The Business of Nostalgia: 1970s edition

YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

Like many of my fellow Baby Boomers, much of my youth was in the 1970s. It was the decade when I found a woman I truly loved and married her (see above). It was the decade where I worked for idealistic political candidates, including Dick Clark (not the Bandstand guy) in his successful 1972 U.S. senatorial campaign in Iowa and Congressman Morris K. Udall, who lost to Jimmy Carter in his 1976 presidential run. And, as an advocate for intercity passenger rail, I was a leader in the effort to maintain and expand Amtrak service.

Looking back from 2025, it seems a magical time. It was, for me and millions of others, "The Period of Possibility." And it's become Big Business, thanks to social media. I recently joined a Facebook group called "We Pretend It's Still the 1970s," a platform owned by Do You Remember? (DYR), which describes itself as "home to the largest online community of nostalgia enthusiasts and is the go-to website for fans of the ’50s ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s." In other words, the postwar Baby Boomers and Generation X, along with the older so-called "Silent Generation." Yet from the photo of the DYR staff, it appears that Silents, Boomers and Xers are absent. I'm not sure whether any of the staffers are old enough to be Millennials. But maybe it doesn't matter, because we nostalgic oldsters provide virtually all of the content of DYR's platforms, albeit without monetary compensation.

We have the distinction of being both the market and the product. That's true of all social media users, of course, but it seems peculiarly unfair that the profits are flowing to trendy-looking twentysomethings from Manhattan. Perhaps some of DYR's investors are Boomers, along with some of its "team members that work remotely," but every indication suggests a much younger demographic than its target audience.

The "We Pretend It's Still the 1970s" group, under "About," includes the following: "Travel back in time, and let's pretend it's still the 1970s and we're there!

"Please do not post or comment in 'past-tense'. No 'I remember' posts! Everything you say, must be in 'present tense', written as if you're writing it from your childhood bedroom, your school desk, or anyplace you hung out at back then!

"Rules: Be Nice. Don't Troll. Nothing Current (including and especially Politics). Report bad behavior."

Many of the posts are from couples like Kathleen and me, who married young, were told their marriages wouldn't last, and are still in loving relationships after 45 to 55 years. I admit to enjoying their stories and their satisfaction at proving the naysayers wrong. I've seen only one post from someone who was divorced in the 1970s, though there could be more. But generally speaking, the Facebook group presents the decade as an idyllic time, which, in many ways, it was, especially for those of my generation.

But, of course, it wasn't all young love, great music, and cool cars. The decade began with Richard Nixon as president, and the Vietnam War not just raging, but expanded into Cambodia. That war continued for the first three years of the decade, while protests counter-protests, and police and National Guard actions turned violent. Then there was Watergate, the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent Arab oil embargo that brought about the recession of 1975-76. Elation over Nixon's resignation and Jimmy Carter's election soured in the face of double-digit inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, and another oil embargo and recession at the end of the decade. It also marked the beginning of the end of the American Dream. I've read more than once that 1973, the year Kathleen and I married, was the first year when Americans' real wages began shrinking. Internationally, there was mass murder in Cambodia, Chile, and Afghanistan. And that list of negatives just scratched the surface.

While some of the posts mention boyfriends or husbands returning from Vietnam, they're shown in a positive light. I doubt whether the administrators would allow posts featuring antiwar protests or Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to read and like the posts of those young couples who defied the odds, and even those who are brave enough to write about their divorces. I don't plan to add my own story to them, at least not in the "We Pretend It's Still the 1970s" Facebook group, though I suspect the wedding photo of Kathleen and me from 1973 would be a hit on the site.

"Tell Out My Soul!" Too Evangelical or cryptically Anglican?

 

It's time for new T-shirts and polo shirts for my congregation--the last ones came out several years ago. I still have my T-shirt and fleece hoodie from then. But I was a tad shocked at the new design, above, which features the phrase, "Tell Out My Soul," in bright blue and red and in a much bigger font than the church name, in basic black. Our pastor, the Rev. Terri Peterson, is a Lutheran--something that has only been possible since the 2001 agreement between the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which established full communion between the two denominations. And she's been diligent in maintaining the Anglican tradition. Since she became pastor seven years ago, I'm seeing new faces in the congregation, so she must be doing something right.

But sometimes, the Evangelical side of her comes out, as I believed it did when I saw the new shirts. I responded that I could never wear a shirt bearing that legend. I'm a fairly reserved, introverted Episcopalian for whom "Tell Out My Soul" is just not appropriate. Pastor Terri graciously agreed to offer shirts with just the church name. 

