I understand this was a decade of high inflation and gas shortages and price controls…
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Check out the short skirts on those chicks. And no fatties!
The US peaked around the middle of the last century but the 1970s were awful in most respects. The 50s and 60s would have made for a better thread.
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If you want to know what it was like, read John Updike’s “Memories of the Ford Administration”.
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I suspect a couple of those undated photos were from the 60s (e.g., look at the electronics in the living room photo) and the dated ones were clearly frontloaded to 1970 and 71.
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I don’t need to read a book about it by some lefty; I was there.
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So was I. But I don’t think @Citizen_bitcoin was…?
Also, I wouldn’t characterize Updike as “some lefty”. I think in the future people will read him the way we now read Austen. He was a novelist of manners. And a brilliant, pitch-perfect one.
But I realize many gents, perhaps even you polymaths ,don’t have much tolerance for novels. (If I thought you did, I’d also recommend Updike’s “Couples”, which is about the same era.)
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I’ve enjoyed reading his work. Nevertheless, he is a lefty and, as such, his perspectives on that era are colored by his ideology. You’d benefit from taking that into account when relying upon his characterization of that very contentious era.
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You know better than that. Why, only last week you noted my interest in Umberto Eco and Ubertino de Casale.
I find the arrogance of the humanities folks rather absurd. The average scientist is far better read than the average humanist is scientifically literate. Most of them have never heard of Maxwell’s Equations, nor could they list the Laws of Thermodynamics.
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Like YOU said: I don’t need to “rely”; I lived it.
I dky you think Updike was a lefty. I don’t know what party he was registered to, IF he was, but some of my favorite passages about celebration of American life, of the freedom and insouciance we used to have, are by Updike. In one of his books, I think it might be one of the Rabbit series, his protagonist plays Uncle Sam in a 4th of July parade, and feels he feels he “becomes” the mascot.
I’ve only read his novels and his poetry and some essays. Did he, like Byron, write some political tracts I’m not aware of ?
My remark that a lot of men don’t seem to like novels as much as I do wasn’t intended as a criticism of you or anyone else. . I find so much enjoyment in them, but my BMD doesn’t, so I didn’t expect I could launch the polymaths out into the wide sea of Updike’s ouevre.
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I read novels, mainly hard-boiled detective fiction and thrillers. I also greatly enjoy “classics” of English/American literature (Hemingway, Twain, Steinbeck, etc.).
I have no desire to read modern “literary fiction” though. I’ve tried, usually books recommended by SWMBO and other. They are all unreadable, at least for me.
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S’what I meant. No accounting for taste….to each his own…it takes all kinds….and other similar expressions indicating good-natured open-heartedness: consider them uttered!
(And thanks for “swmbo”; I hadn’t heard that!
)
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Re SWMBO: I stole it from “Rumpole of the Bailey,” an old Britcom starring Leo Kern. It’s how Rumpole referred to his wife: “She Who Must Be Obeyed.”
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Probably because husbands mutter it under their breath. You should ask your BMD if he knows what it means. While carefully looking in his eyes… 
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It’s the title of a book by Rider Haggard, and Jung used it to designate the female half of the soul, the “anima” But as I recall, everybody has both an anima and an animus……wait, “animus” means, like, aggression, doesn’t it? Still I just checked and that is the term Jung used…
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No no Phil, I’m assure you, I am a submissive wife.
Or maybe we both think of ourselves as the submissive spouse, and maybe that’s the secret of a happy marriage!
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I never heard of that. As I said, Rumpole. 
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The default assumption for anyone in the arts since the mid-twentieth century is that the person is of the Left. The few exceptions that come to mind, like Kingsley Amis, aren’t even American. Even Amis started out as a commie.
It’s hard to imagine anyone could get published in the New Yorker or the NYRB without solid leftist credentials. A quick search on Updike reveals he was an enthusiast New Dealer — and we all know FDR’s administration was rife with hard leftists. People sometimes drift rightward, as Amis did, but I don’t see any evidence of that in Updike.
Did you honestly not know this about loveys, as the Brits call them?
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Hunter S. Thompson may have been a lefty and he may have been a contributor to the breaking of the very “wave” that he laments, but at least he observed, however inaccurately that…
Something Happened
…around 1970
In fact, the largest surge of nubile girls of northern European heritage, all gussied up with birth control, unleashed the most horrific erocidal feeding frenzy in human history. As it became apparent that this Liberation of The Temple Prostitutes of Sodom was not counterbalanced by unleashing masculine power to contain erocide with single combat to the death as the appeal of last resort in dispute processing, a Supreme Court Justice’s “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” was lost, like tears in a category 5 hurricane.
“Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
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Yes and this is what Updike says too: during that period, if any man and woman were alone together in a room for more than 5 minutes, it was just assumed they had had sex.
Everybody was on the make, ALL the time.
Lewd looks,wolf whistles, gratuitous comments on your appearance, getting your bottom pinched: that was just life.
Oh and PS: San Francisco, right before AIDS? It was scary! people making that tongue darting gesture every time you even accidentally caught someone’s gaze— and we saw two shows while we were there. In one Siobhan McKenna was completely nude, and in the other…I wanna say a nude Christopher Plummer, playing Oscar Wilde….and that was the HETEROSEXUAL San Fran! It is actually difficult to believe the things one heard about the guy “bath houses”! Read Armistead Maupin!
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For reasons that are now obvious, 1976 was the last time one could purchase a copy of “The Hippy Dictionary” in which the definition of “hippy” was explicitly “heterosexual”.
But, as Hunter S. Thompson points out “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit…” But it goes beyond that. You can all rest assured you won’t find that definition of “hippy” even in the used book sellers of “The Hippy Dictionary” on Amazon. I suspect if there were any of the first edition copies of that book, they were all bought up and burned some time ago.
But maybe you could find a copy in the Vatican Library.
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