The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  My hemorrhoids.

  “Me and My Hemorrhoids Star at the Ambassador” … during a three-day Erhard Seminars Training (est) course in the banquet hall. The truly odd part, however, is yet to come. In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970’s, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade.

  2. The holy roll

  In 1972 a farsighted caricaturist did this drawing of Teddy Kennedy, entitled “President Kennedy campaigning for reelection in 1980 … courting the so-called Awakened vote.” The picture shows Kennedy ostentatiously wearing not only a crucifix but also (if one looks just above the cross) a pendant of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus. The crucifix is the symbol of Christianity in general, but the Bleeding Heart is the symbol of some of Christianity’s most ecstatic, non-rational, holy-rolling cults. I should point out that the artist’s prediction lacked certain refinements. For one thing, Kennedy may be campaigning to be President in 1980, but he is not terribly likely to be the incumbent. For another, the odd spectacle of politicians using ecstatic, non-rational, holy-rolling religion in Presidential campaigning was to appear first not in 1980 but in 1976.

  The two most popular new figures in the 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown, are men who rose up from state politics … absolutely aglow with mystical religious streaks. Carter turned out to be an evangelical Baptist who had recently been “born again” and “saved,” who had “accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior”—i.e., he was of the Missionary lectern-pounding Amen ten-finger C-major-chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha-keyboard loblolly piney-woods Baptist faith in which the members of the congregation stand up and “give witness” and “share it, Brother” and “share it, Sister” and “praise God!” during the service.o Jerry Brown turned out to be the Zen Jesuit, a former Jesuit seminarian who went about like a hairshirt Catholic monk, but one who happened to believe also in the Gautama Buddha, and who got off koans in an offhand but confident manner, even on political issues, as to how it is not the right answer that matters but the right question, and so forth.

  Newspaper columnists and news-magazine writers continually referred to the two men’s “enigmatic appeal.” Which is to say, they couldn’t explain it. Nevertheless, they tried. They theorized that the war in Vietnam, Watergate, the FBI and CIA scandals, had left the electorate shell-shocked and disillusioned and that in their despair the citizens were groping no longer for specific remedies but for sheer faith, something, anything (even holy rolling), to believe in. This was in keeping with the current fashion of interpreting all new political phenomena in terms of recent disasters, frustration, protest, the decline of civilization … the Grim Slide. But when The New York Times and CBS employed a polling organization to try to find out just what great gusher of “frustration” and “protest” Carter had hit, the results were baffling. A Harvard political scientist, William Schneider, concluded for the Los Angeles Times that “the Carter protest” was a new kind of protest, “a protest of good feelings.” That was a new kind, sure enough: a protest that wasn’t a protest.

  In fact, both Carter and Brown had stumbled upon a fabulous terrain for which there are no words in current political language. A couple of politicians had finally wandered into the Me Decade.

  3. Him?—the new man?

  The saga of the Me Decade begins with one of those facts that are so big and so obvious (like the Big Dipper) no one ever comments on them any more. Namely: the thirty-year boom. Wartime spending in the United States in the 1940’s touched off a boom that has continued for more than thirty years. It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums. Nevertheless, in the city of Compton, California, it is possible for a family of four at the very lowest class level, which is known in America today as “on welfare,” to draw an income of $8,ooo a year entirely from public sources. This is more than most British newspaper columnists and Italian factory foremen make, even allowing for differences in living costs. In America truck drivers, mechanics, factory workers, policemen, firemen, and garbagemen make so much money—$15,000 to $20,000 (or more) per year is not uncommon—that the word “proletarian” can no longer be used in this country with a straight face. So one now says “lower middle class.” One can’t even call workingmen “blue collar” any longer. They all have on collars like Joe Namath’s or Johnny Bench’s or Walt Frazier’s. They all have on $35 superstar Qiana sport shirts with elephant collars and 1940’s Airbrush Wallpaper Flowers Buncha Grapes & Seashell designs all over them.

  Well, my God, the old utopian socialists of the nineteenth century—such as Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, and Marx—lived for the day of the liberated workingman. They foresaw a day when industrialism (Saint-Simon coined the word) would give the common man the things he needed in order to realize his potential as a human being: surplus (discretionary) income, political freedom, free time (leisure), and freedom from grinding drudgery. Some of them, notably Owen and Fourier, thought all this might come to pass first in the United States. So they set up communes here: Owen’s New Harmony commune in Indiana and thirty-four Fourier-style “phalanx” settlements—socialist communes, because the new freedom was supposed to be possible only under socialism. The old boys never dreamed that it would come to pass instead as the result of a Go-Getter Bourgeois business boom such as began in the U.S. in the 1940’s. Nor would they have liked it if they had seen it. For one thing, the homo novus, the new man, the liberated man, the first common man in the history of the world with the much-dreamed-of combination of money, freedom, and free time—this American workingman—didn’t look right. The Joe Namath—Johnny Bench—Walt Frazier superstar Qiana wallpaper sports shirts, for a start.

