Prepare yourself for a mind-expanding conversation with Matt and Alex from the Long 70s podcast. We're rewinding time, unlocking the secrets of an era that stretched from 1968 to 1984/85 and has left far-reaching impacts on our world today.
From the emergence of new left politics to the influence of the cultural Cold War, we unravel the dynamics that shaped the late 60s and 70s. We shine a spot light on the role of media, the existence of aliens and delve into the world of post-modernism. We also uncover the work of cultural critic Christopher Lasch and his unique application of Foucault's ideas to American culture.
To wrap up our journey through this transformative era, we reflect on the cultural messaging in popular cinema, the rapid pace of technological progress and the early days of the internet. As we dissect the legacy of the 70s and its influence on our present, we also explore how this era continues to haunt our culture today. So, tune in, and let's take a trip down memory lane, discovering the untold stories of the long 70s.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Prepare yourself for a mind-expanding conversation with Matt and Alex from the Long 70s podcast. We're rewinding time, unlocking the secrets of an era that stretched from 1968 to 1984/85 and has left far-reaching impacts on our world today.
From the emergence of new left politics to the influence of the cultural Cold War, we unravel the dynamics that shaped the late 60s and 70s. We shine a spot light on the role of media, the existence of aliens and delve into the world of post-modernism. We also uncover the work of cultural critic Christopher Lasch and his unique application of Foucault's ideas to American culture.
To wrap up our journey through this transformative era, we reflect on the cultural messaging in popular cinema, the rapid pace of technological progress and the early days of the internet. As we dissect the legacy of the 70s and its influence on our present, we also explore how this era continues to haunt our culture today. So, tune in, and let's take a trip down memory lane, discovering the untold stories of the long 70s.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Hello and welcome to VarmVlog, and today I'm talking to Matt and Alex of the Long 70s podcast and we are discussing the the 70s malaise. Then you left and we'll probably talk about Christopher Lash too, but now I'm gonna let Matt and Alex introduce themselves, so yeah, Matt.
Speaker 3:And I'm Alex of the Long 70s podcast.
Speaker 1:That's right so before we get into the meat of the discussion, let's like Foreground your project because it's a very it's both a very specific and a very broad show. I've listened to your series on dystopian 70 sci-fi, but I've also listened to you talk about, like audio file stuff from the 70s that I vaguely remember. So I wanted to Ask you guys what makes the long 70s the long 70s and how are you kind of denotating the period?
Speaker 2:So I got the idea originally from a book by a guy named Shulman, who wrote a book called the 70s, where he outlines the yeah, yep, bruce Shulman, this kind of concept of the long 70s.
Speaker 2:It's a way of thinking about history more in like epochs or eras rather than ten year decades, because, like the affinities for the events that happen inside and the trends, they don't necessarily line up to the decades. So it's easier to think about it For Shulman, originally from 68, I think, to 82, which I think I heard you mentioned on another show. 68 to 82, I I think we think about it more as 68 to around 84 85 and that's delineated by Reagan's landslide reelection in 84, and then also the certain cultural changes, like in 85 you get all the John Hughes movies. There's this really heavy emphasis on teenagers that you don't necessarily see in the 70s and late 60s in pop culture. And aside from that it just became an interesting period where I guess the the general Goal of the project is to figure out, like what the hell is happening now. And you can really do that by looking at the long 70s because a lot of the things that happen then in the trends they directly to where we are now.
Speaker 2:And then the longer we've done Research on the long 70s, the more you start to think well, what happened in the long 70s. Why did that happen? You think, oh, it like the 40s and the 50s and it's just like this never-ending recursion back into history. But that, I mean, that's the basic project, just everything in there, anything and everything long 70s, it all ties together. It's. It's really cohesive.
Speaker 3:Right, we sometimes come up with a, even a discrete Topic or one thing you know, sort of picked out of a headline, as it were, from that time period, and We'll just do an episode on that because it's the time period is just incredibly fertile for us and just some of the, the craziness and the stuff. That's if it's interesting to us. Hopefully it's interesting to someone else.
Speaker 1:It's interesting to me. I've listened to like two years worth of your episode. I Am that rare creature of the bird between JNX and millennial, and so I was born and what you would consider the long 70s, but don't really remember it Except when, I see pictures from like 84 when.
Speaker 2:I'm.
Speaker 1:And it is striking to me even in material culture since going back and looking at like photos of my youth, how Very different things look between 83 and 87.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, did you listen to the pop culture Empire episode?
Speaker 2:Yes, I did that, that that one struck me when the the turning of like the cultural, like the cultural revolutions every decade, new fashion, new music. Just this constant need for new consumer goods of all sorts just Requires this overthrow of everything old and this kind of like new set of products, intellectual or physical or music, everything. And a lot of people have noticed that that has kind of slowed down since the long 70s. And there's I noticed this thing on Twitter where people post a photo of Of 2002 or something and say looks, it, looks just like today, whereas if it was 84 to like 72, everybody would look completely different.
Speaker 3:But yeah, the 80s, the big 80s, as it were, feels like such a reaction to the 70s.
Speaker 3:I mean, even down to like the color palettes, and it's kind of a cliche, but you go from like earth tones to neons, just to be real broad about it, but it's, it just seems like such a turnaround that that's it feels like a break in the long 70s. It really does feel like a break there and and it's you know, music, everything. We constantly sort of find that, like you know, we spill over a little bit into the 80s, but but the long 70s itself, I don't know, there's just a lot to to get out of it. So we feel like if that's the only real sort of guardrails or bookends on what we work at, then I feel like we keep digging up more things and that's why we don't put a whole lot of other Restrictions on it and we try to sort of sequence them in such a way and mix it up, just so it's not just so we can kind of find a different category of topic, not just the topic itself, to explore with the given episode.
Speaker 1:I'm always surprised at what you find to talk about. Like I said, I was bizarrely fascinated by your audiophile episode, which was not something and I thought I cared about at all. It was just like oh, I remember turntables right exactly, and in large speaker systems and public music.
Speaker 1:It's actually interesting to think about the shift in material culture. I was talking to a friend of mine about like why it seems like live music is dying and nobody's in bands and stuff like that, and I was listening to the episode you guys did on fuzz pedals.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah and and it all like occurred to me that this like really was tied together in a very like. The market has changed. Music has really not become. It's not a social thing anymore and also you know, I'm a teacher it doesn't denocate social differences between like young people anymore either sure yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and so With everything available to people, I mean now you could be one of those weirdos. It gets in the music from the 30s If you really want to, it's bottom.
Speaker 1:Oh sure there is no real sense of either time period or subcultural delineation from music and that's such a huge change from the from the 70s, but another. I find listening to you show like a very fascinating study. In contrast, because there's other ways that after like two thought, I think about 2009. I feel like the culture has resembled 70s style, like malaise, the whole that I mean. The obvious thing is like silent generation and baby boomers really do even demographically resemble Gen X and millennials, with the exception of Gen X and millennials have been getting poorer yeah, I'm a generation and boomers were getting richer. So, um, well, that's somewhat stabilized. Finally, it is like Sometimes it feels like the odds and the odd teens were the 70s, in reverse.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I Guess. That leads me, though, to a question. What I'm fascinated about the 70s is like, on one hand, like when we think about the 60s, we're often really thinking about 68, 69 in the beginning of 70s, absolutely sure and then we think about like the early, early 80s were also really like it's still the same culture for the most part.
Speaker 3:Yes, like like you know, took term run Reagan still basically the 70s right Pop that you do, yeah, even even just some of the hallmarks of it. You know, you see early 80s TV shows. The clothes and the haircuts are the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think about I grew up like watching Samford and son and just Jefferson's and All in the family and there's continuity between the 70s and 80s on those shows definitely absolutely Not, not to be not to be like blatantly materialist about it, but I think a lot of people don't appreciate the fact that the the time period between maybe like the like 50s and when music streaming started, was really an outlier in terms of it, as that there was no people were not getting rich Playing music. I mean, obviously they didn't have recording at some point, but the sheer amount of just money that was thrown into making people famous, the marketing, what the amount of money it took to press millions of records that streaming just killed. That in the on-demand, like you said, means that people can listen to anything. So it really breaks down. That kind of marketing pop culture engine that can can target million people at once, and so you just start seeing niche marketing and the the.
