New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | January 24, 2006

Tim Cavanaugh takes a scenic tour through the moral panics of the late '70s and early '80s.

Comments

|1.24.06 @ 5:19PM|#

Damn good article.

test|1.24.06 @ 6:01PM|#

test

|1.24.06 @ 6:21PM|#

You FAIL.

But hey, social promotion.

|1.24.06 @ 6:50PM|#

Does Jenkins claim that the working class deserted the Democratic party due to "moral panics"? As a child of the working class, (dad was an auto mechanic), I have to point out that from where I sit, the Democratic party deserted the working class.

I don't like the Republicans, but, the republicans just piss on me. They don't pretend to be my friend while pissing on me.

I know it's easier for elitists to patronize working class people and pretend that we're all too stupid to know what is good for us than it is to actually think about what the Democratic party actually did during this period. The Democratic party stopped representing us! That's it. They left us. 'Nuff said!

|1.24.06 @ 6:56PM|#

I thought Jenkins's Hidden Gospels was excellent.

|1.24.06 @ 8:07PM|#

"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."

Well, sure - and it wouldn't be all that much of a surpise either unless one studiously ignores history. But that is no reason to abandon the "rational high ground" and let it all hang out. Nice article, otherwise.

|1.24.06 @ 8:18PM|#

All very interesting in a hypothetical kind of way. I think there is a simpler explanation though.

Carter had stagflation, a term that didn't exist a decade before. Only Milton Friedman predicted it before it happens. Publicly anyway, in his Newweek column.

Carter had still more gas lines, and a country seemingly held hostage to OPEC.

Carter had the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his reply was sanctions and to boycott the '80 Olympics in Moscow. Carter had the hostage crisis and his reply was to crash the rescue helicopters in the desert. To be fair, Reagan's initial response to the hostage crisis would likely have been as pathetic.

Those five things, inflation, high unemployment, Afghanistan, Iran, did Carter in. the first three were Carter's fault, and I have no sympathy for him.

Only the Fed can create inflation, and we had a national policy of deliberately trading inflation for lower unemployment since the 60's. Of course, this was a false tradeoff in the long run, which is where Friedman comes in. The gas lines were also Carter's fault for not understanding ABC supply and demand, and thus setting price ceilings.

Reagan killed the oil price ceilings on the first day in office, just like he said he would. He ended Carter's (and Ford's and Nixon's) inflation, via the Carter confirmed Volcker in the Fed, just like he said he would. His policy of market liberalization created 30 million new jobs during the his tenure in the White House. Technically 80 million I believe, with 50 million destroyed. reagan rebuilt the military, just like he said he would. Of course Carter started the process, but chose not to highlight the fact. The Iranian's released the hostages just after Reagan took office, i.e. the same day.

So of course the nation followed a lot of Reagan's policies, and they have stood up generally speaking. We have also naturally got a lot of baggage that didn't necessarily come as a result of our opposing Carter's policies. We also didn't get a lot of things Reagan promised, like less government spending.

America was disgusted with Carter's ineptness, and happy with reagan's reversal of those policies. No need to bring in pop culture into it at all. Sorry, I am not buying the book's basic concept. I am not going to be buying the book either.

|1.24.06 @ 8:22PM|#

Not only because he occasionally gets something wrong (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 antiwar/antinuke music genre of the early eighties)

But the music video for that song did have a shot of a cruise missile in it, toward the very end. So it could have had a "here we are, dancing on the brink of nuclear annhilation" message to it.

Or else they just decided to put a shot of a flying cruise missile in the video.

|1.24.06 @ 8:38PM|#

Damn, I just saw the pic on ReasonOnline's main page. That was a sad day. Not the least of which because it spawned Sarah Brady's lunacy.

I'm assuming of course that was a pic of the aftermath of Reagan getting shot, with presumably James Brady lying there.

|1.24.06 @ 10:04PM|#

"Absinthe - open your mind, starting with your ear!"

