No, I didn't get an advance copy of Time's Man of the Year issue. This is from 1969, when the magazine honored red-state Americans and the reemergence of moral values. Before they go and honor the same group in 2004, scaring the shit out of you with the idea that "moral values" are in ascendancy, I'd like to offer a reality check. Let's start with a history lesson.
1969? Moral values? Roll the film: Woodstock, mini-skirts, and the gay rights explosion at Stonewall; feminism, Black Power, and the debut of the super politically correct Sesame Street; orgies, communes, and the debut of the sexually explicit Penthouse.
By the mid-'70s, liberal Democrats firmly controlled the Senate, a bunch of stoned comedians, including John Belushi, were hosting the most populuar TV show in the country, and blatantly gay disco hits were topping the charts. More telling: Time was forced to give its annual Man of the Year to, well, "Women" (1975) for upending traditional male-chauvinist-pig culture. Obviously, the heralded backlash that Time wishfully promoted in '69 was actually a death throe--not a reemergence of straight values.
I'm no love-in hippie, but I wouldn't want to live without the goods that have stuck from the 1970s: abortion rights, basic campaign-finance regulations, fuel-efficient cars, the Privacy Act curtailing the FBI, anti-sexual-harassment law; not to mention Fresca and Acapulco Gold.
So, if Time hits us with another paean to beleaguered Middle America and the valiant reemergence of "values" this year, let me say the magazine was wrong in '69, and they'll be wrong today.
We're winning the culture war. Desperate Housewives, with its swinging '70s values, is the number-two show in the country--and it's number one in red turf like metro Atlanta. More substantively, civil unions--once anathema--are now the Republican fallback position. Polls find two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal, and prescriptions for the morning-after pill have increased from 48,000 in 1998 to more than 310,000 in 2000, according to Planned Parenthood.
With hindsight, it's easy to look at Time's screed from January 5, 1970, and recognize how wrong it was. However, it might not be so easy to do the same this year, mired in the reality of W. But, take heart. 2005 will make it clear the Bushies and the media (as before) are overplaying the moral "mandate." If there's going to be any backlash, it's going to be ours--against their house of cards.