Speaker 2:The industry cannot just throw money at making people famous and that's why you see the Rolling Stones come out with a new album. They've been playing music or writing records for what 60 years now, yeah, and Like the industry is not looking for new talent. They got like a stable of people that are big stars now, just like the movie industry is starting to do. There's not really any new movie stars, they're just. It's like nostalgia for stuff that happened 10 years ago. So the whole thing, the whole industry and its ability to shape public opinion and consumer spending, has just broken down. It's pretty crazy to watch.
Speaker 1:I think I was actually thinking about that too when I was thinking about music as a demarcator of park culture, which is like something that's big in my lifetime and everybody uses it at the frame of reference. But the grand cultural milieu of even 250 years, that's weird. That's like a three-generation thing out of 20. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, none of your Anglo-Saxon scholars are sitting there being like, well, we're really trying to get a handle on what they were listening to in that village in Sussex or whatever.
Speaker 1:That doesn't seem tied into politics in a way, and yet somehow I also think it does, because one of the things that I've thought about lately is we also can't get rid of politicians, and I think for similar power law reasons, the people who invested in these politicians don't see the need to invest in anyone's, even if they're decrepit and 80 and like senile. It's just not relevant anymore.
Speaker 2:It's true, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so that parallel is interesting to me and one of the things I think about like cultural artifacts, like predictions of the future. If you look at stuff from the 80s and 90s, like dystopian stuff are from the 80s and 90s.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it feels further away in its themes than say Rollerball does, and that's fascinating to me that, like these movies that I grew up with and thought of as very old when I was in my teens in the 90s somehow feel way more relevant to me now than they did in the 90s, when it would have been in the nostalgia cycle. So I've been trying to think about why that is and I have kind of come up with like kind of blatantly materialist reasons. I do sort of think like we are in an economic malaise that reminds me of the 70s in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1:Like we don't have stagflation yet, but that's only because we don't have enough people to have higher unemployment.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:They've also learned how to cook the CPI in unemployment numbers. Since the 70s it's gotten very sophisticated and clever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they've learned not to make the same mistakes with the record keeping.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean, the only reason, even in the odds, that inflation was low is like we don't consider, we don't put food and housing and education and medical care in the inflation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, things people actually care about, that's right. Minor details, yeah Well, actually sorry you had. You were going to tell us why you thought that those the 70s, seem more relevant to you.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's a lot of, it does seem, economic. We're in a similar kind of economic malaise where, like the prior period of figuring out how to do growth has stalled out. And it is really interesting when you look at like the difference between the early 60s and the late 60s is like you're going from an economic growth rate of like 7 or 8%, which is not sustainable and developed economy anyway. But that was what was happening after the war.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your plan to an economic growth rate of like four to five and there being some unemployment which freaks everybody out and it does lead, you know, and then in the mid 70s you had the beginnings of the industrialization right. Yeah, we had a major economic shift, and I think we are. I personally think we're living through a similar economic shift that whatever we were doing in the 80s and 90s is no longer viable, and I have no idea what. I don't pretend to know what's coming the future at?
Speaker 3:all.
Speaker 1:And I kind of do think you know the reason why I talk about like since 2008,. It feels like the 70s and reverse is that was when, like, we were reminded that business cycles were a thing and that they were vicious. So yeah go ahead.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, I'm just going to throw this in. One thing that comes to mind. You know it's funny we talk about we have an episode on our podcast about financialization in the 70s. One of the terms we talk about is sort of the giving way of, like, the manufacturing era to, you know, the information era or the information age or whatever you want to call it. But it's interesting if you talk about the information age, or whatever you know, as something monolithic. It really isn't, though. I mean we have sub eras and other things within that that no one even saw coming. I mean you talk about how people, even in the 90s, were conceiving of what are computers, what is computerized things or data driven things doing for us, just in a everything from pop culture to economics or whatever. They couldn't have foreseen how that, how that manifests itself today. You know, with, with, like, so called Web 2.0 or or social media, all that like that's even a whole age within an age. When you talk about the information age. I hope that makes a little bit of sense.
Speaker 1:It makes total sense. I was reading this Euro Communist book by the skining gore, so it takes Andre Gortz, French Euro Communist, and he was talking about in like 78 how automation had solved all the problems of manufacturing. And I'm like do you have no idea how far this is going to? Go, you're already predicting that at 78.
Speaker 2:Like right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Even AI, that's a labor saving device, if you want to look at it that way, you know. And now, all of a sudden, you know, no sooner have people started quieting down about how cool it is that they just did something and chat GPT, and now people are like, well, wait a second, what if it takes away all these writing jobs, or you know, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. So it's, yeah. So the line between cool and scary is you know, that's what technology is and that's you know Right.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a certain privilege strata of work. You know as a person who's in that privilege strata of work. That chat GPT, if it gets good, really threatens.
Speaker 1:And that's, and I find it funny because like darkly funny, because I'm like, well, now you know that now, like, this push for everyone to go into the intellectual fields is going to be very similar to the push for everyone to enter the industry in the fifties, because we're figuring out how to automate it. But it's very hard for me to see, like, well, where did all these people go after this? Because I don't know what they're. I don't see a low hanging fruit economy to push a bunch of people into that.
Speaker 2:Well, they went. Yeah, they went into the service economy mostly. So a lot of people just kind of went nowhere. You know, that's where you get the rust belt.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Right and I mean I was going to piggyback on what Alex said about financialization. I think I think people can like intuitively feel these kind of boom and bust cycles. In the seventies you had the basically the bust of the like, the massive production, the massive post war production boom, and then in the late nineties through 2000s, you know, I'm not sure when you would say it ended, but you get the tech boom, so that that propelled growth and still does to a certain point, although I don't think people necessarily appreciate the financial wizardry that was pulled off after 2008 by dropping, like the fed rate to almost zero and just making money basically free to to like institutional lenders.
Speaker 1:Yep, it made investment not risky.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yep, and so you could just throw money at a hundred startups. If one makes money, you're good. The rest of them can just kind of sink and people will start new ones.
Speaker 1:And it's actually really smart to do this because you can lev it that off. The low cost of debt, like, like, also means you're not paying taxes because technically a lot of your income now turned into debt streams. I mean like when you realize this out? I also think this financial trickery going on right now.
Speaker 1:I was looking at like bank profitability and and like fed stabilization and like it's tanked in the last couple of months and the banks seem to be only only able to be viable because, because the feds are doing something else to get them a lot of liquidity. They're not doing QE this time. It's actually a little bit weirder what they seem to be doing, but it's it's basically barring out a loss at high, like through paying out high dividends on interest rates. So it's, it's. It all seems to be quite a mess and again, that reminds me of the way, the way into and out of the 70s, which, which you know, we I always point out to people that, depending on how you measure profits and there's different ways to measure them but in the 70s we we hit negative profitability, which is like unheard of, and we basically fixed that by nuking the industrial economy and financial shenanigans, which led to a lot of asset inflation and and whatnot, but it hasn't led to like general prosperity. And you know we remember the. I remember the late 80s Like yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well they, they offshored a lot of industry and production to countries that could do it for cheaper and eventually, when you do that, those countries want to increase their own standard of living and you get where we are now, where you can't just use a country like China to like subsidize cheap prices in the United States for consumer goods.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And when we talk about like the end of inflation, to me that's like well, I mean the return of inflation at the end of it. To me that's like corporate number one. That we don't talk about. That like oh yeah, we're, we are slightly decoupling from Chinese manufacturing and also China's is moving away from really low end manufacturing itself, although it's having problems to solve with that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Go ahead. I've got this theory I don't know if you've probably heard it if you listen to the show that inflation never actually went away. We just ameliorated the the price side of inflation by getting cheaper, manufacturing someplace else and then gradually over time using less expensive, cheaper materials and everything Like. Like an Amish oak set of shelves costs like $1400 now, but an IKEA shelf costs $80 because it's built out of glue and saw that so and it was made in a you know, a country with cheaper labor.
