Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ And so it was. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, had declared a state of emergency in November, his fifth in just over three years, to conserve fuel supplies during an overtime ban by the National Union of Mineworkers: street lighting was switched off, floodlit football matches cancelled, electric heating outlawed in offices and factories. In mid-December, two weeks before I caught the last train to hippyville, he announced that British industry would be limited to a three-day week from 1 January 1974. The word that appeared in news bulletins almost daily – ‘stoppage’ – was all too apt. After a while it became hard to remember a time when there weren’t blank television screens, electricity shortages or train cancellations. The nation was blocked, choked, paralysed, waiting for the end. As Margaret Drabble wrote in her novel The Ice Age (1977): ‘The old headline phrases of freeze and squeeze had for the first time become for everyone – not merely for the old and unemployed – a living image, a reality: millions who had groaned over them in steadily increasing prosperity were now obliged to think again. A huge icy fist, with large cold fingers, was squeezing and chilling the people of Britain.’

      The decade’s birthdate may be debatable, but what of its character? ‘If it were not for our quasi-religious modern obsession with anniversaries, decades and other arbitrary spans of time, it might at first sight seem a crazy proposition to essay an account of the Nineteen Seventies,’ Christopher Booker declared on the first page of The Seventies. ‘Of all the decades of the twentieth century, it would be hard to pick out one with a less distinctive, recognisable character.’ We could easily summon up a picture of, say, the Twenties – the Charleston, Model T Fords, Charlie Chaplin, the Wall Street boom. Similarly, the Thirties, Forties and Fifties all carried their own packages of associations, while the Sixties instantly evoked perhaps the clearest images of all – Beatlemania and mini-skirts, JFK and Vietnam, Swinging London and LSD. ‘But what in years to come will evoke the sober, gloomy Seventies,’ Booker wondered, ‘which in so many ways seemed like little more than a prolonged anti-climax to the manic excitements of the Sixties?’

      Well, ‘gloomy’ is a good start, and not just for those of us who were peeved at having missed the frolicsome Sixties because we were still at school. (‘The Seventies generation has forever been the victim of the nostalgia of others,’ the British disc jockey Dave Haslam complains. ‘We arrived too late, the generation before us told us then, and have been telling us ever since.’) But sober? Even when I first read Booker’s account, in 1980, I remember wondering if he’d spent the previous few years hibernating in a Somerset hay barn: the Seventies were about as sober as a meths-swilling vagrant waylaying passers-by to tell them that the Archbishop of Canterbury has planted electrodes in his brain. The adjective applied by Booker to the Sixties – ‘manic’ – seems nearer the mark. ‘Unless the British government transforms itself into a ruthless dictatorship, one is forced to predict the eventual breakdown of political control,’ the ecologist Teddy Goldsmith wrote in Can Britain Survive?, published in 1971. ‘The social system most likely to emerge is best described as feudal. People will gather round whichever strong men can provide the basic necessities of life, and offer protection against marauding bands from the dying cities.’ Never mind Britain: could the world survive? ‘Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable,’ Professor Peter Gunter of North Texas State University wrote in 1970, on the occasion of the first Earth Day. ‘By 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions … By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine.’ In the bestseller lists of the early Seventies, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb jostled for top place with B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (‘If all of modern science and technology cannot change man’s environment, can man be saved?’) and Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (which foresaw ‘the coming of an Antichrist’ and ‘a war which will bring man to the brink of destruction’). ‘I’m scared,’ Ehrlich said in 1970. ‘I have a 14-year-old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.’

      Slice the Seventies where you will, the flavour is unmistakable – a pungent mélange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever. You can find it in the words of Chairman Mao’s wife in 1971: ‘I have been feeling as if I am going to die any minute, as if some catastrophe is about to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time.’ Or in the advice given by Harold Wilson to two BBC reporters in 1976, weeks after his resignation as British prime minister, as he urged them to investigate plots against him by the security services: ‘I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.’ It is omnipresent in the private conversations of President Richard Nixon, preserved for posterity by the White House’s voice-activated recording system which he installed in 1971 – and which provided the evidence that compelled his resignation three years later. ‘Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general – these are the enemies of strong societies,’ he tells his aide Bob Haldeman, in a typical exchange. ‘That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they’re trying to destroy us! … You know it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?’ You can see it, at its bleakest, in the closing scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974): the surveillance expert Harry Caul sits alone in the ruins of his own apartment, which he has comprehensively dissected in a vain search for the hidden bugs which he knows must be there. ‘The Watergate affair makes it quite plain,’ Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1974, ‘that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance.’

      The paranoid style exemplified by Nixon and Wilson – and Madame Mao and Harry Caul, Idi Amin and Bobby Fischer, the Rev. Jim Jones and the Baader-Meinhof gang, Taxi Driver and Gravity’s Rainbow – saturated the 1970s. Conservatives feared that the very fabric of the state was under imminent threat – whether from Communists, gays, dope-smokers or even rock stars. (Elvis Presley warned Nixon that the Beatles had been ‘a real force for anti-American spirit’; John Lennon was duly added to the President’s ‘enemies’ list’ and put under surveillance by the FBI.) In Britain, retired generals formed private armies to save the country from anarchy, industrial moguls plotted coups against the government and malcontents in the security services bugged and burgled their way across London in a quest for proof that the Prime Minister was employed by the KGB.

On the Left, mistrust of political, military and business institutions found violent new expression. Groups such as the Weather Underground in the US or the Angry Brigade in Britain had few active members but forced themselves into public consciousness and official demonology through spectacular stunts – the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. In 1971 an opinion poll found that 20 per cent of West Germans under the age of thirty had ‘a certain sympathy’ with the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group, whose avowed aim was to overthrow the government by force.^* The reborn IRA brought carnage and mayhem to Northern Ireland and mainland Britain; the British state retaliated with a ‘dirty war’ of assassination and misinformation, details of which are only now beginning to emerge. The Provisional IRA was remarkably effective despite being so heavily infiltrated that in due course undercover agents were unwittingly informing on other undercover agents to British intelligence – just as in G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), where the police infiltrate a secret society so comprehensively that the anarchists they’re СКАЧАТЬ