  He didn’t look right … and he wouldn’t … do right! I can remember what brave plans visionary architects at Yale and Harvard still had for the common man in the early 1950’S. (They actually used the term “the common man.”) They had brought the utopian socialist dream forward into the twentieth century. They had things figured out for the workingman down to truly minute details, such as lamp switches. The new liberated workingman would live as the Cultivated Ascetic. He would be modeled on the B.A. -degree Greenwich Village bohemian of the late 1940’s—dark wool Hudson Bay shirts, tweed jackets, flannel trousers, briarwood pipes, good books, sandals and simplicity—except that he would live in a Worker Housing project. All Yale and Harvard architects worshipped Bauhaus principles and had the Bauhaus vision of Worker Housing. The Bauhaus movement absolutely hypnotized American architects, once its leaders, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, came to the United States from Germany in the 1930’s. Worker Housing in America would have pure beige rooms, stripped, freed, purged of all moldings, cornices, and overhangs—which Gropius regarded as symbolic “crowns” and therefore loathsome. Worker Housing would be liberated from all wallpaper, “drapes,” Wilton rugs with flowers on them, lamps with fringed shades and bases that looked like vases or Greek columns. It would be cleansed of all doilies, knickknacks, mantelpieces, headboards, and radiator covers. Radiator coils would be left bare as honest, abstract sculptural objects.

  But somehow the workers, incurable slobs that they were, avoided Worker Housing, better known as “the projects,” as if it had a smell. They were heading out instead to the suburbs—the suburbs!—-to places like Islip, Long Island, and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles—and buying houses with clapboard siding and pitched roofs and shingles and gaslight-style front-porch lamps and mailboxes set up on top of lengths of stiffened chain that seemed to defy gravity, and all sorts of other unbelievably cute or antiquey touches, and they loaded these houses with “drapes” such as baffled all description and wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a shoe in, and they put barbecue pits and fish ponds with concrete cherubs urinating into them on the lawn out back, and they parked twenty-five-foot-long cars out front and
Evinrude cruisers up on tow trailers in the carport just beyond the breezeway.p

  By the 1960’s the common man was also getting quite interested in this business of “realizing his potential as a human being.” But once again he crossed everybody up! Once more he took his money and ran—determined to do-it-himself!

  4. Plugging in

  In 1971 I made a lecture tour of Italy, talking (at the request of my Italian hosts) about “contemporary American life.” Everywhere I went, from Turin to Palermo, Italian students were interested in just one question: Was it really true that young people in America, no older than themselves, actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules and created their own dress styles and vocabulary and had free sex and took dope? They were talking, of course, about the hippie or psychedelic movement that had begun flowering about 1965. What fascinated them the most, however, was the first item on the list: that the hippies actually left home and lived communally according to their own rules.

  To Italian students this seemed positively amazing. Several of the students I met lived wild enough lives during daylight hours. They were in radical organizations and had fought pitched battles with police, on the barricades, as it were. But by 8:30 p.m. they were back home, obediently washing their hands before dinner with Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis and the Maiden Aunt. When they left home for good, it was likely to be via the only admissible ticket: marriage. Unmarried sons of thirty-eight and thirty-nine would still be sitting around the same old table, morosely munching the gnocchi.

  Meanwhile, ordinary people in America were breaking off from conventional society, from family, neighborhood, and community, and creating worlds of their own. This had no parallel in history, certainly considering the scale of it. The hippies were merely the most flamboyant example. The New Left students of the late 1960’s were another. The New Lefters lived in communes much like the hippies’ but with a slightly different emphasis. Dope, sex, nudity, costumes, and vocabulary became symbols of defiance of bourgeois life. The costumery tended to be semi-military: non-com officers’ shirts, combat boots, commando berets—worn in combination with blue jeans or a turtleneck jersey, however, to show that one wasn’t a uniform freak.

  That people so young could go off on their own, without taking jobs, and live a life completely of their own design—to Europeans it was astounding. That ordinary factory workers could go off to the suburbs and buy homes and create their own dream houses—this, too, was astounding. And yet the new life of old people in America in the 1960’S was still more astounding. Throughout European history and in the United States up to the Second World War, old age was a time when you had to cling to your children or other kinfolk, and to their sufferance and mercy, if any. The Old Folks at Home happily mingling in the old manse with the generations that followed? The little ones learning at Grandpa’s and Grandma’s bony knees? These are largely the myths of nostalgia. The beloved old folks were often exiled to the attic or the outbuildings, and the servants brought them their meals. They were not considered decorative in the dining room or the parlor.