But after my wife asked me where the phrase originated, I turned to Google, which gave me an answer that surprised me--it's relatively recent and it's thoroughly Anglican. It's the first line of a 1961 hymn by Timothy Dudley-Smith (1926-2024) an Anglican priest, who later served as Bishop of Norwich from 1981 to 1992. It's based on a paraphrase of the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) from the New English Bible. It begins, "Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord." It's sung to the tune, "Woodlands," composed in 1916 by Walter Greatorex.

So, after finding out that the phrase, at least with an added comma, is as Anglican as Whitsunday, am I going to order the shirt? Nope--I'm sticking with the blue shirt with the church name only. Anglican as it is, it still sounds too Evangelical for me.

Besides, the "church name only" shirt mentions that St. John's is downtown. It's one of the few mainline churches that hasn't abandoned the central city for the prosperous exurbs, and for me, that's a point of pride.

"When Jesus Left His Father's Throne" and savoring the Liturgy of the Palms

 

In the Palm/Passion Sunday liturgy, it seems the theologians who crafted it wanted to get the joyous and triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem out of the way quickly and move right into the Passion. But I think that we in the pews want to savor it, especially the children, who eagerly wave the fronds. And hymnodists throughout Christian history have celebrated the event. “All Glory, Laud and Honour” is John Mason Neale’s translation of a Latin hymn written by Theodulf of Orléans in 820. A thousand years later, in 1820, Henry Hart Milman penned “Ride On, Ride On in Majesty.” Even Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice made a hit out of “Hosanna” in “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970). 

One beloved Palm Sunday hymn, “When Jesus Left His Father’s Throne” (Hymnal #480), doesn’t even mention Jesus’ entry until the third and final stanza, but it does so through a child’s eyes. Ralph (say “Rafe”) Vaughan Williams (1872-1858), who was co-editor of the 1906 English Hymnal, heard the haunting folk song, “Dives and Lazarus,” in the Sussex village of Kingsfold, and he adapted it as a hymn tune bearing the town’s name. (Vaughan Willaims also used the song in his 1939 orchestral composition, “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus.”) The tune surely has Celtic roots, because the Irish folk song, “The Star of the County Down” has virtually the same melody. 

Scottish-born poet and editor James Montgomery (1771-1854) wrote the lyrics for the Hallam Sunday School, near Sheffield, England, which is why it takes a child’s point of view. The first stanza is about Jesus’ birth, and the second, his blessing of the children. In the third stanza, Montgomery celebrates Palm Sunday through children’s eyes: 

When Jesus into Zion rode,

the children sang around;

for joy they plucked the palms and strowed

their garments on the ground.

Hosanna our glad voices raise,

hosanna to our King!

Should we forget our Savior’s praise,

the stones themselves would sing.

 

And it brings us back to that moment when there was the hope, fleeting though it was, that Jesus could bring about the Kingdom of God without the Cross. No wonder we want to savor it.

Image: Entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem (1320) by Pietro Lorenzetti (Wikimedia Commons)

Note This was first published in The Tower, a monthly newsletter of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Elkhart, Indiana

Flooding the zone and my choice to focus on passenger rail

 

“The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

-Steve Bannon to Michael Lewis, January 30, 2018

Thanks to the Trump administration’s “Flood the Zone” tactics, it’s easy for ordinary Americans to feel powerless. That’s something Mr. Trump and his enabler, billionaire Elon Musk, are counting on. I got some wise advice from someone—either Mary Doria Russell or Heather Cox Richardson—to focus on something you know and care about. For me, that’s easy: intercity passenger train service. 

I’ve been a supporter of passenger rail for most of my life, including 32 years as an Amtrak employee. Outside of North America, rail is an integral part of the transportation system. In Europe, Japan, China, and other developed countries, passengers can travel rapidly and cheaply on well-maintained rail systems. 

But Trump and Musk don’t want Americans to have that option. Musk wants Amtrak, the quasi-public system of intercity passenger rail, to be privatized, after comparing it unfavorably to the Chinese rail system. Yet the Chinese State Railway Group is government-owned, and China has spent over $500 billion in the past five years in new tracks, trains, and stations. If Amtrak had that kind of support, it truly would be a world-class system. 

