Counting Back the Years

Two (excellent) reasons to read Francis Wheen’s at times hilarious, other times scary Strange Days Indeed: The 1970’s: The Golden Age of Paranoia (Public Affairs) are Wheen’s mordant humor and high intelligence, and that he is dead on in his assessment of that historical sinkhole known as the seventies (OK, OK, that’s three reasons).

If you missed his previous tome, How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, you would do well to remedy that lapse posthaste (take my word on this one):

By the end of the twentieth century, almost any unorthodox business method could be justified as a paradigm shift, even if it seemed uncannily similar to an ancient scam that had been perpetrated at regular intervals for several centuries. “When you see reference to a new paradigm,” John Kenneth Galbraith said in 1998, “you should always, under all circumstances, take cover…There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble—until the day of disaster.

Strange Days Indeed is not only (almost) a comprehensive catalogue of nouns and proper nouns (I forgive Wheen’s failure to include the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever in this temporal inventory) that I am prepared to consign to amnesia, but a well-considered explication of that decade’s zeitgeist(s) and a reminder that no epoch or era has a monopoly on nut jobs:

Taxi DriverGravity’s Rainbow

Francis Wheen lives in England where he is deputy editor of Private Eye and the editor of Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion, Private Eye’s compendium of book reviews. Among other accomplishments, he has written a well-regarded biography of Karl Marx—apparently making him one of the rare political leftists who has actually read Karl Marx. Wheen occasionally (but not frequently enough to suit me) contributes to American media, and joins Barbara Ehrenreich, Joe Bagneant, Christopher Hitchens, Gail Collins, and Joe Conason and Robert Sheer as commentators whose work I always read with relish and gusto.