For the most part, the hysteria was initially one-sided. The news wasn’t good and musicians fanned the flames. With the exception of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was the nation’s number one song in 1966,14 and Victor Lundberg’s prowar “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son,” which was number ten the following year,15 every other song about the conflict was a protest. I remember that vividly because I was listening to a lot of music then. I had just met my wife, Janet, in 1967, and I even worked for a short time with LSD advocate Timothy Leary in Millbrook, New York. I wasn’t personally interested in the drug, but he represented the avant-garde of thinking at the time, which was complementary to my own outside-the-box view of the world. He gave me a tent at the front of the mansion and I was literally the gatekeeper. Why? Because I did not use the drug and could be counted on to be sober.
The songs of the time were pervasive and powerful. Jim Morrison and the Doors mourned “The Unknown Soldier,” Edwin Starr sang disapprovingly of “War,” John Lee Hooker announced, “I Don’t Wanna Go to Vietnam”—the tunes came one after the other. Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” was cut from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour16—as were the brothers themselves when their hit show became too controversial for CBS. Even softer rock groups like Gary Puckett and the Union Gap sang longingly of “Home,” the Association gave us “Requiem for the Masses,” and the Monkees—the Monkees!—put out the thinly disguised “Zor and Zam” about warring nations.
The antiwar drumbeat was quite literally constant, especially when President Nixon escalated the conflict into Cambodia, where Viet Cong soldiers would hide to avoid South Vietnamese forces. And while campus protests and media disapproval did not constitute hysteria but fear of the draft, they spurred an anti-Establishment backlash that was hysteria. The counterculture, as the hippies were called, all wore peace symbols or spray-painted them on walls and streets. Children of prosperity attacked their own status. Students and the hippie dropouts denounced the once-proud achievements of NASA as a waste of money, stupidly oblivious to the spin-offs like microchips, handheld video cameras, and even Teflon. They turned on the police, whom they referred to as “pigs” or “the fuzz,” and promoted slogans like “Never trust anyone over thirty” and “Make love, not war,” to which the Establishment replied, “America, love it or leave it.” There were impromptu riots, like the one at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in the summer of 1969, which started the gay rights movement in earnest.17 Draft cards were burned alongside flags and brassieres, the latter in the name of “women’s liberation.” Hippies in particular didn’t believe in work, they believed in playing Frisbee. As we’ve discussed, they also saturated their systems with pot, psychoactive drugs, and other substances that not only colored their hysterical reaction to everything but bred a fast-growing antagonism from Americans over thirty. To them, the kids were mostly bums.
In every city, and on every campus, it seemed as though everyone had lost their minds and was acting out. It was different from today, where people are manipulated by social media on a daily basis. This was a generational hysteria in which even the fading HUAC got involved when it subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in 1967, two founders of the Yippie movement—a coy play on “hippie” that described a group of disruptive, theatrics-loving clowns who infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange and threw money (real and fake) at the traders, held “sit-ins” and “be-ins” in public places, and threw Nazi salutes and blew gum bubbles during the HUAC hearings. These self-described “Groucho Marxists” were every inch the hysterical lunatics they appeared. I thought at the time, and nothing has changed my opinion, that they were half-baked anarchists without the skill set to promote an alternative to whatever they protested.
The anti-Establishment lunacy continued until two events put an end to it. The first was the 1974 resignation, in disgrace, of Richard M. Nixon as a result of the Watergate break-in. The second was the end of direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, although fighting continued until 1975. The targets were gone. The insanity passed.
The end of this hysteria wasn’t like pulling the plug on a computer, where a vital machine goes silent. It was like a clean breeze blew in and swept rotted flower petals away. To borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, they were “blowin’ in the wind.” A smattering of the hard-core lunatics and radicals emerged from hibernation a few years ago, pulled their gray hair into ponytails, loaded their iPods with as much Joni Mitchell as Tim Cook’s little devices could hold, and showed up to join Occupy Wall Street, rally for Bernie Sanders, and participate in other hysterical protests. Because, you will notice, the old hippies and young radicals never show up to support anything for all citizens, like eating healthy. It is in their DNA to destroy. But while they were never very dynamic, these modern-day hippies are just sad relics, the by-product of a dazed, reactionary youth that grew into something mentally, emotionally, and physically stunted. And people wonder why the nation is on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.
Because that deformity is another by-product of hysteria. If you subscribe to it at a young age, as a matter of course, you stop listening—except to your own voice and the simplistic mantras of your fellow airheads in an echo chamber. You fail to take in ideas that are intellectually nutritious. And part of that pathology is you want everything else to be the way you are: no restrictions, no literate words, no tradition. In short, no borders, no language, no culture. With these people as role models, with the rebellious sixties held up as an exemplar of protest, we are breeding a generation of equally vapid youth, of lemmings, of people who know only one setting: hysteria. We see it in the reaction to the election of Donald Trump—which, almost two years after the fact, continues to reduce a portion of the electorate to a vocabulary of inarticulate cries. They just nod obediently, like zombies, whenever Bernie or Lizzy Warren speaks.