The reason Amtrak came into being was that the private railroads were unable to make money on passenger trains after the U.S. Post Office shifted first class mail off the trains and onto trucks and planes in the late 1960s. Fred Frailey, in Twilight of the Great Trains (1998) writes that most railroads kept two sets of books: one using the “fully allocated” formula demanded by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which included costs that the railroad would incur whether or not the passenger train ran; a second, based on solely related costs, showed the true expense of running a train. “In 1960,” Frailey writes, “In 1960, when the fully allocated loss on U.S. passenger trains was $485 million, the loss based on solely related expenses was a mere $10 million and would turn into a $17 million profit in 1961.” 

That all changed, beginning in 1967, when the Postmaster General, Larry O’Brien, began eliminating the Railway Post Offices—cars where first-class mail was sorted enroute. Most of the first-class mail went to trucks and planes. While some trains still carried bulk mail, the drastic cut in revenue made virtually every passenger train a money-loser, even using solely related costs. Railroad companies, which had opposed federal subsidies for passenger trains, suddenly changed their tune, and Congress, after massive discontinuance proposals, especially by the Pann Central Transportation company, passed the National Railroad Passenger Service Act of 1970, creating the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. 

When the Nixon Administration signed off on the NRPC, later called Amtrak, it added a “poison pill,” making the corporation “for profit.” While Congress changed the wording to “operated and managed as a for profit corporation” in 1978, some Amtrak opponents believe the profitability is the only way to measure Amtrak, despite the intercity passenger train’s fuel-efficiency and low carbon footprint. And, of course, they ignore massive government subsidies of other transportation modes. 

Privatization, without major spending on infrastructure and the return of mail and express to the trains, would mean a shutdown. Last year, Amtrak advocates were talking about an expansion of both short- and long-distance Amtrak service. That won’t happen if Trump and Musk get their way—the entire Amtrak system would go down. 

Former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood wrote in 2023, “In recent decades, America invested trillions to maintain and expand highways and air travel, while European and Asian nations invested heavily in high-speed trains. Between 1949 and 2017, the federal government invested only $10 billion in high-speed rail with $4 billion of that dedicated to the California project, compared to investments of $777 billion in aviation and over $2 trillion in highways. 

“Meanwhile, since 2004, China has invested over $1.4 trillion to build a 25,000-mile high-speed rail network and is pouring billions more into high-speed rail projects worldwide.” 

The message needs to get out. Trump and Musk can’t be allowed to destroy passenger rail.

 

 

Note: I recently sent an abridged version of this letter to Indiana Senator Todd Young, a moderate Republican who has the potential of challenging the Trump Administration. I’ve also published shorter versions in the Elkhart Truth and South Bend Tribune.

It’s like, weird, man. Like, really weird!

 

Former president and Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance have been called worse: Fascists, Nazis, Misogynists, racists, to name a few. Trump has regularly been labeled a narcissist, a megalomaniac, a rapist, and many expletives. Yet both candidates, along with much of the MAGA crowd, just shrugged them off. But when Minnesota governor Tim Walz said, “These are weird people on the other side,” on MSNBC last month, Republicans took umbrage. 

 “Weird” began as a noun, not an adjective, and meant fate. It’s a direct descendant of the Old English weorðan and a cognate of the German “werden,” both meaning "to become." 

The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the word’s change in meaning, from a noun to an adjective, and from the eerie world of the fates to the strange and curious:

“The sense of ‘uncanny, supernatural’ developed from Middle English use of weird sisters for the three Fates or Norns (in Germanic mythology), the goddesses who controlled human destiny. They were portrayed as odd or frightening in appearance, as in "Macbeth" (and especially in 18th and 19th century productions of it), which led to the adjectival meaning "odd-looking, uncanny" (1815); ‘odd, strange, disturbingly different’ (1820)” 

Since the 19th century and especially since the 1960s, “weird” has become an even milder adjective, usually meaning odd or eccentric. In 1960s counterculture, a weird experience was usually a good one. Heck, Al Yankovic made it his trademark. 

Then what is it about being called “weird” that so upsets the MAGA folks? All I can surmise is that they see themselves as the American norm, and to be labeled as deviating from that norm is a shock. 

I’ve never been offended at being called weird. But then, I’ve never been offended at being called a liberal.

 

Image: The norns Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld beneath the world tree Yggdrasil (1882) by Ludwig Burger.

Left-wing Idealists and the Triumph of the Right, Part 1: How Idealists Helped Nixon

 

After social media interactions with idealistic young people who disparage President Biden and who appear to be planning to sit out the 2024 election rather than vote for the man they consider, at best, the lesser of two evils, I’m going back to blogging to look at some recent elections where idealists, sometimes with the best of intentions, have allowed evil to prevail. In the nearly sixty years since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater and “movement conservatism” in a landslide, the extreme right has made not just a comeback, but in some years a near-takeover, and this year it aims to make that takeover complete. But it can’t do so without the help of the idealists. 