  In the 1960’s, old people in America began doing something that was more extraordinary than it ever seemed at the time. They cut through the whole dreary humiliation of old age by heading off to “retirement villages” and “leisure developments”—which quickly became Old Folks communes. Some of the old parties managed to take this to a somewhat psychedelic extreme. For example, the trailer caravaners. The caravaners were (and are) mainly retired couples who started off their Golden Years by doing the usual thing. They went to their children, Buddy and Sis, and gingerly suggested that now that Dad had retired, he and Mom might move in with one of them. They get the old “Uhh … sure”—plus a death-ray look. So the two old crocks depart and go out and buy what is the only form of prefabricated housing that has ever caught on in America: the house trailer, or mobile home. Usually the old pair would try to make the trailer look like a real house. They’d park it on a plot in a trailer park and put it up on blocks and put some latticework around the bottom to hide the axles and the wheel housings and put little awnings above the windows and a big one out over the door to create the impression of a breezeway. By and by, however, they would discover that there were people their age who actually moved off dead center with these things and went out into the world and rolled. At this point they would join a trailer caravan. And when the trailer caravans got rolling, you had a chance to see some of the most amazing sights of the modern American landscape … such as thirty, forty, fifty Airstream trailers, the ones that are silver and have rounded corners and ends and look like silver bullets … thirty, forty, fifty of these silver bullets in a line, in a caravan, hauling down the highway in the late afternoon with the sun at a low angle and exploding off the silver surfaces of the Airstreams until the whole convoy looks like some gigantic and improbable string of jewelry, each jewel ablaze with a highlight, rolling over the face of the earth—the million-volt, billion-horsepower bijoux of America!

  The caravaners might start off taking the ordinary tourist routes of the West, but they would soon get a taste for adventure and head for the badlands, through the glacier forests of the Northwest and down through western Mexico, not fat green chile relleno red jacaranda blossom mariachi band caballero sombrero Tourist Mexico but western Mexico, where the terrain is all skulls and bones and junk frito and hardcheese mestizos hunkered down at the crossroads, glowering, and cows and armadillos by the side of the road on their backs with their bellies bloated and all four feet up in the air. The caravaners would get deeper and deeper into a life of sheer trailering. They would become experts at this twentieth-century nomad life. They would begin to look back on Buddy & Sis as sad conventional sorts whom they had left behind, poor turkeys who knew nothing of the initiations and rites of passage of trailering.

  The mighty million-volt rites! Every now and then the caravan would have to seek out a trailer camp for a rest in the rush across the face of Western. America, and in these camps you’d have to plug a power line from your trailer into the utility poles the camps provide, so as to be able to use the appliances in the trailer when your car engine wasn’t generating electricity. In some of the older camps these poles were tricky to use. If you didn’t plug your line in in just the right manner, with the right prong up and the right one down, you stood to get a hell of a shock, a feedback of what felt like about two thousand volts. So about dusk you might see the veterans sitting outside their trailers in aluminum-and-vinyl folding chairs, pretending to be just chewing the fat at sunset but in fact nudging one another and keeping everyone on the alert for what is about to happen when the rookie—the rheumy-eyed, gray-haired old Dad who, with Mom, has just joined the caravan—plugs into the malicious Troll Pole for the first time.

  Old Dad tries to plug in, and of course he gets it wrong, tries to put the wrong prong in on top and the wrong one on the bottom, and—bowwwwwww!—-he gets a thunderbolt jolt like Armageddon itself and does an inverted one-and-a-half gainer and lands on his back— and the veterans, men and women, just absolutely crack up, bawl, cry, laugh until they’re turning inside out. And only after the last whoops and snorts have died down does it dawn on you that this poor wet rookie who plugged in wrong and has just done this involuntary Olympic diving maneuver and landed on his spine with his fingers smoking … is a gray-haired party seventy-two years old. But that’s also the beauty of it! They always survive! They’re initiates! hierophants of the caravan who have moved off dead center! Various deadly rheumatoid symptoms disappear, as if by magic! The Gerontoid Cowboys ride! deep into a new land and a new life they’ve created for themselves!

  5. Lemon sessions

  It was remarkable enough that ordinary folks now had enough money to take it and run off and alter the circumstances of their lives and create new roles for themselves, such as Trailer Sailor. But simultaneously still others decided to go … all the way. They plunged straight toward what has become the alchemical dream of the Me
Decade.

  The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else.

  Much of the satisfaction well-born people got from what is known historically as the “chivalric tradition” was precisely that: dwelling upon Me and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality. At Versailles, Louis XIV founded a school for girls called Saint-Cyr. At the time most schools for girls were in convents. Louis had quite something else in mind, a secular school that would develop womenfolk for the superior race guerrière that he believed himself to be creating in France. Saint-Cyr was the forerunner for what was known up until a few years ago as the finishing school. And what was the finishing school? Why, a school in which the personality was to be shaped and buffed like a piece of high-class psychological cabinetry. For centuries most of upper-class college education in France and England has been fashioned in the same manner: with an eye toward sculpting the personality as carefully as the intellectual faculties.