JUDY KUTULAS
This short, selective presentation of cultural phenomena of the Seventies America fails to meet the promise of the title: After Aquarius Dawned, meaning the Sixties, what was that influence? Not all started of that in the Sixties. The Chapter subjects are 1) Music, 2) Style and Manhood, 3) Feminism, 4) Race, 5) Gay/Family Values and 6) Jonestown. Two issues come to the fore: What was the situation in each area during the Sixties, and what was the situation of each during the Seventies?
To access the effects of the Sixties on the Seventies (carry-overs), (ideas) (hangers-on), is an ambitious, detailed project. The historian looks at words and actions backward and forward, and the historian must convey standards by which that process of looking is done.
Aquarius give no starting/ending point for any chapter. The end of the Sixties began with events in 1968: Tet; the Assassinations; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix deaths; Woodstock; Altamont; Nixon election; the end of the Beatles and other groups; fractionalization of the Left – S.D.S./Weathermen – within African-American groups and leadership – discord among Women – leftists, Women’s Libbers/Feminists; Santa Barbara; Cambodia; Kent State; University of Wisconsin bombing; attack on academia (mostly by white leftists); cross-over attacks in the South – shooting African-American students by police maintaining law and order; men and women separated from families and friends go missing; advent of surplus people choosing to live on the street.
The chapters in Aquarius advance arguments using the improbable. Carole King and Joni Mitchell at the forefront of 1970s music: each may have represented small segments of music. James Taylor had an audience but wasn’t the missing link between the Sixties and Seventies. Policy fears generated by Sputnik are unaddressed, although men and women were hooked into that business math/science sub-culture. Did the Mary Tyler Moore Show represent feminism during the Seventies? Aquarius does not mention the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972. Stonewall happened in 1969 but its issues did not become a political movement for years; one episode of All in the Family hardly represents a grand advance. At the end of the decade, AIDS separated and next became a public health issue. Race in America during the Seventies was mostly black and white, and despite his unspeakable transgressions, Bill Cosby, by using cartoons, was a leader moving the goals of civil rights expressed by social/political groups to entertainment. Meanwhile, African-American communities were beset by government programs of benign neglect, a term coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
The commune – hippies with disaffected, alienated lives – finishes Aquarius with Jonestown. 900 dead is emblematic of the Sixties influences into the Seventies: The inability to learn and to establish one’s own identify: Become an individual, apart from social, political and cultural norms and expectations. That revolution preached accept, don’t judge other human beings, don’t
criticize. For example, dancing: Partner dancing in the early-mid Sixties; becoming chaotic (feel, reflect the vibrations) in the late Sixties and Seventies; disco awkwardly ebbed and easily flowed. The Eighties brought in raves – human beings jump up and down to pounding sound – in the end there are no couples.
The common thread of the Sixties and Seventies was the survival of a cultural revolution, an attack on individuality: Join the group, accept everyone; let people [not individuals] do their own things; Americans were easily swayed or led. Let people do victimless crimes involving drugs. During the Sixties to this day, individual Americans learned they have liberties, freedoms, rights and privileges, yet how many individual Americans learned that each of them has also duties, responsibilities and obligations to America, to fellow Americans and to the common weal? And Americans also learned government has responsibilities, duties and obligations: Tell no lies about Vietnam and the Vietnam War! Tell no lies about Watergate! Americans learned, don’t trust government.
Ronald Reagan returned some individuality to Americans, and some Americans complain he did it wrong and his efforts were incomplete. His policies reloaded and renewed greed and self- interest into the American psyche, laying those traits over the disorder and undefined social and cultural influences beginning in the Sixties.
Jonestown loaded the hallmarks of Aquarius into the Seventies: A commune, an appeal to communism as was shown by Jim Jones himself, a strong man telling followers how to live, taking their money and property, isolating commune members, using forced labor, always lying, making life and death decisions about commune members, on and on and on. On a sliding scale how many Americans in the Seventies were willing to sacrifice or let go of their status, as individual human beings, and submit to the whims of a goon? The Beatles had disciples but never this. How many Americans follow today? Jonestown should be the first chapter of the book – Americans lost and looking for anchorage. Jonestown manifested a time when little in life seemed certain and life itself was worthless.
Yet, Aquarius uses a subtitle to better tell what the book is about: How the Revolutions of the Sixties Became the Popular Culture of the Seventies. Was the Popular Culture of the Seventies reflected by run-of-the-mill television shows, a few of which have sequels made into movies e.g. Charlie’s Angels. Some of those shows will never go into syndication. Missing from the Seventies Popular Culture but certainly prominent are eye-candy fashion and sports magazine covers, and super-models rising from commonality to become the image of boomer womanhood, (and feminism?).
As a book and as an argument Aquarius is not convincing.
muymue 