Word: frum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Here: The 70's: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) (Basic Books; 418 pages; $25), David Frum revisits, with a good deal of wit and a surprising ambivalence, what he calls "America's low tide." Popular memory tends to conjure the '70s as the bummed-out, banalized aftermath of the '60s, which were the authentic circus. Frum has a more interesting take. He considers the '60s, for all their noise and flash, comparatively inconsequential. "But the 'social' transformation of the 1970s was real and was permanent," he says. It left a country more dynamic, tolerant...
...time, the '70s seemed fairly awful--oversexed in a brainless way, infected by a fatal mix of narcissism and paranoia. Presidents (Nixon, Ford, Carter) seemed either crooked or clueless. Yet, in Frum's analysis, the hideous '70s were a fulcrum and a rite of passage that changed almost everything and brought us, for good and ill, to where we are. He's right. Much has been gained on the journey. But Frum does not sufficiently reckon what has been lost...
...Popular memory recalls the '70s as the bummed-out aftermath of the '60s, as if the '60s were the real circus. Frum, however, sees the '70s as the true transformation, the turning point when old America ended and new America, such as it is, began...
...Frum seems to hate the '70s, but at the same time, to regard the decade as a necessary social shaking-out. He says the decade "left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant, less deferential, less self-confident, less united, more socially equal, less economically equal, more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual, less literate, less polite, less reticent...
...True. But I think Frum may not be sufficiently aware of just how much has been lost in the shaking-out. In a way, the John McCain phenomenon registers a nostalgia for discarded virtues (duty, honor, endurance) - for an authenticity that the '70s did their idiot best to destroy...