or financially, so fear of loss is pervasive. Education has changed from a balance of personal and professional to all professional, so people do not learn human care as they used to -- note today's youth mental illness and violence. Therefore, health is worse, obesity more prevalent, child care poor, intact marriages at a new low, college pricey, poverty and income gap growing, and 45% cannot afford retirement or understand that social security will be a pittance if it's there at all. Teaching in the 70s in a large city, I did not see homeless people living for years on the streets. All told, things are better now for those sectors that comprise happy econ data or political outcomes, but worse for the overall human quality of life. I suspect the normalization of the 'abnormal' prevents objective analysis. Seems like level of fear now is causing many people to retreat and try to save themselves, polarizing the country from the top down, just when the thing that works is common cause and action. The 70s conditions and their fallout were not existential or intractable like some we have now but many, like climate change, were forecast.
Happy Independence Day, America! And greetings from Ukraine. ✊
Does this mean that kpop is the new disco?
Exactly.
Ding dong call me on my phone
Ice tea and a game of ping pong!
Ring my bell, ding-a-ling-a-ling!
That’s K-pop lyric…I don’t think English is their first language. I edited them to the right words.
"Ring My Bell" (as per lyrics I quoted) was a disco hit in 1979. ;-)
I love the optimistic forecast! And agree.
Bad times pass into better ones. Although the current gens music doesn't enthrall me. Although there are awesome performers.
Just 69 here! Obviously the 60s had the trauma of assassinations, Vietnam, Nixon. And the best decade of music, necessary and positive political protests and change.
My 70s also had great music, personal computers, internet, email and the start of millions of travel miles everywhere, and marriage 46 yrs ago. Vietnam ended.
President Carter I believe began the recovery of American self-healing. Gets no credit for it. The Arab oil embargo caused inflation. Ending Vietnam caused unemployment. Out of his hands. But ny wife and I were very optimistic then.
The right wing extreme conservative policies will not stand either. They are negative. And America is still a positive people.
.Happy 4th of July.
Lee retreats from Gettysburg, as the greatest man not on Mt. Rushmore, U.S. Grant, defeats the bad guys at Vicksburg. Read the best bio ever, Ron Chernows Grant.
That sounds more like my parents' '70s as well, which never seemed to square with the modern narrative of the decade. They got married and managed to launch successful careers.
Of course, the decade peaked when I was born ;)
Sounds like you are familiar with Ketamine. I work with Veterinarians. And the leading clinical and investigation vets using Ketamine infusion for chronic pain.
I'm an anesthesiologist so administer it frequently. It's a cool med, very different from other injectable anesthetics.
Nice. I work with your Veterinary counterparts.
https://youtu.be/D_3d2UbIDQ0
Very interesting! My vet may be interested in this. She gets students from UC Davis rotating through so is more academically-oriented than your standard community veterinarian.
Fabulous. Let me know what she thinks.
If she is going to AVMA, the national conference, my business is hosting 4 1 hour CEs. On Ketamine and chronic pain. Clinical and science.Next week in Denver .
Concur
why does the music count as an anodyne?
It's relaxing and soothing. Well often.
Study: musical taste typically consolidates circa age 33, for me w/Baroque at age 14 in 1945, later adding a few Romantics & early 20th-C expressionists. Nothing post-Satie ever grabbed me. What nu styles duyu anticipate for 21st C, now that syntelligent composition has emerged?
So I played solo Oboe in jrhigh and HS in WVa 1960s. Heard a wee bit Beatles but most of HS I was into classical music.
In college 70s I broaden to all the 60s and 70s, Beatles, Elton John, Queen. My wife loved the Stones.
I don't think much good music has been written after Elton John, Queen and Phil Collins.
I honestly don't know Satie. Over the last 20 yrs, I've migrated to contrast the Pianists like Rachmaninoff to Richter to Horowitz on the Concertos. Love how concertos highlight an instrument with the orchestra
Catholic taste, for sure, but hasten to Satie: his melancholy is world-class.
I'm not religious...but of course much good music is...
Love your referencing the Perlstein books. If you haven’t seen it already, you may enjoy Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies, which is equally wonderful.