Speaker 1:Well, it is interesting to me how much stuff that I can see from material culture. You go into an antique shop and from the from the 40s to the 70s is still around. Yeah, good luck on finding anything from the 80s or above that's still functional, oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Even if you use, yeah, thrift store shopping is like your, your barometer or for something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have memories of like people who say, oh, yeah, you know, like you know, we went into the thrift store, or my mom went into the thrift store and we've got this dresser that we're still using today.
Speaker 3:And you and you go and take a look at it and you're like my God, there's like solid wood, you know, it was made in, you know Vermont or something like that, or you just, or it's like somebody painted it some ugly color with craft paint, you know so, and so has got a YouTube channel where they show how they got all that craft paint off. And I've got this amazing solid wood dresser and it's like, yeah, my IKEA dresser is not going to be in the thrift store because the person that's like moving it off the truck to try and get it into the thrift store is going to bang it against the doorway and that's one less dresser you've got to put in the thrift store. So it's going to just using that little like sort of snapshot of consumer goods. That's absolutely going to. That's just a great opportunity to say well, things are different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, matt, I think I really like that point because something that I've noticed too that when we do like inflation baskets, we're not comparing like to like in terms of good quality at all.
Speaker 2:Like no, not.
Speaker 1:Yeah and um, and where there's labor involved, there's been, you know, any field that's labor intensive, with the exception of agriculture. For reasons that are unfortunate, the prices have just have just shot up, are or the profit margins decreased, like when people ask me if they want to start a business and they tell me they want to start a restaurant, and I'm like, dear God, why?
Speaker 3:Like yeah.
Speaker 1:Like do you have any idea, like, what your profit margin on a restaurant is going to be? It's actually remarkably low, unless you get like trendy Michelin star stuff. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 3:So there's also the parallel manufacturing. Like, I feel like I'm hearing the word bespoke being thrown around a lot more. So, right, yeah, well, even yeah, doc Martin shoes. You can buy Doc Martin shoes today, and they have one line that's made in the UK and one line that, I believe, is made in China. So I thought that was an interesting development that someone cooked up that Doc Martin HQ. But it makes perfect sense. You still get your shoes one way or the other. You just you've got parallel lines there.
Speaker 1:Well, I think about, for example, when when there's this move to make like like I think it's gone away now, but like American and parallel and stuff in the odds and early odd teens, where there's this move to make high quality versions of basic stuff in the United States and it just became very clear that a T-shirt was going to be $50.
Speaker 3:Like nobody wanted the T-shirt that badly.
Speaker 1:Right, it's just like. It's like okay, so if I make quality stuff here at like a fair market rate out of decent materials, the same, basically the same stuff that we would have made in the 70s and 60s, it's going to. It's going to call out how expensive the process is here.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I totally agree with you on that, and what I think is is basically happening is the rest of the world is kind of hit. You know a lot of the not like India or whatnot, but India doesn't have the industrial capacity but, like a lot of the rest of the world is got to the middle income bracket and they're not going to make stuff cheap for us anymore.
Speaker 2:So yeah, or we'd make it geopolitically difficult For them to cooperate, which is just a giant mistake, of course, but the whole thing was really not sustainable anyway.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And I think that the I had another reason why I think maybe we might talk about you know the long odds or whatever, because I agree culturally I was. I have been surprised, I see I was. I had a friend of mine who's younger than me was showing me their high school pictures from from like 2004. And I was just like, yeah, really like high schools until until unless you're talking about in the last post COVID have seemed stagnant for almost 20 years. And that's normally how I would like to know cultural change, because usually you see cultural change first in young people.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:So but you know, I wanted to set this material background first to talk about like a kind of political background, because when we talk about like the late 60s, we think of the new left which gets associated with baby boomers. I think actually that's somewhat erroneous. It's actually mostly silent generation people who are not reading that.
Speaker 1:But, but it does happen in the late 60s and the 70s. I do think of the work of Rick Pearl Street, who points out that it was never as big of a part of the population as people seem to think it is, but it does seem to be part of the 70s own mythology about itself. So, and yet, in some ways also I think of the 70s as like for lack of a better term a reactionary decade. So how does that do you think? I'm characterizing it fairly.
Speaker 2:I think I mean I'll go first and I'll let.
Speaker 1:Alex talk.
Speaker 2:But it kind of depends on what you mean when you say the left, because generally the way and I'm not gonna speak for Alex, but generally the way I think about political delineations and the spectrum is the obviously you have this kind of like Marx inspired left, which makes sense. Then you have like this kind of like traditionalist, monarchist, fascist right and then I think of liberalism as kind of a foundation that underruns the entire spectrum. So you can have left liberals, right liberals, and I think my personal opinion is that during the long 70s it feels like reaction because there really is not like a left left in the long 70s. There's a liberal left and a lot of what you would call like the radical tendencies and movements were funneled into the liberal left in the 60s and so in the 70s you're kind of wound up. You wind up with this very like in the 70s.
Speaker 2:You don't see what would be called like class struggle or class based analysis. It's really the entire left takes on the language and like the categories of the liberal left, like you get like liberation movements, you get like anti-racist movements, you get all the. You get like a democracy movements, but what you don't really see is a lot of talk about, like the working class or any real mass political movements. You definitely still have people who talk about it and those people tend to get a lot of attention because they're very like, their activity is very lurid and it's a certain like nerve in the media.
Speaker 1:Well, a lot of them are terrorists.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah yeah. Yeah, that never hurts either.
Speaker 2:But like that is such a small portion of politics in the United States that it's almost non-existent on like a political level. Sure, and I think that this is one of those things where, like I said, like how do I understand what's happening now? I look back at the long seventies. But how to understand what's happened in the long seventies, I look back to the post-war period where there was a concerted government effort to funnel the left into what's called the non-communist left, started in Europe but also involved the United States. And it was this, this like weird cultural war. It's basically like the book called the cultural Cold War. It's this back and forth between the like the US and Britain and the Soviet Union, like who has the best culture, and in doing so it was also an attempt to marginalize the communist left, because obviously the Cold War was like it was an anti-Soviet Union, anti-communist war, and so everybody just gets kind of shifted into like the non-communist left is essentially the liberal left, and you see, people like I guess I'm not like a that big into political theory, but I definitely heard that Marcus is like the father of the new left and his idea that culture is the new battleground and liberation movements. I see those as wow. I think he's actually right because you can see the level that the government puts money into the culture war, which I think is much, much bigger than people can even imagine.
Speaker 2:But the battleground during the Cold War was culture, and so he was probably right to think that. But at the same time, what it did was shift everybody into a liberal mode of thinking which is like the you know, like the glorious revolution, the French revolution, the American revolution. You get like liberty, democracy, fraternity, equality. That's the like. Liberalism owns that. That's the battleground. They own that and they can turn and I say they, there's no day. It's a decentralized thing, but they can turn any effort to mount an attack on it right back into itself. It's pretty wild. So I think that's what happened. That was kind of a long, rambling answer to say that I think politically, the left doesn't have any power in the long seventies.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's interesting. Right, I think you're right. I just wanna go ahead and like my reading of this as it like I'm actually kind of a the other thing that I told you I was a historian of Lash, I'm also a historian of Marxism.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, I figured that.
Speaker 1:And I can tell you that my reading is actually very similar that what you have emerging is the cultural Cold War, the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Ironically, the key figures that you left all have ties to the OSS. Of course they do, I mean like if they don't have ties to the CIA, like Steinem who's still around, I guess but like they have ties to the OSS. Markuza worked for the OSS when I mean, it was when the Soviet Union and the US were technically allies, but like.
