However, during the s as things began to wind down and feel more peaceful, people became more interested in bettering themselves. Individualism became more important as people became dissatisfied with wars and politics. When the s was described as the Me Decade What did that mean?
Who coined the phrase Me Decade for the s? Health and exercise fads, New Age spirituality such as Scientology and hot tub parties, self-help programs such as EST Erhard Seminars Training , and the growth of the self-help book industry became identified with the Baby Boomers during s.
In the U. The s was the decade that started on and ended on. The s term also refers to an era more often called the Sixties. Pop art also started in the s. Why was the Bicentennial celebration so important to America?
It had been a way for America to start to love their country again. Funk emerged as a uniquely African American musical form, and disco stole elements of funk and rock to create a popular music and dance craze.
The s was in many ways a decade of fads and crazes. The s were a tumultuous time. All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes. With the hindsight of several decades, the weaknesses of this argument seem clear.
America was not universally prosperous, or even nearly universally prosperous, in the s. Both inflation and unemployment were high. Economists and policy makers did not know what to do about this. The U. And many Americans were not able to afford est seminars or weekends at Esalen. Wolfe also seems unable to see power at play. Movements like est and Scientology — both of which Wolfe presents as key examples of the Me Decade — are presented as if they were called into existence by individual adherents.
From the vantage point of the s, the description of the Seventies as the Me Decade seems to explain little about the changes taking place in that period. Precisely because it does not look like a particularly accurate way to sum up the decade in hindsight, we need to think about why it seemed like an accurate way to do so at the time.
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In a sense, these essays came out of the same cultural milieu as the Hard Hat Riot or George Wallace bragging about running over antiwar protesters with his car: all represent a white conservative lament that everyone was getting a handout except them, that society was stacked against people who worked hard and kept their heads down, and that demands for the amelioration of suffering represented the destruction of Mayberryesque s culture.
Several movements with roots in the activism of the s -- on behalf of women, gays, the physically disabled -- came to fruition in the next decade. Gays made the largest strides. As a pop culture critic, however, he leaves a lot to be desired.
The chapter on film feels slipshod and compromised, shoehorned in to make the book more accessible.
His pop-culture chops notwithstanding, Berkowitz makes it perfectly clear that the s were a seriously transformative decade in which the short-term inability of the government to respond to crises resulted in devastating long-term effects on the country. We squeaked through it, but here we are again. Although the author leaves it unspoken, the s in many ways parallel the U. All Sections.
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