In too many of the elections since 1964, we’ve seen the triumph of money and the Republican Right. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and worst of all, Donald Trump have prevailed in part because idealistic people refused to vote for candidates they considered the lesser of two evils. Yes, all these Republican winners cheated to win: Nixon, by sending Anna Chennault to sabotage the Paris peace talks; Reagan, whose campaign persuaded the Iranian authorities not to release the hostages before the election; Bush, whose “Brooks Brothers Riot” shut down the recount in Miami; and Trump, who may not have “colluded” with the Russians, but publicly invited them to interfere with the campaign, which, of course, they did. 

And the Democratic losers made their share of mistakes: Hubert Humphrey waited too long to break with Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War; Jimmy Carter cut off grain exports to the Soviet Union, throwing the Midwest into a recession; Al Gore put a historic first—naming a Jew, Joe Liebermann, as his running mate—ahead of campaign strategy, along with refusing Bill Clinton’s help; and Hillary Clinton slighted Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in her campaign, along with making that “basket of deplorables” remark. 

But even with the Republican cheating and Democratic bungling, all the presidents who did so much to turn the U.S. government over to the moneyed elites and the multinational corporations would have lost without help from the idealists. 

Let’s start with 1968. Lyndon Johnson, who after becoming president after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, achieved things that had seemed impossible, beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed by Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid, all signed in 1965. But just a month after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act,

the first presidential election I got seriously involved with. I turned 16 the day Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy announced his candidacy. I was two years away from having to register for the draft, and there seemed no end to the Vietnam War. Lawrence O’Donnell, in Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, puts it succinctly: ‘[T]he 1968 presidential election would be about nothing less than life and death. In the nuclear age, all presidential elections were, by implication at least, about life and death because the commander in chief had the power to start World War III in minutes by launching nuclear missiles. But the 1968 election was going to be about the life and death of people we knew.” O’Donnell continues: 

I was in high school in 1968, and I never heard my brothers and their college-age friends talk about career planning. They only talked about how to deal with the draft and Vietnam. There was no long-term planning, no career hopes and dreams. Life was a short-term game for many young men in 1968. It was as if they were prisoners who would only begin to think about life on the outside when they got outside. Their prison was in their pocket, the draft registration card that controlled their lives and blocked their hopes and dreams. 

(O'Donnell, Lawrence. Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (pp. 10-11). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.) 

While I didn’t have that card in my pocket, it was just a matter of time. I was an enthusiastic McCarthy backer—I sold “McCarthy’s Million” buttons to my Cedar Falls (Iowa) high school classmates. But after Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention, I knew that the choice was between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, and that Humphrey was a lot more likely to get us out of Vietnam. 

A lot of idealistic McCarthy supporters sat this one out or voted third-party. While South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who, after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, became a stand-in for him at the convention, endorsed Humphrey, McCarthy sat on his hands, even after September 30, when Humphrey broke with Johnson on the war. McCarthy finally issued a tepid endorsement of Humphrey on October 29. Nixon won the election by about one percent of the popular vote, though he did much better in the Electoral College. 

Julian E. Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University, wrote in Politico on April 21, 2016: 

Crucial to Nixon’s victory was that he won states like California, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New Jersey—all states where McCarthy had a strong following—by just a few points. Though counterfactuals are impossible to prove, it is clear that McCarthy’s active support might have created a different outcome. Humphrey believed it. “A united party working in my behalf,” he noted in his memoirs, “might have changed the electoral outcome. Those states could have been won. … Particularly in California, had McCarthy campaigned early and hard for me and the Democratic Party, he might have turned it.” McCarthy adamantly denied the charge, joking that if Humphrey had been victorious “they probably would have said it was really clever of McCarthy to hold me off.” 

While Zelizer admits that he can’t prove McCarthy’s aloofness elected Nixon, he writes that ‘…’certainly McCarthy’s refusal to help give credibility to the Humphrey campaign within the New Left did not help Humphrey’s candidacy. And the feud also had long-term effects: The Republican Party was able to use the divisions within the Democratic Party to build a powerful and lasting conservative coalition.” 