Speaker 2:Well, sorry to interrupt you, but the thing about that is, in World War II it was a total war. The entire society was mobilized, including the like what you'd say the call the intelligentsia. But they didn't get sent to the front, they got jobs altogether in information, in academic type jobs, scientific jobs, research jobs. So they all. It's really hard to find an academic in this period, in the post-war period, that didn't have something to do or wasn't connected in some way with intelligence or people in intelligence. That's why the Congress for Cultural Freedom works so well, because those people all knew each other from Berlin and Germany and Paris immediately after the war, and so it's like a social networking group yeah absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean it's weird to me when, like you're reading about, like first generation college students going to Berkeley, like someone like Terence McKenna or something right, and like the CIA is approaching them and it's just like wow, they were really all over these campuses. And I mean I think we do have to remember that the 70s is when education explodes as a segment of society, I mean.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:In education studies we talk about, which is my day job like the 70s is when we hit universal basic education, which you know, I don't know that I totally believe, but it does. It is when we have established full access to it and it's also when we stop seeing growth. But it's interesting to think about that because when people compare like now to the past, or like when people are talking about like scholars in the past, I'm like, yeah, but like only like 10% of the population had anything to do with the university. If that, even after the GI Bill, you're only looking at 20%, Like it takes a while for it to become like Deira Gour for the middle class, and this is something I also think we see shift in the 70s. When I think about this and the new left in the cultural debates, you could be a white collar worker like a actuary, right Like or something like that, and support a family and have even an upper middle class-ish life in the 50s with a high school diploma.
Speaker 1:Like absolutely possible by the 70s. That's already becoming impossible, and by the 90s it is hard, impossible. There's no way to do that anymore.
Speaker 1:So, that's something that I think is a major shift. We start to see, and I think some of that's tied to deindustrialization Well, I think most of us tied to deindustrialization but it's interesting to think about. I wanted to think about like these, like you know, these key figures of the new left. You know we hear about all the Maoist movements and all that and one of the things that I've been struggling I read a lot of like Marxist histories and criticisms of Marxism from the 70s and I was reading Alvin Gouldner who was writing in 79. And he was talking about this weird paradox of the 70s and a global scale Cause, on one hand, like the number of revolutions you know, quote communist revolutions had increased almost exponentially.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 1:And, on the other hand, everyone was saying that there was a crisis in Marxism and everything was stagnating, which was not just true, it was gonna be true, in a way, that we started seeing real pushbacks on communist growth and like quote, counter revolutions, unquote worldwide, starting in the late 70s and then culminating in 1992. So that paradox is always part of what's driving my thinking about why everyone moved to culture, because it's like, on one hand, there seems to be all these revolutions, on another hand, classical Marxism, even before the, even a 20 year before the fall of the Soviet Union, seems to be pretty much over.
Speaker 2:So Well, sometimes I think it has something to do with what like from a class basis. I do often find like class based analysis kind of useful, but like so, like the liberal revolutions were like a bourgeois revolution against monarchies and traditional societies, essentially empires, and then like a Marxist revolution, is what Like a proletariat against bourgeois? So during this time period it's there's not as many places like basically after World War II the monarchies are gone, and what are locations that are more suitable for a Marxist style revolution? People try it in the US. The US is very difficult because it's so decentralized and but you know, in African colonial countries they had a colonial government that was set up essentially like a monarchy, so it's a lot easier to know who is who you have to basically overthrow to have a revolution.
Speaker 2:Even even China was more like that, and although I personally I think that in some of these cases the like the US, the Cold War countries on the US side, use those communist revolutions to basically pry the European colonial fingers off of certain countries, I see Vietnam as that in a way. Everybody sees Vietnam as a giant loss, but if you look at it over a longer period of time, the US and Britain were trying to get France out of Vietnam since World War II and essentially that's what we did with Vietnam, even though you know it was a huge debacle, but we kind of got what we wanted. And then same kind of thing in Africa. But I just think like suitability for that kind of class-based revolution was not necessarily located in the West at the time, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think what you have in the developing world is you hit the realities of, I don't know, not having an industrial infrastructure and who's got it? Well, you can either appeal to the Soviets or you can appeal to the Americans, and even China eventually appeals to the Americans. So it's, you know, like that's where we end up, and I think it's interesting and I'm gonna pivot to Lash soon, but I wanna talk about one of my favorite 70s movies and one that seems. This is definitely a movie that seems way more prescient after, say, 2008, than it did when I was a kid, and that's network.
Speaker 2:Oh, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like network has cultural predictions and stuff that you feel like got paused for 20 years and then came back, or 30 years and then came back. It was very interesting to see, and one of the things it makes fun of is this new left tendency to be radical and dramatic, but how, in doing so, most of them become like a media spectacle.
Speaker 2:Sometimes even like, consciously, like in the case of like the Yippies, like it was all street theater to get media attention.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean I think about, like you know, the days of rage and there's like what, 3000 terrorist bombings in run by leftists in the 70s and yet like the only people who die in them for the most part are the people who are the activists themselves. It's like-.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, the townhouse bombing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's the spectacle that counts.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:However, that is like if you're gonna go in like a situationist direction, the spectacle only reinforces the establishment because the media picks up on the spectacle and the media benefits and the message they disseminate is crazy terrorists bombing New York City every other day for all of 1972.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And what I find fascinating about that critique, it's the beginning of something that's both becomes like transparently obvious in the 90s and yet also even critiquing. It becomes co-opted by this, which is commodifying your dissent and even like complaining about commodifying your dissent is also commodifying. Yeah, like I think about Mr Show, which is like a commodity. That was popular, that was also commenting on the commodification of dissent, and it's just like the meta there is crazy. But that kind of like network is where you first start and it's not like the directors of network with like a vowed theoretical leftist or anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that some of what network critiques is. Well, I see a lot of people talking about it now. It's actually pretty interesting because if you pay attention broadly across the political spectrum now, you see a lot of conservatives complaining about the media. The media is not fair, it's a propaganda. The media has the message in capitals and they phrase it like this just started two years ago or five years ago, but this has been going on since TV was born, radio.
Speaker 2:The media has always basically been an ally of the establishment, whoever's kind of in charge, and so network kind of pointed that out. But in a similar way that it happens now, it kind of acts like hey, this is something that's just happening, like we need to stop this, and then people kind of go right back to just trusting the media, the nightly news, and so it is this weird moment in time where the mask was kind of pulled off, so to speak. But once you see that and you see like the last 10 years, where people like once the mask gets pulled off, people just get used to the new face and just don't care. So it's very soporific in a way.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I think about now like I remember how we'd all, even when I was a kid, we'd all believe, just like well, if anyone proved the aliens were real and I don't think we have proved it, I just want to point it out there. Like if anyone proved the aliens are real, like society would totally break down. And now I'm like, well, we're having congressional hearings and literally no one gives a shit, like it's kind of amazing, yeah yeah, yeah go ahead.
Speaker 2:The alien thing is funny because the parapolitical guys have been talking about aliens for so long and then you finally, a lot of them have been talking about how aliens was, like was a Psyop, and then you get the you know, like a CIA essentially whistleblower come out and say, yeah, we got aliens, you know, we've had them for a while. And then the parapolitical guys go just I told you so, but still everybody else goes from there's no aliens to there's aliens, but we don't even care. It doesn't. It doesn't mean it just gets added to the pile of things that exist, like the, like the ontology just expands by just aliens in CIA labs, but it nobody. It doesn't actually change anybody's life the way you would think it would.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just, it's fascinating and I know we think I think of the 50s as like the high period of like alien cults, but I also think of like in the 70s. There's so much concern about what these you know could represent. I think like everything from the man who fell to earth to like how much sci-fi was in the 70s. I was just thinking about that. Like that must have been like one of the genres.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. Plus ancient, ancient aliens became. You know, we had an episode on the books by, was it Eric von Daniken? The chariots of the gods. So I mean you have that that topic get introduced or at least popularized.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's. I think it's interesting to think about this in long generational cycles, because my theory is that ancient alien stuff is actually a result of a post-war pulp fiction. Like like people reading like Lovecraft. That's where it actually comes from, but you're right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the old ones.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, that's. I think that as a scholar Jason Calvita, who actually argues that too but it just occurred to me one day I was like, oh yeah, all this pulp fiction from the 40s sounds like the conspiracy theories from the 70s Like, which then become like they regure on cable TV in the 90s, you know.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:You definitely see that, that trend, Matt. I was thinking about your discussion about like the cultural cold war stuff. One of the things I was gonna ask you is like in so much there is such a thing called post-modernism and I'm gonna wear my former scholar hat and say like I'm not actually sure that's a thing but in so much that it is a thing that we can vaguely refer to, as you know, philosophy and art, as that does seem to be like the ultimate, like theoretical liquidation of like the old left into something way more liberal and skeptical and cynical, and it does seem to me pretty telling that it emerges in the end of the seventh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I also don't believe in a post-modernism. I believe that there's an attempt to transcend modernism, but I don't. I don't really think it escaped, it reached escape velocity. It basically degrades into this kind of subjective individualism which is again just this kind of like liberal perspective. So even the art ceases to provide a transcendent message. It is basically just whatever you see in it, as you know, a subjective individual. Generally. It reminds me of those.
