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1979 Movies and the End of an Era PETER LEV As the seventies came to an end the United States was still struggling to understand the crises that had rocked the country in the previous dozen years. The Vietnam War had ended, but American culture was still examining how and why we had lost this faraway conflict to the North Vietnamese. The Watergate scandal had ended with Richard Nixon’s resignation from the presidency, but Americans continued to debate how to make government ethical, responsive, and forward-looking. The price of crude oil, pushed ever upward by OPEC, had led to economic slowdown and double-digit inflation. The important social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—civil rights, feminism, gay rights—had established themselves as part of the political landscape while also generating long-term con- flicts with opposing forces. And the Cold War, a struggle for international dominance between the United States and the Soviet Union dating back to the end of World War II, was still going on. Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia, was now in his third year as president, having been elected after a campaign based on honesty and reform in government. He and his Georgia associates—Hamilton Jordan , Jody Powell, Bert Lance—ran a loose, undisciplined White House and had little enthusiasm for the give-and-take of congressional politics. Carter tried to reform the federal government by writing long, complex proposals within the White House, rather than reaching out to allies in the House and Senate. He also presented himself as a simple, humble man, despite his intelligence and his record of high achievement. This humility, no doubt based on his Southern Baptist faith, was attractive in a candidate but sometimes disastrous in a president. It led him to accept problems and impasses rather than finding ways to solve them. When things went wrong during his administration, the president was more likely to preach to Americans about their failings than to inspire them to do better. On 15 July, Carter gave a televised speech about a “crisis of confidence” in American society. This was soon labeled the “malaise” speech, even though the word “malaise” was not spoken (it had been used by aide 228 Patrick Caddell in a memo that prompted the speech). Carter’s subject was the stubborn energy crisis that was still a major problem—previously he had called the crisis “the moral equivalent of war,” a phrase cynics quickly labeled “MEOW” (Carroll 217)—but he veered off that topic to describe a divided America losing confidence in its future. He made a series of pessimistic comments about the country: people are losing faith in government ; people are losing connections to America’s past; people are worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.” He further observed that productivity was falling, the personal savings rate was down, and twothirds of Americans did not bother to vote. This speech accurately diagnosed a confusion and loss of confidence in American society, but for all Carter’s proposals regarding energy (import quotas, an excess profits tax, conservation, and a switch to abundant fuels such as coal), it is best remembered as more of a dour and moralistic lecture than a policy address. On the broad moral question of America’s belief in itself, Carter said, “Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country” (“American”). In general he offered nothing that engaged the broad themes of confidence and faith. The entire speech seemed to be suffused with a sense of limits in what America could do both at home and abroad, calling for small, incremental action in a resistant world. It came to be seen as a metaphor for the Carter administration as a whole. A similar tone was struck by the economist E. F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful. Though Schumacher was born in Germany and spent most of his working life in England, his book was widely read in the United States, and it exemplifies an important intellectual current in American life, especially the Carter years. Schumacher’s main idea is that the current resource-intensive, high-growth economy in rich countries such as the United States is unsustainable. For example, petroleum is a nonreplaceable resource, and yet we are using it up at an increasingly rapid pace. Further, the emphasis on wealth above all other values is morally and spiritually debilitating. Schumacher suggests a more human scale technology with meaningful work...

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