But we can’t just blame it on McCarthy, whose erratic behavior during the summer and early fall of 1968 should have been a sign that he wasn’t the leader we expected him to be back on March 12, when he had nearly beaten Lyndon Johnson in the popular vote and trounced him in the delegate count. (The upset, plus Robert Kennedy’s entry into the race, persuaded Johnson to bow out of the presidential race on March 31.) Virtually everyone who had finished high school had taken civics class and should have understood that it was either Humphrey or Nixon. And with the racist George Wallace’s third party run depriving Nixon of electoral votes in the Deep South, Humphrey had a far better chance than he might have. But, of course, he didn’t win. Nixon did, with the help of thousands of idealists. 

And with Nixon, we had four more years of war in Southeast Asia, 20,000 more American dead, and surely hundred of thousands more Asians killed.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"

 

“Or wait—try All Saints. That’s what they call places when they can’t decide on a single saint.”

-Garmus, Bonnie. “Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel” 

Chemist and television cooking show host Elizabeth Zott, the main character in “Lessons in Chemistry,” is an avowed atheist, but has a soft spot for a Presbyterian minister named Wakely, who isn’t given a first name. Wakely, who gives the eulogy for Elizabeth Zott’s partner, Calvin Evans, later befriends Elizabeth’s young daughter Mad (sometimes called Madeline, but legally “Mad”), who is trying to find information about her late father. She knows he lived in a Catholic orphanage in Iowa, and while Mad can’t find its name in the Sioux City phone book (this is 1962) under “Saint,” Wakely makes the quip about “All Saints.” 

Which is a roundabout way of introducing the Feast of All Saints, celebrated in many Christian churches on November 1. It may be one of the purest Christian holidays because it’s been eclipsed by the pagan holiday it was meant to supplant. If Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster are correct, the celebration of All Saints on the first day of November began in the eighth century in the British Isles, to provide a Christian alternative to the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced SAH-win in Irish). 

Outside the British Isles, the feast had been celebrated in the spring, but by the ninth century the November 1 date spread across the English Channel to the Frankish Empire. By the twelfth century, November 1 had become All Saints’ Day in Western Christendom. 

Back in Britain, it wasn’t called All Saints’ Day, but All Hallows, or Hallowmas, from the Old English “hālig,” meaning “holy.” Merriam-Webster notes: 

“All Hallows' used to be a bigger deal—one 17th-century source notes that ‘the three grand days are All-hallown, Candlemass, and Ascension day’—and since important feast days usually started the night before with a vigil, the evening before All Hallows' gained its own notoriety as All Hallows' Even or All Hallows' Eve. All Hallows' Even was shortened to Hallow-e'en by the 16th century. The word Hallowe'en began to lose its apostrophe in the 18th century, though we still have some evidence for the apostrophized version.” (“The Origin of 'Halloween.' Or 'Hallowe'en'?”) 

In Celtic tradition, Samhain was a time when the line between the living and the dead became blurred, and the souls of the dead could visit the living. Some of the traditions of Samhain, such as wearing masks, carving vegetables (often turnips) into lanterns, and telling ghost stories, began to be celebrated on Hallowe’en. The Christian celebration added souling, where people went through the town asking for cakes, “soulcakes” in exchange for prayers for deceased relatives, which became the ancestor of trick-or-treating. 

Today, Halloween, without the apostrophe, is virtually divorced from All Saints’ Day. We usually celebrate All Saints’ Day on the Sunday following November 1. And of course, it isn’t just for people who “can’t decide on a single saint,” but for all the saints, known and unknown. In the traditional Episcopal lectionary for All Saints’, the first reading makes it clear:

 

Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10,13-14

(a commemoration of patriarchs, prophets, and other heroes of ancient Israel.)

 

Let us now praise famous men,

and our fathers in their generations.

The LORD apportioned to them great glory,

his majesty from the beginning.

There were those who ruled in their kingdoms,

and were men renowned for their power,

giving counsel by their understanding,

and proclaiming prophecies;

leaders of the people in their deliberations

and in understanding of learning for the people,

wise in their words of instruction;

those who composed musical tunes,

and set forth verses in writing;

rich men furnished with resources,

living peaceably in their habitations --

all these were honored in their generations,

and were the glory of their times. 

There are some of them who have left a name,

so that men declare their praise.

And there are some who have no memorial,

who have perished as though they had not lived;

they have become as though they had not been born,

and so have their children after them. 

But these were men of mercy,

whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten.

Their posterity will continue for ever,

and their glory will not be blotted out.

Their bodies were buried in peace,

and their name lives to all generations.

Image: Fra Angelico (c.1395-1455), The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs