That 70s Childhood
The Times’ Ross Douthat manages to partially blame the latest revelations of Catholic priests’ abuse and church cover-ups on those wacky 70s:
The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’s overemphasis on therapy.
Call it the conservative reversal: blame a crime (or sin, if you like) enabled by the status quo you’re defending on the trends against it. Child molestation? Damned hippies, feminists and shrinks! Financial abuses on Wall Street? Free spendin’ liberals, bailing out the banks (after the fact). Douthat does go on to say that Pope Palpatine Benedict should feel bad, but really… Ross, you’re probably too young to remember, but I knew the ’70s. The 1970s were friends of mine, and you’re no… in the small towns and suburbs where I grew up, sexual permissiveness at most showed up on movie and television screens, though local priests were well known to have been sent to new parishes, and in the case of an Episcopal priest, defrocked, for… indiscretions.
Entirely coincidentally, I was writing about the 1970s this morning before Ross’s piece dropped. Reading old Alice Munro stories has me stuck on the era. It doesn’t take much!
For me the 1970s were a terrific place to grow up. For the last third of the decade we lived south of Seattle. Mount Rainier floated like a giant scoop of ice cream above our street in one direction. On clear days the Olympic Mountains filled the other. Winters were what you’d think and worse—inversions, pollution alerts, recess inside—but the summers of ’78 and ’79, I remember, were especially sunny. People remarked on it. The only culture I saw prevailing was innocence and goofiness. Look at old Billboard charts. I was able to roller skate to the Bee Gees with no clue where their music had come from. And we had Star Wars. Boys could argue over who got to be Luke and who was Han. Leia was fine by me. Danishes over the ears? Seemed reasonable that they’d have wacky hair in space. I don’t think it can be underestimated, seeing a woman with a blaster, talking back to Darth Vader no less, even if she did have to be rescued by dweeby Luke Skywalker. This wasn’t the Leia of Jaba and a steel bikini. She was the one in white robes in charge of the ceremony at the end.
And, now that I think of it, her grin was rather shit-eating.