Happy Fourth Noah and readers
Art
Oh, and happy Fourth!! Of course. :-)
Hi Noah
I am sixty-eight years old which is my excuse to be up now. (I am in Chicago.) Hope you are in Europe or Asia or someplace which explains you being awake, but in any case much appreciate your response.
Love your work, from the thoughtful analysis to the easy reading style to the optimism…especially the optimism, as it’s so rare in America these days.
This from a friend I sent the student debt piece to:
“OMG (as the Millennials say), what a sane piece! Work productively, buy a home, save a little. Welcome to America. What’s so remarkable is how refreshing a sane piece is today.”
Thanks so much! That really means a lot.
Couldn’t agree more! Same reason I enthusiastically recommend Noah to my friends. Even where you might disagree, it’s nice to read someone who is making their arguments and forming their theses in good faith. Makes me wish I had stuck with journalism. ☺️
Thanks! I haven't read that one yet! I did read "It Seemed Like Nothing Happened", which was good but somewhat myopic as it was written in the early 80s.
This period certainly does rhyme with the late 60s/early 70s period, but I feel as though we're still battling through a period of upheaval unlike anything my parents' generation faced. I talk to them about this all the time, and both say today's broken political system with threats from the far-right and extremism infecting local neighborhoods is simply worse than anything from that period.
Having said that, there are promising portents ahead. As you call out, Noah, this administration seems to be investing in America's future, not groveling over how to divide the pieces right now. So, there's at least one promising sign. And there seems to be a lot less insanity in the spotlight in 2023, as opposed to any of the last 3 years. I hope that trend continues!
Interesting take, and I appreciate the optimistic tone. But one important difference between the 2020s and the 1970s is extreme partisan polarization. The Nixon/Trump analogy is revealing -- Nixon was ultimately tossed out by his own partisans, but Trump, for much worse sins than Nixon ever committed, is on his way to the GOP nomination in 2024.
This is a complex topic.
Civil rights WAS a huge issue, but I think it would be more accurate to say the 60’s upheavals ERUPTED (was catalyzed and initiated by) a mixture of ingredients, including 1) the birth control pill - which dramatically lowered risk of pregnancy for the first time in history, followed by 2) the Viet Nam war, which not only killed and physically wounded thousands of young Americans, it also brought young people home with PTSD from the atrocities of war, AND the drugs from Southeast Asia (pot, hash, heroin) to medicate their pain... and pass those drugs along to the rest of the young people anxious for a new way to get high, followed by, 3) the release of LSD in the Bay Area in the early 60’s (it wasn’t illegal until 1967), which created was the final ingredient needed in the war-sex-drugs-rock and roll cocktail explosion. 4) Let’s add the assassination of JFK in 1963 - followed by the assassinations of MLK and Bobby Kennedy a month apart in 1968, followed by the spectacle of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
Happy 4th of July!
I’m proud to live in an imperfect but (still) free country where we have an ever-evolving public square that allows us to debate our ideas and vote.
That was a preposterous idea (self-governance and free speech) that (I believe) has been a net positive for humanity.
Keep up the great work you are doing Noah, it’s needed now more than ever.
Am always a fan of optimism.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain
I am in my early 60s and I absolutely loved the 70s! It really was my time.
1. The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it kicked off a decade of environmental movement actions that were both amazingly successful and frankly a lot of fun. The first vision of what the country could be as a solar nation. As a child in an activist family I also enjoyed the music and environmentalist culture of the time.
2. Architecture and design hit a high point. Actually innovative change in many intellectual fields deeply changed those fields in the 70s. (I do really wish, though, that the architects of the 1970s had chosen more durable materials.) By the 80s there was a reaction, architecture and design got much worse.
3. I learned to program in 1970 and definitely rode the wave. Alan Kay's vision of computing as an expressive, universal community of practice though the programming language Smalltalk (1972-1980). The invention of the GUI interface. Ted Nelson's book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (1974) described a vision that became the web a decade later. A revolution in online communities with Turroff's EIES system (1974-78), and an exploration of what a networked country would mean for human society in "Network Nation" by Hiltz and Turoff (1978).