*points to the Vincent theme of the new ads*

|1.24.06 @ 10:15PM|#

The one thing I really want to comment on is the "perception" that "American cities [were] in violent, unmanageable, apocalyptic decline." If there was such a perception, maybe it was because they were at the time, or shortly before!

Bankruptcy of the city; Blackouts and rioting; 12-day transit strike; Week-long sanitation strike; Drawbridge and sewer workers strike; the Hard Hat Riot; student occupation of a university; a soaring murder rate; the highest taxes in the nation.

And that's just New York City in the 1970s.

|1.24.06 @ 10:20PM|#

happyjuggler0 - I was going to say something along those lines, but you said it better than I could. Something similar happened in the UK, I think, with PM Thatcher in place of Reagan.

|1.24.06 @ 10:25PM|#

Two clarifications/updates to my earlier post:
1. I should have said "1960s and 1970s"
2. Apparently during John Lindsay's tenure as mayor, one in seven New Yorkers worked for the city government, and almost as many were on welfare. Us Reasonoid types could have told you that wasn't a recipe for a healthy city, but nobody ever listens to us.

|1.24.06 @ 10:46PM|#

I don't think Al Bundy as an unmistakeable hero contrasts all that sharply with Archie Bunker. My memories of All in the Family's early years are murky, but by 1975, in the latter half of its run, I think Archie was being pretty clearly depicted as good-hearted, if struggling to cope with a changing world, his prejudices being a function of his upbringing and ignorance. Meanwhile "Meathead" was usually shown to be hypocritical, naive, and/or destructively intolerant by the end of any given episode -- further support for Jenkins' thesis, I suppose, though I'm with happyjuggler0 on the reasons for Carter's fall.

|1.24.06 @ 11:47PM|#

"...the limitless, Hellraiser-style perversity of the My Little Pony franchise."

Speaking of starting mortal panics, what horrible, traumatic experience did Mr. Cavanaugh suffer at the hands of "My Little Pony" fans? Or were liitle girls being seduced into something evil?

|1.25.06 @ 4:11AM|#

I thought the big problems back then was disco and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Some of Tim's essays are real high-wire acts, it seems like he's juggling three bowling balls, seven meat cleavers and two bananas at once. What the hell does he eat for breakfast before he writes one of these, I wonder?

|1.25.06 @ 5:35AM|#

Yeah... I was wondering about that hellraiser-pony connection.

|1.25.06 @ 9:50AM|#

No mention of dungeons and dragons in an article about the late 70s/early80s? For all that it's been mocked, it really got into the heads of a genreations of geeks that are now heading up the corporate and government ladders.

|1.25.06 @ 9:51AM|#

dammit, genreations=generation

|1.25.06 @ 10:52AM|#

They didn't mention D&D, Native NYer, but it meshes well enough with the thesis if you view the game from a classic Good vs. Evil perspective -- One doesn't reason or peacefully coexist with orcs, for example. On the other hand, there was always somebody who wanted to play a thief or assassin and prey upon the other players, and the occasional whole "evil campaign" where players anticipated all the horrors of Grand Theft Auto and then some by two decades or so. I'm not sure how Jenkins would address all that.

Tim Cavanaugh|1.25.06 @ 10:59AM|#

My apologies if I gave the impression that the book is about why Reagan beat Carter. It's not. It's about changes in conventional wisdom and attitudes of the electorate over a given period of time. The 1980 election figures into it as a watershed event, obviously, but if anything Jenkins, compared to other commentators on the era, plays down the significance of the election-both because he sees Reagan as presiding over a revolution that was already in progress and because he's more interested in the continuity between their two eras.

