John-Boy Walton & Alex P. Keaton
Our family used to take long vacation drives in a tan Dodge Dart with us kids taking turns sleeping in the back dash, a shelf small even for sixty-pounders.
The sun baked you, the motion of the car lulled you; I recall hearing Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” over and over on a trip to the Great Smokies and I’ll never forget my mother saying how horrible it was. Hill’s voice broke from emotion but Mom took it for a note he couldn’t reach. But it was a romantic era where standards musical and moral were subject to negotiation.
Art was bad but sincere. John Denver could sing, “you fill up my senses” with a straight voice. Neil Diamond soberly sang “I am I said / to no one there / and no one answered / not even a chair” or something like that. An overwrought operatic song like MacArthur Park became a big hit.
The ‘70s and ‘80s repeated in reverse order the 1700s and 1800s, with Beethoven exchanged for Barry Manilow and Alex Keaton for Voltaire. Kids are naturally histrionic so we took to it like ducks to water. Adults were acting like children and the children could relate. Parents were experimenting with open marriages and designer drugs and children experimented with life itself since life was all the high required. A game of tag or hide-n-seek at dusk with the foreknowledge of an early bedtime produced its own sort of high – we ran faster, hid harder, wanting to leave nothing behind.
Alan Greenspan was the uber-adult who ended the 70s. He came and mended a self-indulgent Nixon/Carter economy with tough love. A recession in ’82 brought about the conditions for a sustained recovery. If the ‘70s were right-brained, the ‘80s were left-brained. The pendulum swings, as it does in a micro way from our weekdays to our weekend and in a macro way the centuries.
Similarly, moralities tighten and loosen like the movements in a stock chart. But are not the lows lower and the highs not as high nowadays?
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