Yes, the 1970s also had its share of problems. The metastasis of drug culture (horrible), public corruption, violence, and bad political events. But from my teenage point of view the deep disappointments did not show up until 1980. I hope this new era, if like the 1970s, includes some of the good parts too.
I genuinely hope you are right. Happy 4th, Noah!
I like this essay. It's optimistic. But I also think it's based upon old notions which have been obliterated by religious fanatics who want to force us all to live according to their (various) (mis-) interpretations of their sacred texts. We're still in deep, deep water.
I’m looking forward to listening to the ‘Rumors’ of the 2020s.
Sorry, it’s ‘Rumours’ right.
I look forward to hearing the Modern Lovers and Wild Tchoupitoulas of the 2020s!
I get the comparisons and you may be right but if Ray Dalio and George Friedman, among others, are correct about several long term cycles all coalescing now the late 1920s may be a more apt scenario to compare with (stock market bubbles, asset bubbles, divisive politics, maybe a Warren Harding/Trump corruption connection).
I think the 1920s are also an OK analogy for the 2010s. The 1920s saw the rise of reactionary white supremacy in the form of race riots, the New KKK, and the anti-immigrant movement. In the 1960s, all the momentum was with the cultural left -- Black Power, women's liberation, the hippies, the New Left, and so on.
The 2010s were the first time since the 1850s that forces on the cultural left and right rose at the same time. That was why it felt more like a civil war than the previous episodes did, even though it was actually less violent overall.
It's hopefully a sign that better things are ahead
So whatever happened to BLM apart from showing a country can be burned down and hustled by race hustlers,politicians, the media and grifters who go off with the money after taking advantage of tragic events.
Which country was burned down?
The same one that had an insurrection
And which country would that be? If a country ‘burned down’, that sounds like it would be a very big deal.
You should try to
read for context. The answer (as I thought was obvious) is that there was neither a country that burned down nor one that had an insurrection.
Oh I get it. You were just trying for some kind of ‘gotcha’ but when I didn’t take your bait, you took a swipe at my reading comprehension (???) Very weird, but hope this was a nice moment for you.
Gotcha? I was mocking the partisan hyberbole and BS narratives of the election year, as I thought was obvious.
Pure coincidence that we had Trayvon Martin in 2012, Ferguson in 2014, Charlotte (fizzled) in 2016 and Floyd in 2020- all election years. None of the victims personified were particularly beatific (plenty of other incidents each and every year of more wanton police violence against actually innocent victims), but the timing was perfect!
The difference with the 1960’s is that billionaire tycoons weren’t funding the black power movement (though there were plenty of privileged white Antifa types as there are now, but the weathermen actually thought they were changing things through violence rather than censoring things). Whoever thought anarchists would become thought police?
What happened to "Black Power"? The hustlers settled down and became the likes of today's Al Sharpton. (The right has had its equivalent in corrupt preachers.) So what else is new? ;-)
COINTELPRO and the carceral state.
Surely, a jest...
Sadly, it's obviously not "a jest," but it is "an example" of the thinking that got us here. Having read these comments will help me hide my rage when my neighborhood version of Treeamigo gets drunk at the picnic and starts whining, "What about Portland!!"
Where to begin -- lived through it all, now twice. The differences? This has become a much more predatory country. Tech abuse caused a a lot of it, overtly or covertly, socially or financially, so fear of loss is pervasive. Education has changed from a balance of personal and professional to all professional, so people do not learn human care as they used to -- note today's youth mental illness and violence. Therefore, health is worse, obesity more prevalent, child care poor, intact marriages at a new low, college pricey, poverty and income gap growing, and 45% cannot afford retirement or understand that social security will be a pittance if it's there at all. Teaching in the 70s in a large city, I did not see homeless people living for years on the streets. All told, things are better now for those sectors that comprise happy econ data or political outcomes, but worse for the overall human quality of life. I suspect the normalization of the 'abnormal' prevents objective analysis. Seems like level of fear now is causing many people to retreat and try to save themselves, polarizing the country from the top down, just when the thing that works is common cause and action. The 70s conditions and their fallout were not existential or intractable like some we have now but many, like climate change, were forecast.