Friedmanesque economics certainly had something to do with Reagan's successful management of the economy, but if successful economic policy were what the public judged a president on, Bill Clinton would be on Mt. Rushmore and George W. Bush would be out of office. As somebody who was way too young to vote for Reagan in 1980 but passionately wanted him to win, I can vividly remember the advertising and the tone of the campaign, and they didn't focus on economics in any detail, beyond the obvious point that the economy was in the crapper and something needed to be done about it. (Cripes, Reagan's own veep called his plan "voodoo economics.) I wanted Reagan solely because I thought he was going to get tough on the Russians and make America stand tall again, and I'm guessing I wasn't the only one. Anyway, if you think the American electorate from 1975 to 1986 converted to a belief in, or even an understanding of, free market economics, I've got a bridge to sell you.

And finally, it's not true that all Carter did about Afghanistan was boycott the Olympics. Brzezinski was the architect of assistance to the mujahideen, and Reagan largely inherited that plan. If nobody (including me) realized that in 1980, that demonstrates Jenkins' point: People vote for largely non-rational reasons that are unrelated to the verifiable facts.

Native NYer, I don't recall there being any mention of Dungeons and Dragons, and unfortunately I'm working from a review copy without an index. If it had been mentioned, it would have been in the context of the anti-D&D hysteria of the time, in which kids were supposedly "losing all sense of reality in the fantasy world of the game," often killing themselves or others as a result. This trope turned up repeatedly in news stories, and there may even have been a case where a college student got killed playing Killer or some other RPG-type thing. It was also the theme in a variety of very special episodes and TV movies, the most prominent of which was Mazes and Monsters, with Tom Hanks as a college student who loses all sense of reality in the fantasy world of the game. You're right, it's an unfortunate omission.

|1.25.06 @ 2:00PM|#

I think Archie was being pretty clearly depicted as good-hearted, if struggling to cope with a changing world, his prejudices being a function of his upbringing and ignorance. Meanwhile "Meathead" was usually shown to be hypocritical, naive, and/or destructively intolerant by the end of any given episode

I was kinda young when I watched All in the Family," but I remember it a little differently. I remember Archie Bunker being portrayed as an invincibly ignorant buffoon. Deep down he wasn't a bad guy if he could be forced to see the light, but he was no one to emulate. Mike "the Meathead" on the other hand, while he had some "funny flaws" -- unemployed perpetual student and always hungry for chow -- was portrayed as always being in the right. Again, as I recall.

There was one episode, however, where the Bunkers had their home invaded by a couple of black-guy robbers. At one point, Archie said something bigoted and Mike tried to smooth it over by saying, "Look, he doesn't understand what it's like to grow up in poverty."

And one of the robbers gives him the eyeball and says, "And you do?"

Mike is caught short for a second, and then says, "Well, no, but in my sociology classes --"

And then the robbers bust out laughing.

I remember that as a rare zinger at Mike's expense -- suggesting that his views of the world may be as ill-informed and "prejudiced" as Archie's.

But I remember it because it struck me as so rare and odd -- usually the show took Mike's side.

|1.25.06 @ 2:11PM|#

On the other hand ...

Once when I was a kid at St. Sabina's grade school, we had a visiting priest come in and talk to our class. And he illustrated his talk with, of all things, recordings from All in the Family. (Audio recordings ... VCRs hadn't been invented yet. I think they were on a vinyl record.) One I remember was a clip where Archie and Mike are arguing about evolution:

ARCHIE: Look, youse can believe that you descended from chimpanzees and bamboons if you want. But the Bible says that God created man in His own image.

(pause)

MIKE: You mean God looks like you?

(laughter)

ARCHIE: Well, I didn't say youse couldn't tell us apart ...

I think the priest's point in this was that you don't have to take everything in the Bible literally. Anyway, I remember he said, "This time, Mike is right ..." This time ... as if usually Mike was wrong. Well, this struck me because, as a kid, the impression I got from the show was that Mike was always supposed to be right.

