Dazed & Confused (& whiny)

[firecat]

The Dazed and Confused Generation by Bruce Handy in The New Yorker

I haven’t seen the movie this article covers, but the article discusses how some of us who were teens in the 1970s thought “our” decade was incredibly boring, and I remember feeling that way. The article is whiny and I want to say “OK, Boomer” in response even though I agree late Boomers are difervent from early ones. But it was interesting to re-visit that white suburban 70s kid feeling of “born too late, everything cool’s been done already.”

Our generation naturally had no equivalent watershed events, no epochal gatherings worth lying about having attended. Linklater and I reminisced about what a corny, cynical dud the Bicentennial had been. “The Comet Kohoutek of holidays,” he called it.
[…]
Linklater confessed surprise at the unironic affection with which younger audiences embraced the movie and its trappings….”I was thinking, O.K., there’s no way this film will ever kick off a nostalgia for the seventies. I’m going to make a film to show how the seventies kind of sucked….It was funny to realize, Oh, shit, people like this!”

Comments

[greghousesgf]

yes. and the politics too.

[firecat]

In retrospect the politics of the 70s look fairly benign. Reaganomics has done the country way worse than Whip Inflation Now.

[greghousesgf]

what baffled me is why so many working class people thought Reagan was Mr. Awesome when he shat all over anyone who wasn't rich!

[firecat]

I‘ve heard various theories for the phenomenon of white working class people voting “conservative” — voting based on your aspirations more than on who would help you most in your current circumstances; or voting based on which party appeals to you more morally; voting for what you perceive as the status quo because your life seems unstable and the status quo is perceived as more stable; voting for whoever points you at a more believable scapegoat to blame your problems on.

[greghousesgf]

You'd have to be an idiot to think some random gay guy is a bigger threat morally than a rich asshole trying to screw over as many poorer people as possible.