Great Funk Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies

Excerpt If you wanted a world that was orderly, where progress was guaranteed, the seventies were a terrible time to be alive. Cars were running out of gas. The country was running out of promise. A president was run out of office. And American troops were running out of Vietnam. Only a decade before, as the nation anticipated the conquest of space, the defeat of poverty, an end to racism, and a society where people moved faster and felt better than they ever had before, it seemed that there was nothing America couldn't do. Even the protestors of the sixties objected that America was using its immense wealth and power to do the wrong things, not that it did things wrong. Yet during the seventies it seemed that the United States couldn't do anything right. The country had fallen into the Great Funk. America even fumbled the celebration of its birthday. In 1975, the United States began a multiyear observance of the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution. Fifteen years earlier, such a celebration would have engaged America, but by the mid-seventies, everything seemed to be falling apart. Four years of pageantry, featuring musket-wielding guys in tricorn hats, didn't feel like a solution for the country's malaise. At many of the commemorations, Gerald Ford, that unelected, unexpected president, said some little-noted words. Ford presided over bicentennial America like a substitute teacher, trying to calm a chaos he had no hand in making and seemed scarcely to understand. The bicentennial celebration left few memories, few images or events that have resonated through the decades since. "Media Burn," staged on July 4, 1975, at San Francisco's Cow Palace, is an exception. It was not an official commemoration but rather a project of Ant Farm, an art and architecture collaborative. President Ford was not in attendance as he was at most of the bicen's big moments. Instead, the presiding figure was an imitator of the late President John F. Kennedy, who was remembered at the time as the last real president, or at least the last who didn't leave office in disgrace. "Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?" the ersatz Kennedy asked. In the climactic mo-ment of the event, a specially modified and apparently driverless 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible crashed through a wall of vintage television sets. In fact, there was a driver hidden inside the car. And the crash was documented by a camera housed in an additional tail fin, constructed for the purpose. "Media Burn" was a quintessential event of the seventiesbleak, funny, transgressive, and intensely satisfying in a way that was either juvenile or profound. Though it lacked the Betsy Ross impersonators and flag-waving oratory that marked official bicentennial events, it was nevertheless a historical pageant: Kennedy and the Cadillac Eldorado, icons of success in the immediate past, represented an America that was past and seemingly irrecoverable. Only a decade and a half earlier, every part of American culturefrom its leaders to its cars and even its linoleumseemed to promise expansiveness and progress. Americans had watched those television sets and seen the future, but nothing had turned out as advertised. By 1975, the future had turned from a promise to a shock. Following the first Arab oil embargo of 1973, the Eldorado and the dream of freedom and luxury it embodied had come to appear grotesque, a true road to ruin. Overnight, Americans went from a world where abundance was assured to one in which scarcity was an ever-looming threat, and they didn't handle it well. Mysterious rumors of shortages of everything from toilet paper to raiHine, Thomas is the author of 'Great Funk Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies', published 2007 under ISBN 9780374148393 and ISBN 0374148392.