What might have been and what has been
I was so cheering for what Polly Toynbee was saying about the 70s: Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …: Most 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured caricature, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, big hair 80s. It’s an image that obscures the radical social changes and great progressive leaps forward that took place then....So why does history record the 70s as nothing but a time of strife, shortages, hyper-inflation and decline? Well, it’s because history is written by the victor. And that victor was Margaret Thatcher, whose 1979 election conquest sought to uproot, marketise and diminish the role of the postwar state. Her political tribe used all their media power to expunge inconvenient 70s memories that didn’t fit her narrative, as surely as Stalin purged Trotsky from the photographic record. It was a goodbye to John Maynard Keynes’s generous social democratic state[.]
She doesn't glamourise the decade - the racism the sexism, etc. (And what tripled divorce rates - and women's freedom - in the 70s, was actually the 1969 Divorce Act, finally implementing recommendations that had first been made before the Great War. [Will concede that I am nerd about lawz of mattermoney...])
For me, personally, it was the best of times it was the worst of times, in that I was in a dreadful relationship but I was on (after an initial wrong direction) The Right Career Path.
On, at any given time a lot of things are happening, and not all of them are the things we remember, or rather, some people will remember some things and others will remember others and not always will the twain coincide: 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year by Nick Rennison review: In this enjoyable slice of popular history, he assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture. It makes for some unlikely associations. So, for example, January 1922 saw the second trial of Hollywood comedy actor Fatty Arbuckle for rape and manslaughter, the first successful treatment of diabetics with insulin, the death of Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica and Edith Sitwell’s debut performance of Façade to William Walton’s score.
And what seemed important then does not necessarily seem important now...
I happened to have a Zoom meeting yesterday of one of the bodies I have got involved with because of being involved with its archives over an extended period. During the course of which I happened to deliver myself of an apercu of mine that just because something does not look like an astounding success (an institution that did not last, a small and insignificant society, a legal case that was not won) it may in fact have had long term effects.
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