The '70s Were Objectively Unhinged, Man
More than 2,500 bombings in 18 months, 1971-72 alone. Nobody remembers this. The '70s were a full-contact sport with no off-season, man, and we all just kept bowling through it.
I was just trying to find out which decade had the best bowling shirts. That’s it. That’s all I wanted out of my Tuesday. Instead I fell into one of those internet holes where you start at polyester and end up somewhere you did not consent to go, and about forty minutes later I’m sitting there with a White Russian I forgot to drink, staring at a number that made me put the glass down. That never happens. I do not put the glass down.
Here’s the number. More than 2,500 bombings in this country in eighteen months, 1971 to 1972 alone. Not a decade. A year and a half. I did the math on a napkin, slowly, the way a man does math three drinks deep, and it comes out to something like five bombings a day, every day, for a year and a half straight. And somehow this is not the first thing anyone brings up when they talk about the ‘70s. Everybody wants to talk about the gas lines. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that we were also just, structurally, on fire.
The thing that really gets me, though, is who was doing it. Because it wasn’t one guy with one grievance, man, it was everybody, everywhere, all at once, running completely separate operations with completely separate reasons, like the whole country independently discovered explosives were the answer to whatever was bothering them that particular year. You had the Weathermen, mad about the draft. You had the Black Liberation Army, mad about the cops. You had Cuban exile groups, mad about Castro, which is a very specific and very intense kind of mad that apparently required a bombing campaign all its own. You had the Jewish Defense League out there too, running their own thing entirely. Nobody coordinated. Nobody sent a memo. Everybody just kind of arrived at the same hobby on their own timeline, which is either the most horrifying thing I’ve heard all week or the single most American thing that’s ever happened, and honestly, man, it might be both.
Walter, predictably, has a whole speech loaded up about this, and for once I gotta admit the man’s not entirely off base. “This is exactly what happens when nobody respects the process, Dude. You’ve got a grievance? Fine. Everybody’s got a grievance. I’ve got several, some of them going back to ‘Nam, some of them going back to the league finals in ‘78. You write a letter. You call your congressman. You do not blow up a federal building because the DMV made you wait too long.” Which, sure, Walter, that all tracks, right up until you remember this is a man who once threatened to get somebody’s toe over a rug and considers a loaded weapon a reasonable response to a foot fault in league play. Glass houses, my friend.
Donny piped up at some point too, half paying attention like always, going “hey, isn’t this the same time as the guys who wanted to go to Cuba?1” And, Donny, my man, out of his element as ever, but not wrong. Same years. Bombs going off on the ground, planes getting hijacked in the air, all running concurrently, like the entire country had beefs going on every axis available simultaneously and just decided to handle all of them at once. That’s not a decade, man, that’s a full-contact sport with no off-season.
I want to be straight with you for one second before I keep riffing, because it feels wrong not to. A lot of this actually hurt real people. That’s not the joke, and I don’t want to pretend it is. The joke, if there is one, is that a country this loud about all of it at the time somehow managed to misplace the scale of it within a couple generations. That’s the part that’s actually strange to me, not that it happened, but that it’s mostly just gone from the collective memory, filed under “things that happened once, probably,” when it was closer to a standing weekly appointment for the better part of ten years.
Here’s the one silver lining, and it’s a genuinely good one: all that chaos apparently forced somebody, somewhere, to invent modern explosives forensics more or less from scratch, because there wasn’t really a serious apparatus built for this kind of thing before the wave hit. So somewhere out there right now, there’s a guy in a lab, tweezers in hand, doing blast residue analysis on a Tuesday, and that guy’s whole career exists because the 1970s were, structurally, a mess. That’s a hell of an origin story for a job. Beats “I liked chemistry in high school.”
Anyway. It was apparently easier in this country to get your hands on a bomb-making manual than it was for me to get my rug replaced, and I’m still a little sore about the rug specifically, priorities being what they are. But I think the actual takeaway here, man, the real one, is that this country spent the better part of a decade in a genuinely unhinged state, on fire in the most literal sense on a rolling basis, and mostly just kept bowling through it. Which, say what you want, is a hell of a display of collective wu wei. Not something I’d recommend. But genuinely impressive, in the way that watching a guy walk away from a car wreck unbothered is impressive.
The Dude abides. The ‘70s, somehow, also abided, right through all of that. Wild.
The seventies were fun, man....