Domestic hysteria often has a real trigger. During the 1970s, a manufactured gasoline shortage led to long lines, fights, and riots. Wage and price controls caused the impotent rage of the populace to toss out elected officials. When attention shifted during the Reagan administration to rampant pornography—including the exploitation of children—it became a flashpoint for hysteria on both sides as religious leaders, feminists, free-speech fanatics, free-sex fanatics, and many others were fiercely polarized by a single subject. The fallout of this long hysteria was that nobody wanted to be “politically incorrect,” even if, once again, innocent youth had to suffer.
13.
FROM GAS LINES TO REAGAN
Not All Hysteria Is Manufactured
The Arabs of the oil-producing nations won a war against the United States without firing a shot.
It was October 1973, and America had come to Israel’s aid after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack. The fighting was over in three weeks, the attackers defeated, but the Arabs were not done with us. In November, under the umbrella of OPEC—the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries1—they reduced oil output by 25 percent.2 Their goal was to bully America into a foreign policy less friendly to Israel.
The result was hysteria at the pumps. Gas prices jumped by more than 40 percent—when you could get it.3 The summer of 1974 is captured in two iconic images: endless lines at filling stations that had gas, and filling stations that had sold their inventory and were closed. Some closed for the day;4 others closed permanently. Every day, Americans drove by gas stations that had once been brightly lit twenty-four hours a day. Seeing them gone did not help the national mood.
And it got worse. Open gas stations came under fire for selling gas by appointment to longtime customers,5 or for supplying black market vendors who sold their product at whatever prices the market would bear.6 By summer, fights at gas stations were common.7
This wouldn’t be the last time in the 1970s things got ugly at the pumps. In June, 1979, there were protests over gasoline shortages. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, police wore riot gear and used dogs to s
top frustrated motorists from burning cars and vandalizing buildings. That same weekend, fewer than fifty gas stations were open in the entire state of Connecticut, and of six thousand stations in New Jersey, barely five hundred had their lights on. The cost of delivering goods by truck skyrocketed, as did consumer prices. Everything from food to clothing to goods was impacted.8
As all wars do, this one endangered our children. Starting in January 1974, the United States went on year-round Daylight Savings Time in an effort to preserve precious reserves of oil.9 Before the sun had risen, kids were crossing streets, waiting—sometimes alone—at bus stops, and stumbling around in the dark.
Hysteria was present in every corner of the nation, in every industry—and in Washington, D.C.
War frequently makes governments do dumb, hysterical things, and this war was no exception. In 1974, the Nixon administration imposed a national 55 mph speed limit to boost fuel efficiency.10 Truckers, the lifeblood of our economy, felt this harder than anyone. Many were paid per delivery, and the reduced speed limit meant more time per load. Rather than work for reduced pay, they struck, which further damaged the economy. But President Nixon stood firm, as did Presidents Ford and Carter after him, and the national speed limit wasn’t rolled back until 1995. Ford was flat footed for his short tenure in office following Nixon’s resignation, but Jimmy Carter leaped into action to expand government as only a Democrat can. In 1977, the government bureaucracy swelled by another cabinet-level department, the Department of Energy.
The war almost brought rationing back to our country. Gasoline ration cards, like those used during World War II, were printed. There was a truly rebellious tone to the hysteria as this new burden was readied for distribution.11 Thankfully, we’ll never know what impact those ration cards would have had on national morale. After a combination of conservation efforts that threatened to impact the economy of the Arab states permanently, and Middle East diplomacy that briefly settled tension in the region, petroleum-producing countries reopened the taps.
It turned out crisis was only on hiatus, though. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 created additional supply disruptions. Oil prices again shot up.12 And again, government intervention made the situation worse. Under President Carter, controls were removed from oil and gas prices. That placed a momentary burden on consumers, but it was supposed to spur domestic exploration and production. Carter and the Democrats couldn’t resist tacking a “windfall profit tax” on oil companies, however. That took away any impetus for them to explore for new sources. Had the government not interfered, rising gas prices would have made exploration affordable and we could have moved from dependency on the Arab states.
Supply was down, costs were up, and Americans again faced long lines at the gas pumps. The government tried to moderate the situation by, among other schemes, alternating days when cars could fill up based on even or odd license plate numbers.13 All summer, anyone with a screwdriver and at least two vehicles was busily switching plates. Illegal? Yes. Jimmy Carter made almost everyone a criminal. But like backyard distillers during Prohibition, idiotic laws enacted during periods of hysteria make people do illegal things, whether as acts of rebellion or simply coping.
Here’s the ultimate joke played on, and then by, the left. It was under Carter that alternative energy exploration began to take root, whether solar panels like the ones he put on top of the White House, or coal and natural gas. But the hysterics found something new to be hysterical about. This time it was the nuclear industry, which currently provides a cheap source of 20 percent of this country’s needs.14 It was unsafe, there were going to be meltdowns, we would all be sterile. You can’t win.