Speaker 2:I don't know, you might be a little too young, but in the malls in the late 80s there would be these posters that looked like static, like a TV screen static, but if you stared at them in a certain way which I could never do I never saw a single thing in these.
Speaker 2:There would be some kind of a 3D kind of image in them of a sailing ship or something, or a dolphin. But I definitely and I'm not saying that post-modernism is, even though it was funded by intelligence to a certain extent, I think in general it came up with some really good ideas, some really helpful ideas, but it did not transcend modernism or like the engine of modernism which, just in my own way of looking at it, is a one way, is a one way ticket. But I mean it's a post-modernism is also this weird thing where, like the original people who thought it up were really were brilliant and they thought it up because they were really deeply educated on what came before. But then, as post-modern studies kind of grow over the, the decades, you get people who maybe never read the things that the originals did, so they're basing it just on the, the previous post-modernist, so they, I feel, I just feel like they don't quite have the the same impact. It just kind of it degrades a little bit over time.
Speaker 1:I think like yeah, as a person who went to the mall in the 80s and also came up as a, you know, a first-generation college well, kind of first-generation college my mother, my mother and I like went to college roughly within three years of each other. My experience of that was that I was in school when the quote post-modernist started, the post structuralists and and metaphictions from all those kinds of kind of ending their dominance, but by the time we were studying them no, you're right, we weren't studying their context. Like you know, maybe you got Nietzsche and a little bit of Heidegger and someone would mention Marx and then you jump to like we're gonna spend, you know, an entire course on Foucault and Derrida and that's it like yeah which does make them a lot less useful.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that brings me to you, like Christopher Lash, because I think it's interesting to me. I've always thought it was interesting. Lash is not a post-modernist at all, but he's actually responding to the same things and he actually starts with some, with some similar assumptions. Like it's not in the books that you read for your episode on him, because you pretty much focus on the cultural narcissism which you know is his key 70s text. Right, but in earlier books, like in the late 60s, he was actually applying Foucault to like American culture, but not in a post-modern way. He wasn't picking up Foucault's verbiage and all the weird French like ways of speaking, he was just talking. He was just doing institutional analysis which he credited to Foucault.
Speaker 1:He gets up on that by the 70s. You know along a long story short. But what I find interesting about about him is most of his work both before the 70s and after, although in a different way, was very concerned with class analysis and like looking at social class. That his two books from the long 70s well, there's three, but one of them I'm gonna just bracket out that. The first ones, havin and Heartless War, which is about the family. That gets him, like a lot of conservatives, start to listen to him, even though he hates that. Then he writes a culture of narcissism to kind of explain that, which blows up because a lot of people treated as like a Tom Wolf style book, like a general, like you know, complaining about the culture, and it's absolutely not that actually.
Speaker 1:But that was originally and then. But what I find so fascinating is then, and then in the middle most self, which was released in 1982 but was, I believe, written in the late 70s, he decides that, like to understand politics in the 70s, you actually can't look at class alignments, you have to look at psychoanalytic styles. So that that's an interesting thing. By 1987 he abandons it and then unfortunately he dies of cancer before you get a whole lot more from him. But I find it interesting that even he kind of thinks that like you can't explain, like even the new left politics which often talked in class terms, what it actually did in class terms, like it was just not explicable at all in those terms and that you had to look at like relationships to psychoanalysis to figure it out yeah, well, I think it's always important to not necessarily look at what people say but to look at what they do.
Speaker 2:And the result and the result of a lot of class-based talk was not class-based outcomes great, it was. And this is, this is another shift in the 70s, that so, basically, after the new left falls, you get this, this back to the state of nature thing going on broadly across culture, like there's a specific back-to-nature movement where people, you know, move out to the country and they want to become farmers and they realize they don't know how to grow food because they're college students and they've never been outside of a city. But in general, you get this fracturing of identity away from essentially the like the QK opera, like American Cold War identity to you know, you get like I'm Italian, I'm Irish, I mean like the, like the, the black cultural movement predates this. But you see, basically everybody get in on it and that essentially fractures any kind of like class-based activity, because obviously not everybody is not going to agree if, if you're divided into like, not random, but like these kind of arbitrary, like ethnic identity groups, and it just it just becomes, it becomes difficult, especially when you actually see that those kind of like fractured identity movements actually help people move into a class like the intelligentsia.
Speaker 2:Or you know white collar work, you know, you see Italians in the 70s talking about how, like you said, first-generation college. You know, now I'm my college student, I'm not gonna work on the docs like my, my father, and so it just gets kind of left by the wayside and it's the, the, the psychologizing that lash does is difficult for me because in general I try to stay away from psychologizing on generational, generational level. But I do find his, the insights he gets from it I think are valid and he nails. He nails like the new consciousness movements, he nails the celebrity, that like the celebrity-seeking behavior, which are things that really never went away and just kind of stagnated in culture. But I mean you, you could, you could maybe see like it. Like if you're gonna assign a personality disorder to different ages, you might see like the 80s is definitely keeps this kind of narcissism going. But then once the internet hits, it's like a free-for-all for personality disorders in society.
Speaker 1:It's for you, borderline, antisocial schizo yeah, you move from narcissism to general cluster B exactly, exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's also makes any kind of class-based action virtually impossible, because everybody's in their own head and you're not gonna get like the working class bipolar people together with the working class narcissists and you're not gonna make like a coalition of personality disorders to overthrow, you know, like the billionaires.
Speaker 1:Just it doesn't work that way well, I think that you know I have criticism of lash on this too. I'm literally writing a paper right now trying to figure out why he picks that up so thoroughly but also why he abandons it and never says why. Because if you read his essays in after like 84, they barely go. They barely ever touch on psychoanalysis again. Like this is really something he only seems to pick up from like 75 to like 82 and it's and it's interesting, and even his psychoanalysis is kind of specific because like he's one of the only people in those who tries to like tie that into modes of production. Like he really thinks that fort ism is why narcissism is developing and he ties that to secondary narcissism and then and then, as fort ism in ending, and like he doesn't talk about neoliberalism yet he only, I think he first writes about it and the true and only heaven, one of his 80s books.
Speaker 1:But he, he also seems to think that like we were moving into like quote primary narcissism, and then, you're right, like by the time we get to the internet it's like I joke, but I'm actually kind of serious. If you follow him out, it's like total psychic devastation. All the personality disorders are readily available now and their identities they're not like things you have right, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a sense of FOMO for that that I never noticed before yeah, what like FOMO for personality disorders is weird.
Speaker 1:I mean, that is weird to me and I know, that we're all gonna sound like cranky old men now and that's fine in some ways, like I'm a cranky middle-aged man, so I get it, but I was born in the card administration. It's time, but yeah, nonetheless it does seem to me that, like that is a very particular cultural shift that comes out of a couple. Everything, some of them I don't even think are negative. Like I do think de-stigmatization of mental health is a great thing, sure, but I never thought that that would necessarily lead to mental health conditions as, like identity categories on TikTok, like that's yeah, that's not something I saw common yeah, that's pendulum swing.
Speaker 3:Though you know, you never know where the end of the pendulum is going to swing. Once you get, you know once it gets started that's true and I guess it.
