Wednesday, July 15, 2009
News / News Bites That woeful year -- 1979
Posted by Michael Miner on 07.15.09 at 12:12 PM
I haven't thought about Disco Demolition Night in Chicago in conjunction with President Carter’s speech to the nation on a "crisis of the American spirit" since 1979, and something tells me I didn't even then.
But that's what historians are for, to make the connections that didn't occur to us at the time -- possibly because no connections actually existed but possibly because we missed them. As we live our lives we take things as they come, and time has to pass before we can make out the patterns.
Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park was July 12, 1979. Carter spoke three days later. Americans were in a bad mood. Stagflation gripped the economy, one lousy thing after another was happening inside our borders, and the public was deeming the president ineffectual and tuning him out.
Those lousy things, according to a New York Times review Wednesday of a new book on Carter's historic speech, included the Three Mile Island meltdown in March of '79 and the catastrophic DC-10 crash here in Chicago in May. And then there was Disco Demolition Night, when according to book reviewer Dwight Garner, "the country's blue-collar id was uncorked."
As Brian Costello wrote in the July 9 Reader, Disco Demolition Night is remembered as a "promotional disaster" that time has turned, at least locally, into a "cherished legend." Now I wonder -- did it send shudders down the nation's spine when it happened because it seemed to be just the latest in a series of Very Bad Things. In retrospect it was nothing of the sort, and nowhere should that have been clearer than here in Chicago. The DC-10 crash -- that was godawful. Disco Demolition Night was the sort of thing that people cluck at and stomp their feet about in an effort to reassert themselves in a universe that has just demonstrated its absolute indifference. What was lost that night? Only the game forfeited game by a White Sox team that was going nowhere and wound up the year 73 and 87.
Carter's speech is remembered disdainfully as his "malaise" speech, for a word that never appeared in it. Wednesday being the 30th anniversary of that speech, there are two pieces in the Times on it, Garner's review of 'What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?': Jimmy Carter, America's 'Malaise,' and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country, by historian Kevin Mattson (who admires the speech), and a recollection by Gordon Stewart, one of the speechwriters. Stewart says that once the core of the speech was put into words -- "On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny" -- the rest of the writing went rapidly. The first public reaction was positive, something I'd forgotten; but then Carter, to signal the rebirth of his administration, asked half his cabinet to resign, and thus he made himself look ridiculous.
Stewart writes, "Mr. Carter's sense of our own accountability, his warnings about the debilitating effects of self-centered divisiveness were the speech's true heresies. They are also the very elements that keep it relevant today."
Which to my mind is his way of saying, "But we wrote it beautifully..."
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I read this after reading a reassessment of the movie "Zabriskie Point" over on Salon. Even though the two were separated by about 9 years, it strikes me that there are similarities. The movie was panned at the time and mystified critics. Now, however, it can be seen as a lavish epitaph on the youth movement and revolutionary spirit of the late '60s, both of which were spent forces dominated by a sense of impotence and pointless lashing out. Even though Carter's speech earned public plaudits at the time, in the context that followed (the Cabinet purge), we can see a similar impotence, a similar pointless lashing out that produced, in the years to come, nothing like the serious effort to restructure our energy future that Carter said was necessary. (As another commentator noted, Carter said that the solar panels he was installing on the White House would be viewed years later as either representative of a bold initiative to seize control of our own future or a museum piece. We now have the answer: They're literally a museum piece.) Which leads me to what I heard on WBEZ this morning. Sen. Durbin was being interviewed on a variety of subjects and at one point said that, although the Sotomayor hearings were dominating talk in Washington, what really concerned Americans was soaring health-care costs. Really? I doubt it. Everyone I know is concerned about whether or not they'll even get health care if they need it, about whether they can keep their insurance if they lose their job, or whether the insurance they think they have will somehow be yanked out from under them if they actually get sick. Cost is a concern, but way down the list. What I heard in Durbin's comment sounded a lot to me like the Democrats' opening capitulation in the debate. If they were really serious about broadening health care, they would be mining the rich field of care denial, injustice and insecurity in our current system for their talking points. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he was trying to get Medicare passed. He knew that if he talked about cost, he would be driving on the Republicans' side of the road and would be likely to get nothing. So he avoided that landmine and got the most significant piece of health care legislation we've ever seen. I think the Democrats know what they're doing. They're lowering expectations by changing the subject, from security to cost. We'll get something this year, but I'm guessing it won't include a public option or, if it does, entry will be so difficult that most Americans will remain stuck with their predatory private insurers. It'll be the Dems' and Obama's "Zabriskie Point."
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