RonBrownstein.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) April 15, 2021: In 1974, I was not especially interested in the music, movies or the television shows coming out of Los Angeles in the early 1970s that the native New Yorker Ronald J. Brownstein (born in 1958) celebrates in his new 400-page 2021 book Rock Me on the Water: 1974: The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics (New York: Harper).
In 1974, far from Los Angeles, in Washington, D.C., the Senate's televised Watergate hearings also took place in the summer of 1974, and then on August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon announced that he was resigning. Television and movies coming out of Los Angeles in 1974 were no match for the televised political drama involving Nixon that summer.
In any event, Brownstein says, "Cultural eras don't precisely follow the calendar. The creative renaissance in Los Angeles did not begin on January 1, 1974 (or even January 1, 1967). It did not abruptly end on December 31, 1974. But the dynamic that rejuvenated culture and politics in Los Angeles reached their fullest expression through 1974. And as the year transitioned into 1975, forces gathered momentum that would end the city's revival in movies, music, television, and politics" (page 354).
In Brownstein's "Acknowledgments" (pages 391-395), he says, "I spent seventeen happy years at the Los Angeles Times" (page 392).
Brownstein's new 400-page 2021 book is a love song to the television, movies, and music coming out of Los Angeles in the early 1970s - well before his years at the Los Angeles Times. His book is also a loving valentine to certain values of activists of the 1960s such as Tom Hayden (born in 1939) and Jane Fonda (born in 1937). Because Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964 (page 5) tended to be over-represented in demonstrations in the 1960s, Brownstein works with a contrast between Baby Boomers and their parents - variously known as the Greatest Generation or as Nixon's "silent majority."
The values advanced in critiques of American life in the 1960s that Brownstein celebrates include "greater suspicion of authority in business and government, more assertive roles for women, more tolerance of pre-marital sex, greater acceptance of racial and sexual minorities" (page 4).
According to Brownstein, those values advocated in the 1960s "were not widely accepted before they were infused into the movies, television, and music emerging in this period [the early 1970s] in Los Angeles" (page 4). According to Brownstein, the right "definitively lost the [cultural] war" "[i]n the struggle for control of popular culture" (page 4).
Brownstein later streamlines the values of "the social movements of the 1960s" as "suspicion of authority, greater personal freedom, more respect for marginalized groups, and increased tolerance of differences" (page 389).
Disclosure: Like President Joe Biden (born in 1942), I was born before 1946 - in my father's hometown in the state of New York. However, in my case, my father was a decorated soldier in World War II. So my parents were part of the Greatest Generation. In the 1960s, I listened to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speak on the campus of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 12, 1964, and then again on March 25, 1965, in Montgomery, Alabama. Over the 1970s, I taught approximately one thousand black inner-city youth under open admissions. For example, in 1975-1976, I taught English at the City College of the City of New York (CUNY) during CUNY's idealistic experiment with tuition-free open admissions, which helped bankrupt New York City in May 1976. Only years later did I receive my May 1976 paycheck. In the 1960s and early 1970s, I was also an anti-war demonstrator against the Vietnam War. Consequently, I did not vote for the native Californian Nixon in 1968 or in 1972 (nor did I vote for the native New Yorker Trump in 2016 or in 2020).
For the record, neither the City of Los Angeles nor the University of California ever funded a large-scale idealistic experiment in tuition-free open admissions comparable to CUNY's. For a sober reflection on CUNY's experiment, see Theodore L. Gross' book Academic Turmoil: The Reality and Promise of Open Education (Garden City: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1980).
But please also note that Brownstein's book was published by a publisher in New York, not by a publisher in Los Angeles. Then again, arguably book-reading Americans may not contribute as much to American popular culture today as movies, music, and television out of Los Angeles did in 1974.
Now, why did the native New Yorker Brownstein write his celebratory book about his adopted hometown of Los Angeles?
In Brownstein's "Prologue: Magic Hour in Los Angeles" (pages 1-10), he provides his own answer to this crucial question -- but it prompts me to pause and say, "What?!"
You see, Brownstein says, "The early 1970s represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change and a political order controlled by older generations opposing such change [including the Greatest Generation who had fought in World War II]. That struggle, between those who welcomed and resisted new attitudes and arrangements, has echoes today in the conflicting visions of a president [Donald J. ("Tweety") Trump] who mobilizes a political coalition focused on restoring a more racially and culturally homogenous America [a Trump coalition including not only still living older whites in the Greatest Generation, but also, presumably, many now aging white non-college-educated Baby Boomers who may not have been so intent on change in the 1960s and 1970s] and the huge Millennials and their younger siblings have changed the culture more quickly than they have changed the politics. But America's diverse emerging generations will inevitably stamp their priorities on the nation's politics as well, even if those priorities evolve over time. Today, the Millennials and Generation Z, the two largest cohorts of Americans born after 1981, represent a larger share of the total American population than the Baby Boomers did even at their peak" (page 9).
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