Speaker 1:I guess it was.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I was gonna ask is, when you were reading culture of narcissism for your show and people should listen to the episode I was telling the guys off air that that's how I found them and also that, like, because they came in with very few preconceptions and, like you know, you're not leftist academics, that you guys aren't, and you guys actually had because you had less preconceptions, you had a what I thought was like the most honest reading because, like, you're just dealing with the text. So One of the things that I was going to ask you is when you read the culture of narcissism, which I think does really describe a lot of the trends of the late 60s into the 70s and where it was seeming to be ending up and does seem to pre-sage where we're going into, like the 80s in a lot of ways focus on youth culture, a kind of 50 style conservatism, a lot of that coming to the forefront. What did you find familiar when you read it and what did you find alien? What was, like, not relevant to us today?
Speaker 2:Oh geez, it's been a long time actually.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The familiar stuff is probably the obvious stuff, but go ahead Nat.
Speaker 2:It was all new to me. This was very early on on the show, True, and when I kind of flipped through the book before this, I noticed a lot of different things. Different words and different ideas sprung out at me. I think that his idea of experts taking over working class roles or essential functions of the family struck a nerve with me. That makes a lot of sense. His concept of just the general character of the era makes a lot of sense. Now, looking back at that, knowing the things that I know, I feel more like I'm not the only one knowing the things that I know. I feel more like it was the culture that was built.
Speaker 2:I just at this point, I feel like people drastically underestimate how Cold War culture, American culture, was generated rather than was organic, and I think that that has something to do with the character that it built, Like it was building this kind of general narcissist, narcissistic kind of character which is essentially not self-hating, but maybe like the self is not.
Speaker 2:The self is weak, maybe damaged, and it's covered up by an outward expression of charisma or power or success. That really hit a nerve for me then and now, because I think that that's essentially the society that was built. It was built on this public relations campaign of Americanism, and the Americanism was itself a Cold War weapon. It's literally what we still export to this day. You can watch it happen An American diplomat will go to a country and they'll say they'll basically tell this country that they have to be more American, and so that aspect, I feel, is kind of vestigial, because we've in some ways lost the power to enforce it. But after the Cold War ended, which was 91, I feel like that essentially it was still running on some momentum. But I think that that's why that kind of narcissistic societal character kind of dissipated to some extent and you see a lot of different character in society after that. The goal reasons Does that make any sense?
Speaker 1:It makes a ton of sense. I'm kind of processing like that what's such an active campaign? I know when we talk about that it sounds conspiratorial, and I'm always like, well, often this stuff happens planned but not conspiratorially. I don't know. When I think about what happened in the 90s, for example, I don't think Bill Clinton set up with a bunch of planners and said we're gonna do exactly this, but I do think a bunch of people saw a bunch of things coming down the pipe, and that was how they were gonna handle it, and some of it was coordinated and some of it was just like the ideology of the day.
Speaker 1:One of the things I'm thinking about, though, about when you talk about importing Americanism. I think people have a hard time dealing with that in the US military, because that's what the US military does, and so it makes it like the US military is wildly culturally inconsistent, because sometimes what we're importing is hyper conservative and other times it has a rainbow flag. And that isn't to say anything about the content of those two kind of cultural orientations. It's just to say it's seen as part of what America is and that's what we do to export, right, so it can seem wildly inconsistent from period to period, what we're trying to do as our cultural export. We also don't seem very good at it, oddly, and that's always interested me, Like we are. We weren't good at it in the 50s, 60s and 70s because of like, not because of military power, because of financial power, but once we started asking the military to do that, it's like it's just it's kind of the wrong institution for the job. I mean, militaries kill people is what they do, so like.
Speaker 2:Speaking of conspiracies, so QK Opera supposedly ended in 67. And the way these things go is they'll end and then they'll be renamed. So I don't actually think that the effort to shape and guide culture changed or ended. It just shifts into a different direction. And Alex and I have talked about this a lot and our next episode coming out what is it October 1st is gonna be on the movies Red Dawn and Firefox, which are just Cold War movies. They're like the quintessential rah-rah America Right, yeah, cold War movies. You can see the shift into that. However, I lost the train of thought. Oh, okay, I lost it again. Amateur.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that happens.
Speaker 2:I had a point just filling the blank.
Speaker 1:Well, it actually comes to me now that I'm thinking about this, so I think about, like, the trajectory of both Rambo and Rocky.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Like understanding the situation. Like Rambo is like a critique of US military action and somebody's even a critique of the police. And by the time you get to Rambo III, like he's like single-headedly fighting with the Mujahideen to defeat the Soviets and Afghanistan, like. And then Rocky is similar in that it doesn't have it. The first two don't really have any geopolitical context at all. It's kind of a working class, just kitchen-seek sports drama, right, like. And then by the time you get to Rocky III, it's like we're going to defeat the Soviets with diplomacy through.
Speaker 3:Rocky IV.
Speaker 1:Rocky IV. Yeah, yes, thank you for correcting my Rocky numbers, but yeah, it's. That's how ridiculous it gets. But also it does seem to like clearly mirror a shift from Even now. I mean, the only other movie period that I think has as much cultural ambiguity in everything as the 70s is like two years. In the 90s it's like 98, 99.
Speaker 1:But, like, like, like. You even watch a horror movie, I don't know like, because William Freakin died. I've watched the Exorcist recently, so it's in my mind, and the amount of cultural ambiguity, even in a ostincentively beginning of Satanic Panic movie is way more pronounced than what you'd see in the 80s or even in remakes of the Exorcist now, including ones that are coming up. So do we make anything of that? I mean, how does that? What do you think was part of the culture where the ambiguity of American culture was much more just front and center in the 70s than it is later on?
Speaker 2:I think it was advantageous. This goes back to the point that I forgot. My point was that actually American cultural export was incredibly successful, but maybe not now, but during the long 70s. People say blue jeans won the Cold War. I think that rock music and 70s movies basically won the Cold War. It essentially proved that American culture was superior and everybody could see it on a movie screen, they could hear it in the music even though there's some actually really awesome Soviet music from the late 70s and early 80s but we didn't hear it, of course. But I think that that stuff was just so good that it solidified our cultural dominance around the world for decades. And part of why people feel like cultural creation has just ground to a halt is because we are running off that time period this whole time and still are in some ways. I mean, like Hollywood is just rebooting, like you mentioned, the exorcist. They're just gonna redo it and try to make lightning strike twice, but it's not gonna work because it's not really authentic.
Speaker 3:And the timing was perfect. You can't duplicate a point in time always. I mean we start the long 70s with the end of the Hayes Code, for example. So you get this loosening of restrictions, you get director-driven films and you just get an explosion in the variety and just sheer volume of them. So these are artistic creations but they end up being cultural exports in the process. They're there to be exported if somebody wants them to be, but you can't shift. If those things had happened at a different time period it wouldn't have the same impact. You've got this ramping up of things once the restrictions come down and just the vibe in the air is there. That's why you get the films that you do and you get just a huge variety of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say, and you mentioned, why did it, as like cultural criticism, so successful? Because, as deconstruction proves, deconstruction is an incredibly powerful process and criticism is incredibly powerful. It releases a lot of energy out of whatever institutions and traditions you're critiquing. If you can tear apart a genre and deconstruct it, at least initially, that is, you get something really interesting with a lot of energy.
Speaker 1:but that you actually say it's a genre a lot of the times, interestingly, but oh, deconstruction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like deconstructed Westerns are the only reason Westerns are viable after the disease Like yeah, well, that's interesting because the whole Western genre was basically a fantasy in the first place, mm-hmm, so that one had to be deconstructed, basically.
Speaker 1:I'm with you about that. I think it's interesting because I think of I've watched a lot of Soviet movies and the US's ability to critique itself, particularly in the 70s, actually ironically ends up making it look stronger because it can deal with the self-criticism, whereas even oblique criticism in someone like Tarkovsky ends up with the best Soviet filmmaker having to and even though he's a weird religious mystic, he was a loyal Soviet citizen which I've actually never even really understood with him having to go and escape to Italy to make movies and not being able to make that many after that point because of cancer. But like that you don't have. No, you don't have this art house cinema like Cannes. You don't have French New Wave, but what you do have is the United States being able to glom on to that and make it palatable to a world audience to the point that it's no longer clear how much we were pulling from that stuff.