The 1979 oil crisis resolved itself as industrial nations turned to alternative fuels. By 1981 there were oil gluts and oil prices were dropping.15 It is perhaps a fitting denouement to the Arab-manufactured crisis that a line from Galatians in the New Testament applies: “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
COMMUNITY STANDARDS
Born-again Christian Jimmy Carter was the presidential candidate who famously told Playboy magazine, in 1976, “I’ve looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”16 He wasn’t alone and he did no one any favors by setting the bar for morality so low.
Ronald Reagan came along at the right time for a number of reasons. One of them was to call attention to a scourge that has always caused me more than a little concern, if not quite hysteria. Pornography.
When I was a teenager, there was only one place anyone could buy girlie magazines like Nugget, and Cavalier, and Swank: under the counter at certain newsstands. For the harder stuff, you had to go to Forty-Second Street in Manhattan off Seventh Avenue. Heading west, closer to Tenth Avenue, were the last holdouts of the burlesque houses along with the theaters that showed porn and “all-male” movies. It was a sleazy area that got even more degenerate until Rudy Giuliani cleaned it up when he became mayor. People say he “Disneyfied” it by allowing the New Amsterdam Theater to be renovated and for the Disney musicals King David and then The Lion King to take up residence. They’re right. He did. And it was the best thing that could have happened. What had been three avenues of crime and perversion became a safe tourist attraction.
I’m not a prude, but what people do behind closed doors should stay there. It’s no one else’s business. In the early 1980s, before the Times Square cleanup, though, our nation was subjected not just to a proliferation of full-frontal nudity in once semi-artistic magazines like Playboy and Penthouse—and worse in Larry Flynt’s Hustler—but to a surge in the number of porn films as the new medium of home video leaped on the genre as a valuable source of revenue.
That was the state of things when Ronald Reagan was elected president, and law professor and former army second lieutenant Edwin Meese was named attorney general of the United States. As Governor Reagan’s chief of staff in California, Meese was a law-and-order man who was the impetus behind the hard National Guard crackdown on student protesters at Berkeley in 1969.17
One of Meese’s signature efforts was the exhaustive report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, which was released in the summer of 1986.18 The report was, on the one hand, a politically charged document. It was a repudiation of the earlier President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography report, released on October 24, 1970, which was against censorship of pornography and advocated stronger sex education programs in schools.19 That report had been commissioned under the Johnson administration, was denounced by Nixon, but stood as a liberal lighthouse for three administrations. Meese finally undid that. The topics the document covered, in great detail, were a history of pornography, an interpretation of First Amendment protections, the dangerous sociological impact of pornography, and the ways in which pornography enriches organized crime.
Few could disagree with the social and criminal aspects of Meese’s findings. I had friends in the 1970s who worked in the Midtown South Precinct of Manhattan. Many pornography shops on Forty-Second Street were fronts for criminal activity. Many of the films were used to launder mob money. A large number of people who frequented these establishments were not looking for a one-time-only stag film for a bachelor party. They were obsessed individuals who should have been seeking help, not more books and magazines. If it were alcohol, the liberals would have been urging the users to join AA.
Liberal hysteria exploded over two topics: that it was impossible to define pornography vis-à-vis art, and that free speech was under attack by the Reagan administration. Both of those arguments were absurd and were ably dismissed by the Supreme Court in the mid-1950s. The members of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Court came up with what I consider to be a wise and applicable yardstick: It’s pornography if “to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest.”20 In other words, the nudes of Michelangelo are art. The movie Deep Throa
t is pornography. Pornography is demonstrably destructive to our society, to our economy, to our families, and cannot be considered protected speech. End of discussion. In its own way, even the free-speech advocates at the New York Times inadvertently supported the Supreme Court definition when they refused to publish the Meese report because they deemed it too pornographic. It was one of the richest hypocrisies in the history of journalism as the press censored a document whose view of censorship was contrary to their own. To their credit, many religious bookstores that agreed with the report sold published copies under the counter.
Sadly, maybe that isn’t the definition the Supreme Court should have been worrying about. Today, the question is: What’s a community? Is it Muslims in Minneapolis? Scientologists in Clearwater, Florida? Progressives melting down history in New York City? The justices never envisioned a nation where the very concept of community was no longer viable.
Thirty years ago, there were still community standards. But no legal finding has ever stopped the ACLU and other liberal juggernauts, and they defended both the pornography shops and the businesses that provided the wares. In fact, showing just how repugnant they are, the ACLU issued this directive in 1994 under the banner of pornography and the First Amendment: “The sexually abusive acts committed against children should be criminalized, but once those acts are in the form of visual depictions, they are protected forms of expression.”21 I do not believe I need to comment further.
Communists were of the opposing view, critical of anything that promoted sexual inequality among workers, thus chauvinism, thus pornography. Feminists were actually torn. While most of pornography treated women like sex objects, the women who appeared in these magazines and films were exercising their right as liberated women to do as they pleased. The Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force held that view.22 The group Radical Women took the former view.23 There is nothing so validating as watching liberals tear at one another with greater and greater frenzy. You can see their dilemma. Are women who do a lesbian sex scene being used or promoting gay rights?
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