But I guess this anecdote showes it's possible that some adult viewers routinely agreed with Archie more often than Mike. Or else they were more perceptive critics than young me, and could see that Mike was often wrong too.

|1.25.06 @ 2:16PM|#

Great article. Interesting take on Al Bundy. My mom hated that show because she thought it was disrespectful to fathers and husbands...even though she wears the pants in the family. Nice Yakov Smirnov reference. And interesting perspective on the Oingo Boingo song. I'll have to pull the Best of Boing CD out and listen to it again. Again, excellent article. This is the best web site around.

|1.25.06 @ 2:27PM|#

OK, in my post at January 25, 2006 02:00 PM, in the 2nd paragraph, the italics were supposed to stop after "All in the Family."

And as long as I'm making another note, a correction: I don't think it was a visiting priest, it was a young student teacher who took over some of our classes for a while. Mike Papas, or maybe Tom Papas, was his name. He changed it from Papadopolous and he was a grand-nephew or something of the king of Greece. He was a pretty cool guy, actually. Although some of the eighth-grade boys would "test" him a bit during recess by yelling, "Hey, Pap-Ass!" and then they'd run, and he'd run after them. Which was probably a mistake on his part -- he should have disciplined those kids like an authority figure instead of running after them like a dissed peer.

Don't mind me, I'm just doing a free-association unspooling of my 1970s memories.

Hey, do you guys remember Angie Dickinson in Police Woman...?

|1.25.06 @ 3:33PM|#

The best thing about the Bundys was that the one thing they did better than everyone else was kick ass. Some of my favorite episodes were when they would stop bickering with one another and kick the shit out of a yuppie family.

Tymothi Loving|1.25.06 @ 3:33PM|#

A Thief in the Night! God, I remember that movie (and the sequels). I need to track that down again and show it to some of my friends, just so that they can feel the pain of my superfundamentalist home&church-schooled church-every-day-of-the-week upbringing.

|1.25.06 @ 3:34PM|#

Stevo -- I had watched the series as a young'un in the '70s, and then saw a number of reruns in the late '80s, which are the ones I remember most clearly (albeit still murkily). I remember being a bit surprised (my original childhood memories being similar to yours) at how sympathetically I thought Archie was being portrayed in spite of his obvious bigotry, compared to the shrill stridency displayed by Mike.

I'd have to research specific examples, though I at least remember one "Rashomon" episode in which Archie and Mike relate their own extreme versions of what transpired in a confrontation between Archie and the young black man delivering a refrigerator to the house. The episode concludes with Edith telling her own, more nuanced version which is implied to be closest to the truth -- thus showing Mike to have at least as distorted a view of the world in his own way as Archie.

I also recall more than one episode in which Mike was depicted as decidedly sexist with regard to Gloria, despite talking the liberal talk. The "Mike as jerk" theme was ultimately enshrined in the short-lived "Gloria" spinoff, which didn't feature Rob Reiner, it being explained that the couple had divorced, with the strong implication that Mike was the "at fault" party.

My memories of Police Woman are pretty murky at best, though in some respects it can probably be related to the topic at hand via Jesse Walker's "Death Kitsch" essay of a couple years back:
http://www.reason.com/links/links090803.shtml

|1.25.06 @ 3:57PM|#

"Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic were mutilating cattle in the countryside"

Excellent article and nice Lovecraft reference. I plan on checking this book out. Reason rocks.

|1.25.06 @ 9:39PM|#

Dr Doom: "Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" is actually an H.G. Wells/War of the Worlds reference.

Umbriel: Yeah, now that you mention it ... I remember that "Rashamon"-type episode. Archie said the black deliveryman threatened him with a huge knife, and Mike said there was no knife, and Edith said he had a small penknife that he used to cut an apple.

MIKE: It was just a little penknife!

GLORIA: But Michael, you said there was no knife. So you're just as bad as Daddy.

ARCHIE: Yeah, Meathead, you're just as bad as me!

Wow, it's amazing how much I remember from watching that show ... and how much apparently didn't sink in.

At that age, I was probably just disposed to think some people were always right and others were always wrong.