Speaker 1:Now, like the 70s American cinema, like the Godfather, being reliant on French New Wave cinema is both like if you study film, you know it, but those 70s blockbusters are so dominant that you actually don't catch it when you watch them anymore because they seem so generous, right, right. So that's interesting to me and I remember in 2007, everyone was telling me that like, oh, it's gonna be like the 70s and we're gonna get good movies again. And I'm like I don't know, man, just to remind you what film was like in the 30s. It seems a lot more like that right now, actually, than it does the 70s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it does you know mass produced, unremembrable serial slock Right.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean American liberalism and liberalism in general, has always thrived on reinvention and revolution. I mean it's a revolutionary ideology from start to finish. So the constant revolution in techniques and like themes and the deconstruction, that all plays right into the capitalist strongpoints. You can make just as much money deconstructing something as you can constructing something, and so they can import those new wave techniques and just apply them to an American theme and it will make just as much money as if they had created new wave in the start, maybe even more.
Speaker 1:So to kind of pivot towards wrapping this up, see, I know you guys have lives, so One of the things I was thinking about asking you is and you know you guys have been in the show for a while now and and you cover so many different areas of of life I mentioned the pop-up or Empire episode. I've mentioned the audio file episode. I've mentioned, like, musical equipment episodes. There's all these movie episodes. One thing I would ask you, though, like and since you know this is kind of on the theme of Culture and you know the liberal ass versus kind of a Marxist laughter, whatever, but maybe we can just broaden it out to the entire thing what about? Learning about the 70s has really surprised you, what. What did you really not expect about the entire decade as you studied it?
Speaker 3:Wow, I'll have to give that a thought.
Speaker 2:I Think actually the reality versus the Like, the mythology of the time period. I mean you you started off the show by mentioning that what? When people think of the 60s, they're actually thinking of basically the beginning of the long 70s and the 70s proper. Just the the fact that there is actually so much, so much going on. That has nothing to do with hippies or rock and roll or Earth tones, right, it's such a complex time that is only kind of remembered through these, like these, aesthetics.
Speaker 3:That you can pick and choose and hide. When you're in high, when you're looking at it in hindsight, you can pick and choose. You're not, you don't have to take the whole picture.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah yeah, just just to piggyback on what Matt was saying in a nutshell. Also, for me, one thing that I got out of it is that this it's for the purposes of our podcast the 70s is both a An entirely like self-contained era from which to draw content, but I also find myself thinking a lot about it as like a period of transition to connect More modern times with like just the post war Years or even just just other parts of the 20th century. Like it can be a bridge sometimes, and it can also just be something unto itself that you don't have to leave.
Speaker 2:Yeah that that that's actually probably the best point is, and what every single episode sticks out to me is the fact that there is, like there is a transition point Somewhere in the 70s for almost everything movies, music, politics, culture, society, family, economics. It's, it's in there if you just look and it's not even, it's not even like a Like. If you're a film critic, you can all like, you can almost read anything into a movie. Now there's literally a set of events or Ideas that the change somewhere between 1968 and 1984 that lead directly to a new trajectory. It is pretty wild.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and at the same time, you can see things that you cannot imagine happening at any other time in history either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is. Yeah, I think about that, I mean it's. It's interesting. Like you know, for me, as a person who was born In the last year of the card administration, who already said the 70s, feels both like like my immediate contexting, and also, until very recently, it also felt like a bajillion years away and Sure, thank you.
Speaker 1:But, but it, I think it felt a bajillion years away because it was like the hinge point. It's like, okay, well, this is the first time of this kind of movie and this is the first time Of the of this type of thing. And this is when, like you've, culture really begins. And Even though it's not the primary focus, it's really, you know, this is when we see, like, the shift from, like New Hollywood cinema into blockbuster cinema. This is when, like this, is when religion gets weird, even like yeah.
Speaker 1:And so by the time I'm coming around in, you know, the mid to late 80s, it's the air I breathe, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it feels so familiar.
Speaker 1:And it feels so familiar, but it also feels like it's always been that way, right, and I have to constantly remind myself that, no, like, the post-war world was actually very different than the post-70s world, like yeah. And and also the pre-war world is, like, undeniably different for the post-war world because you're barely talking about on our bills. I mean with the amount of change, when people tell me today that, oh my gosh, there's so much change happening right now and I'm like have do you? Do you know anything about the last century?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah let's talk about 1910 versus 1960.
Speaker 2:This is something I think about all the time and also something that I kind of learned from the podcast is Are you, are you familiar with Mark Fisher's formulation of hauntology?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I didn't tell you this, but, like my claim to fame on the left is on the person, I'm one of the two people at a magazine to publish the vampire castle, so I knew Mark.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's actually. That's actually one of the coolest things I've ever heard. I love him, I love the vampires castle, but, um, I think he nailed hauntology and I'm not sure. I'm not sure, even sure why he was right. But the, this, the 70s and mid 80s, the long 70s, seems like the last real time and and our culture is just haunted by it, the haunted by what the possibilities Brought up in that time period could have been all the amazing ideas, like you said, the science fiction, the, just the futurism of the time, even politically, just the kind of positive. We're gonna, we're gonna change the world, we're gonna change this, we're gonna change that. It really just faded away and we're just left with this, this massive monolith of culture that just haunts us to this day, and it's why we remake the movies, it's why there's never really been 90s nostalgia. You know, they tried. They Did it with fashion a little bit. They try to remake the movies a little bit to try to bring bring Jin goes back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but, but you're right, actually I have thought about that, like it, like it seems like we go through the cycle of 70s, through 80s, nostalgia. I Feel like I've lived through it like three times actually you have yeah, like. I keep trying to push into the 90s and we never get there and like the idea of odds, nostalgia just seems like impossible, like that'll never happen, it's like, yeah, it's funny because I Go ahead Alex.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, go ahead, matt. I was gonna say at one point a couple years ago I tried to pitch Alex on an idea for a new show called Null exit, oh right, which was about how the 90s were, the last decade or like the early part of the 90s, really in. I actually listened to your show, I think, with Elijah, about Fukuyama and the end of history. It's not really the end of history I'm talking about, but it's it just ended.
Speaker 2:you know, like the new ideas, like if you act, if you ask somebody who's 22 Now to describe the future, they the ones I've talked to just cannot no, they don't there's almost no way to think of anything new because, like that, the Time frame has been constricted to basically now and the things from the past that are like imported and repackaged. It's, it's bizarre, you know.
Speaker 1:It is weird I was watching and this is something that I have noticed that like, even in, like educational know-yous, like people are increasingly Presentist on everything, like, oh you know, stuff might be problematic or whatever before 2008, and there's a whole controversy about one one library in in Canada apparently using their, their, their criterion for inclusion to get rid of seemingly everything before 2007. And it's just like in. Yet it isn't like anything feels future-oriented. The one thing I can say like I you know, I'm a high school teacher by trade and Kids now they're they're really Conscious and sweet in a lot of ways and they're very plugged into current events in a way that I know I was not and in my teens.
Speaker 1:Sure however, they don't really believe in a future like at all. Like they have no concept of like. In a way, that like really concerns me now because I'm like okay, how do I walk them through like life choices so that they have their own future and they're barely concerned about that?
Speaker 1:and it's just like whoa, you know and I know there's very unique conditions for them but, you know, given COVID and everything else, but it's it's still. It's sort of shocking when I think about how non future-oriented they were and I remember sitting in a classroom in 1988 and I work, you know, in relatively working class suburb as the suburbs in Georgia and you know being talked to about the possibility of a future without war.
Speaker 1:Yeah like, like and in third grade and like. No one would even begin to pause. That would just seem ludicrous to positive.
Speaker 3:No, I remember I actually was reading a book by Arthur C Clark, childhoods, and, and I remember at some point I had to put the book down because it posits this future society that doesn't have religion in it, which, as a futurist when he wrote it, you can totally see coming. But now I fast forward to now and I was like well, hold on a second. Even just as an American, I mean, religion is as much part of the conversation as ever. So it was. It was like what do you call it? It was a, it was a willing suspension of disbelief that I just couldn't will enough. I couldn't, I couldn't disbelieve it enough to make the book. You know, to get back, to get my head back into the book, yeah, I find that interesting.
