When the Seventies Ended: January 20, 1981

The Seventies certainly did not end on December 31, 1979. Nothing big happened then. (I was at a New Year's Eve party in Bayonne). So when did the decade end?

For a while I thought of December 8, 1980 as a good cutoff for the Seventies. That was the day, as some of you will recall, that John Lennon was gunned down outside of his home on 72 Street and Central Park West. John's demise was clearly symbolic of the death of something greater: perhaps the last shreds of Sixties idealism or the hippie style. But after the shock wore off Life was the same for most of us.

On January 20, 1981 two major events occurred. Of course there was the inauguration of former actor Ronald Wilson Reagan as President of the United States. The second, which occurred just moments after Reagan took the Oath of Office, was the release of the US hostages in Iran. Reagan was clearly an Eighties president, what with his emphasis upon the media and appeals to nostalgia. The Iran hostage crisis was just the capper of a whole series of events that left Americans feeling pretty lousy about their country. Here was a superpower, held hostage by some wacko students who followed a "spiritual leader" who looked like a character from a bad horror movie. Jimmy Carter, sober former nuclear engineer and naval officer, could do nothing. Well, he did try to rescue the hostages, using America's most elite forces, only to have the effort collapse as a farce in the desert.

The emergence of the Reagan Revolution and Iran's Islamic Revolution had a number of things in common, and I sometimes think Khomieni was sending his fellow demagogue an inauguration present when he freed the captives. Both movements were heavily backed by hypocritical clerics looking for power; each appealed to emotion instead of reason, and there was a yearning in both nations for a return to 'pure' values that never existed.