In one of those insights that are hidden in plain sight, Decade of Nightmares notes that no major coverage of the 1980 presidential campaign mentions the Atlanta child murders, that year’s biggest, most disturbing, most compelling news story. This is not to say that Jimmy Carter would have won re-election if only Wayne Williams had been convicted of the murders (on very dubious grounds) a few months earlier. But there is no denying the sense of horror and powerlessness that hung over those days, infecting even the incumbent’s home state. (One counterfactual Jenkins doesn’t consider is that had Watergate not irradiated the Republicans, it’s likely the GOP would have remained in the White House through the end of the ’70s and paid the price for the decay of that period.)
This is soft science, and Jenkins beefs up his arguments with the citations of pop culture ephemera that have become standard in studies of this sort. He is skillful at this part, comfortable with the vagaries of punk politics, the cult of drug-addled sitcom star MacKenzie Phillips, Hal Lindsey’s evangelical End Times blockbuster The Late, Great Planet Earth (and the many books of environmental apocalypse that now seem indistinguishable from it), Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s conspiracy-drunk Illuminatus! trilogy, and the gradations of slasher movies. Jenkins finds meaning in very special episodes of Mork & Mindy, in the no-budget Rapture film A Thief In the Night (which reportedly gained an audience in the hundreds of millions via showings on the international Protestant church group circuit), and in Sexual Suicide, George Gilder’s unintentionally hilarious rampage against gay and feminist activism (and Gilder’s own flagging masculine energies).
This type of material is easy to write and frequently fun to read, and I would have liked to see Jenkins devote more of his energy to it. Not only because he occasionally gets something wrong (e.g., erroneously grouping the Men Without Hats classic “Safety Dance,” a song whose only concern is the listener’s capacity to dance if he or she wants to, with the anti-war/anti-nuke music genre of the early ’80s), but because there is room for so much more. Once again, The Bad News Bears gets ignored as a watershed film, as does Dawn of the Dead, popular culture’s last word on both de-urbanization and Me Generation anomie. And where is Oingo Boingo’s “Only a Lad,” a song that demonstrated even New Wave fancy lads could produce a tough-on-crime anthem? Fox’s sitcom Married With Children debuted at the tail end of the period Jenkins treats, to unanimous condemnation from conservatives who viewed it as an assault on traditional values, but in hindsight, the Al Bundy type of working-class forgotten man, whose real enemies are mealy-mouthed elites from the blue states, appears to be the central actor in the social transformation Jenkins is discussing.
But this is to criticize Decade of Nightmares for not being a different book. Jenkins has made an important contribution to our understanding of post-’60s America. If the book has a failing, it may be that Jenkins doesn’t follow his arguments to their disquieting conclusions. He acknowledges that, particularly in the areas of foreign policy and crime prevention, moral panics often contain a kernel of reality, but he doesn’t consider what that reality means for those of us who share his skepticism. The book ends on a modest plea for reason, acknowledging that while terrorists, killer drugs, and child molesters exist, we need to shrink the space they hold in our consciousness and avoid hysterical reactions. This supposes that reasonable reactions are advisable, or even possible. Against a hypochondriac who insists on wearing a surgical mask at all times, facts and logic are useless, because it’s the hypochondriac who has facts and logic on his side: The world really is crawling with killer germs and unimaginable pathogens. The only counterargument is that nobody wants to go around looking like Dr. Giggles every day, but that’s an argument based on preference, not logic.
To take a recent example of hysterical overreaction, consider that the most effective arguments against the USA PATRIOT Act haven’t been logical appeals to the self-interest of the average citizen (who has almost certainly not noticed the act’s effects) but panicky appeals to Big Brother’s slippery slope and other fears that tend to exist more in the mind than in reality. (Proponents of the act have their own habits of chop logic and unreason, which don’t need recapitulating here.) By the same token, Jenkins appears to be dismayed at ballooning rates of incarceration in recent decades. But like civil libertarians, he avoids the question of whether those rates might have something to do with the precipitous drops in violent crime rates during the same period. And it was the Chicken Littles of anti-terrorism and “Islamophobia” who ended up looking prescient after the 9/11 atrocities. I am not defending the prison boom or the PATRIOT Act, merely noting a troubling point about contemporary hysteria: that in many instances the hysterics have turned out to be right, or at least as right as anybody else offering solutions.
In what may be Decade of Nightmares’ most brilliant juxtaposition, Jenkins compares the psychiatrist figures in slasher movies from two very different eras. At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho, perpetual hothead Simon Oakland is brought in to explain murderer Norman Bates’ pathology in irreproachable psychiatric detail, while authority figures from the church, the state, and the victim’s family listen in rapt silence. (“A psychiatrist doesn’t lay the groundwork,” Oakland intones. “He merely tries to explain it.”) Eighteen years later, John Carpenter’s Halloween ends with perpetual egghead Donald Pleasance being asked if slasher Michael Myers is the bogeyman. The creepy shrink replies that yes, he probably is. You couldn’t find a more striking contrast between the era of technocratic liberalism and the era of conservative reaction.
But there’s another wrinkle here. By 1978, let alone 2006, Oakland’s pseudoscientific display of Freudian skylarking looked not only wrong but laughably stupid and under-informed; the psychiatrist, like so many other authority figures, had by then been recognized as eminently fallible. The bogeyman explanation seems downright scientific by comparison.
The real surprise may not be how silly moral panics of the past look today but how disheveled today’s rational high ground will look in the future.
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