Speaker 1:Actually, alex, you, when you talk about secularization, the US is finally like caught up to Europe on secularization and yet You're absolutely right that I make religion go away at all.
Speaker 3:No like?
Speaker 1:not at all. Even if the religions institutions aren't particularly viable right now, they seem to be super relevant right, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just woven into different things or it's coming from a different place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the idea that, like, if we became secular we were all gonna be good scientific humanist, like that to me is like a laughable thing that people as recently as 2009 believed. Yeah and I'm like no astrology is back like.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true. I I like overreacting. You know, seeing a like a reddit post or someone's complaining that their girlfriend just dumped them because Cancer and Sagittarius don't work out, or something like that, I was like, oh, that's, that's what somebody's talking about right now. It's true though.
Speaker 1:It's funny, I mean it's. It's kind of hilarious Because, again, that's something I associate with the seven.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 2:Matt. I mean, the thing about religion is that it does, in a way, give you a vision of the future, even if it's I think you know what. It was lash who was talking in culture of narcissism, talking about how people were divorced from the idea of Like progeny, like their society in the future, like a legacy, and I think that religion does impart that in a certain way, it also, depending on religion, will give you an actual future. Like this is when the you know, millennialism was huge in the 70s and in some ways still is. This idea that the world's gonna come to an end, it kind of will tell you what the future is about, but I don't think that there's been any. The you're right, the. The weird thing is that the secular version has not kept up. It just disappeared, maybe because we had the, the tech boom, the technological revolution and all. We got a bunch of apps that help us order McDonald's.
Speaker 3:No, you're right. The exponential rate of of change for tech stuff I think for me at least, just my read plays a huge part of that. It's like it's. It's hard for me to keep up with what's next, you know, to see that future, because the future Already came faster in some ways. I mean, we never got the jet packs that I was hoping for, but, like, the future came Faster and in different ways than I even would have guessed at. So if I couldn't guess at what's happening now, how can I guess at what's happening in the future?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting reading like 70s and 80s, for example, like cyberpunk or Pro pro cyberpunk and like what they get right but also what they completely don't see yeah, and. Like almost nobody sees this right?
Speaker 2:Yes, we were listening. Yeah, that's not our track.
Speaker 3:Yeah right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I know you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3:But I can drag out my old thing that I always feel like I come back to periodically on the podcast of how someone like Philip K Dick was imagining these advanced androids. But they still got a roll of tape, of magnetic tape in their back that, unable to speak, you know, somehow the microchip or the integrated circuit didn't make it into his, his concept of the Android.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, and not I mean, you know, I guess that's. That's the whole thing about studying the history of Futures. Right, like you can go back and watch those cartoons that I used to watch in the 80s that were like from the 50s and 60s about what the 90s were gonna be like, and they are, oh my god, wrong. But it is interesting now living through the time period that it's supposed to be the culmination of what the 70s and 80s are. As you see, like when a lot of these, like you know, far future, well, near far future stuff it's like 2010 to 2020 comes up over and over and over again and In some ways, technologies have progressed way faster and in other ways, like if you think about, technology is actually changing your life in major, major ways. That might be true this LLMA, I stuff but, right, so far the life changes significantly less. Like, if you compare, like the technological difference between 1890 and 1940.
Speaker 1:Versus 1980 to now. It does seem like, well, things are both sped up and slowed down simultaneously, sure, and that's, that's a, that's a. I think that would just be. It's just Disorienting because you're like, well, so much is coming at us and yet also our life is more similar, you know, to what it was in the late 90s and someone's life was in the 70s, was to the 40s. It's, it's really, it's really true, complicated to think about. So I think that's a good enough point is any of the end. I could talk you guys all day. Can you yeah, can you plug your social show and anything that you want to plug?
Speaker 2:So the Twitter account is long 70s. I Run that. Alex doesn't have anything to do with that. So if you're gonna get upset, get upset at me at my shitposting.
Speaker 1:I find your shitposting funny.
Speaker 3:We have our website for those who like to do that. That's right. Long 70s podcast calm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you want to send us an email, it's a nice one. We we take suggestions for podcast episodes. We do have a pretty long list at this point. Some people have been giving us some pretty good ideas, but We'll get to them. You can send that to the long 70s podcast at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:And so far I found you guys in almost every podcaster available. I've yeah, so you know you guys are readily available. So just look up the long 70s podcast if you like this show. It's a very different show, guys, you know, but but I find it so fascinating because it's both very limited and utterly not so.
Speaker 2:It's it's just that describes us to that's the secret to the success.
Speaker 1:Is this like okay? Well, we're only dealing with, like basically 15 year, well, 16 years, but but anything about those 16 years can come up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I am.
Speaker 3:I'm the sex raft, for example. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I Enjoy your show too. I listen to it when I make dinner. Listen to the Foukiyama Episode while I made a salad. It was. It was pretty intense, so yeah, um. I gotcha.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am a general. I'm a general interest, non-sectarian, vaguely left as podcast. But it's like I also, like you guys, decided that I wanted to talk about whatever and I didn't want to be. I don't know if you guys know this, but there's like a. There's like a Not far. There's a far left one now too, and it's kind of obnoxious, but there's definitely like a center left podcast pipeline and I decided a long time ago that, like I Only occasionally want to dip into that when I find someone who's doing the rounds when their book came out Interesting.
Speaker 1:But in general, I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want. Yeah and it's work for me, so yeah.
Speaker 2:That's how we're doing it too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but yeah, I totally, I really enjoy your show and, like I said, you guys often go in with a very, a very Fresh and clean mind. I also, like I I gathered that you guys are are left ish, but not left ish. I'm a leftist exactly by that. You didn't sound like sectarian leftist at all. No no yeah.
Speaker 3:I try to be. I think we try to be fairly neutral With our yeah, I don't even know how to describe myself. Yeah, we're, we're. We try to let the the topics, you know. I kind of kind of give the topics their space and and all that. And you never know, by the time we're working through an episode, we may start on one thing and end up on another.
Speaker 1:So yeah, absolutely, matt. It's funny that it's okay now I know who was talking to on Twitter, but I I actually you. One of the reasons I love your shitposting is you're one of a few people who I can't predict what you're gonna say. Like most people, I know, I'm like I know what their takes gonna be like I'm like that 70s podcast I don't know what they're gonna say about something.
Speaker 2:Mostly comment when something irritates me, right? Somebody's view of history is not long enough. Like they don't realize that this exact thing, same thing, happened before. It's probably irritating to a lot of people, but sometimes I just feel the need to get that out there. And also, current politics irritates me to no end and my the drafts folder is full of posts where I just said now I'm not gonna say that because there's no, no need to argue online about politics.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you have to stop and count to ten and then decide.
Speaker 1:I want to send it I.
Speaker 1:Learned that, unfortunately, in my 40s. Sadly, there's back in Facebook days. There's lots of useless and long debates. So and Twitter Makes that worse because you can get ratioed and, having been ratioed although I got ratioed for something stupid, I got ratioed for Comparing left-wing JFK conspiracy theory structurally to bircher conspiracy theories and keep about real mad. Yeah, I'm like that. I didn't even think it that was gonna get any likes or hate at all. It was just like you know, I just like okay, whatever. Like. In some ways this JFK was a secret anti imperialist reminds me of JFK as a secret anti globalist, virtuous fear season. That's all I kind of said and Apparently I said it on the wrong day.
Speaker 2:So Twitter is like a weird rage machine. You just, you just never know you know yeah. It incentivizes people just to get mad about nothing. I really miss the old forum days. I learned a lot on the internet in the first probably 10, 15 years.
Speaker 1:I was on my phone friends on the internet before Twitter Like I actually can think of. I mean, some of that's being young, but I think about it and I'm like, oh yeah, I'm like met people's families who I met on live journal, even on early Facebook, but after like 2013, that doesn't happen anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, thank you guys so much for coming on. Thank you for giving me about two hours of your time, and people should check out their show. I, I love it, so you welcome.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us on, it's been great I.