Discotheques, Drugs, & The American Dream
by Link Furrow
Copyright 2007
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


It was a hazy, humid night in July of 1978. 

The lights of the discotheque pulsated with an intensity that could hypnotize.  On the swirling floor of lights, sheer fabrics with metallic overtones created a show of their own as they reflected their surroundings.  The occupants of this frenzied environment were people of a different realm, one that was not exactly representative of reality. 

While America slumped into recession, and sat with a disconcerted expression in front of the evening news, the dedicated disco faction could not have cared less.  It was a different world behind the doors of the electric whirlwinds called discos.  In the club world, the ruling class was composed of socialites who were half the age of the rulers of the real world of America.

The blood of any discotheque was a mix of alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, various pills of pleasure, and sex.  The end result of such ingredients was the symbolic young couple, spinning at a dizzying speed on the floor, exuding the art of high fashion and elegance. 

Her face was flawless and a masterpiece of makeup artistry; his every move and alluring glance was a testament to exactly how sexually driven and energetic the top socialites could be. 

Together, the pair was human energy and excess united as one confusing piece of commentary on the status of the country's youth. 

And in our particular discotheque, any given pair of dancers could fit the broad stereotype of who these people were; they were the materialists which would propel America through the remainder of the 20th century.

The basic problem with any disco was that the people occupying it were, most certainly on purpose, only thinking of the moment at hand. 

And who could have blamed them? 

After the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, popular youth culture reacted against the cynical environment of their predecessors.  The movement towards escapism evolved, and along with the shift in thinking came the change from peace protest to dance floor.  Hallucinogenic drugs fell from their place of dominance during the late 1960s, and drugs with a more 'fun' effect took their place. 

By 1978, the most prevalent drug was marijuana.  The following year, it is estimated that Americans partook of the plant more than any other time before or since then.

The youth of that time period were not considering that they would have to, at some point, move on past their wild abandon if they desired the traditional concept of American success: the perfect husband and wife, forever in love, with the perfect children in the yard, and the perfect sunset illuminating the West side of the suburban home they occupied as yet another perfect day came to a close.

There was, however, another major problem with what was going on during that humid Summer night in 1978. 

The American dream which would be impressed upon so many of those young people had its own shortcomings; the primary flaw was that the entire concept of 'traditional America' was a complete untruth. 

More than just a little white lie, this complex concept, by which millions judge their success, is a paradoxical prank of astronomical proportions; the traditional American dream is only an illusion, and it has never been completely attained.  It never will be, not by any couple or any family in America; but to the delight of this cosmic joke, it will haunt and control the lives of hundreds of millions of people during the next twenty years, long after the doors of the discos have closed for good.

The 1970s were the final days, however, of the American dream actually having any sizable amount of 'followers'. 

The idealistic fantasies of a perfected American family were embodied in the 1976 Goliath of an event: the Bicentennial. 

The irony is that 1976 stood for and celebrated idealistic dreams which none of its citizens could reach.  The energy of the beautiful lie was so blinding that nobody at the time even noticed the truth of the matter. 

In the middle-seventies, the patriotism of the bulk of the Middle Class was astonishingly high, perhaps in a reaction against the very vocal minority whom were adamantly against the Vietnam interactions. However, the patriotism to our Country would not even rival the patriotism to the American Dream that seemingly possessed the American populous.  It was from that point in time that massive investment made in the illusive dream would start to unravel into the actual junk bond that it was. 

It should be made clear, however, that dissatisfaction with the American Dream was not a new concept; the public expression of the unspoken discontent was an innovative factor of the efforts of radicals of the late 1960s.

The war against illogical social systems was fought in a series of battles, beginning with the very founding of America.  Progress continued through the subsequent centuries, and eventually bonds such as slavery, unequal voting rights, and civil rights issues were dealt with.  This long - term effort towards improving the society of America has been fought in a series of battles, with a certain period of 'recuperation' occurring after each major accomplishment. 

Hence the calm experienced after the Second World war was won, during the years leading up to the escalation of the Cold War. 

Likewise, Middle America the experienced short period of relative societal stability and during the years of 1975 through 1977.

Through the two centuries of the American adventure, injustices had been dealt with according to their severity.  By 1978, America was prepared to fight the next level of injustices, and issues such as the Equal Rights' Amendment gained National attention.

The shimmering lights of the disco continued undaunted into the early days of January, 1980.  In the beginning of the new decade, things did not instantly thrust forward and change rapidly.  The predominate driving force in popular culture continued to be the pulsating sounds of disco, although as 1980 proceeded, there were slight notable changes, such as the 'roller disco' movement, which quite literally put disco on wheels. 

However, for as much as 1980 might be recalled as a new year, it really was just yet another interpretation of the late 1970s, a retooling of familiar themes.  Women's' issues still burned hot on the frontlines of liberal social change, yet America as a whole was straining to collapse under the weight of failed Democratic leadership.

It is easy to forget exactly how much mismanagement the Carter administration is responsible for.  For the mass populous to forget the turmoil of Nixon, and to roll over to the Conservative ideals in less than the four years of Carter's leadership, was a stunning shift. 

1980 would witness the public giving up on Democratic ideals in many American arenas, and by November, the National election was secured for Ronald Reagan. 

In fact, the Carter administration's incompetent management of the National economy had secured a win for the Republican party as early as 1978.  Jimmy Carter had been the man of the hour for 1975 and 1976 when he was campaigning and subsequently elected, a model Southern reflection of the contemporary politically-oriented family.  His background was almost best described as 'common', and in that since he was in the best of positions for the mid-Seventies; Jimmy Carter, however, was painfully out of place and out of date by the beginning of the power-obsessed 1980s.

The editors of the 1979 edition of The World Book encyclopedia convened prior to its publication, and the most compelling topic on their minds was the failure of the Carter Administration to make the most of the very office of the Presidency.  Carter clearly was aware of the situation, and in early 1979, he demanded the resignation of the leaders of the entirety of his own Cabinet.  The ensuing mess of power shifting failed to regain the confidence of a public obsessed with the horrid inflation rates of the time.  President Carter's belated efforts to 'clean house' only further watered - down the ability of the Federal Government to have much strength to impress reforms upon the American populous.

The 1970s, during their time, were perhaps mistakenly labeled the 'me' decade by contemporary sociologists, a term that supposedly denoted the newfound individualistic approach to one's life.  Could those same sociologists have had but even had a glimpse of the horrific excesses to come in the 1980s, chances are they would never have been so premature in their labeling of a generation which had obviously not come to full fruition, and would not do so until sometime into the early 1980s. 

Jimmy Carter certainly was not a participant in the 'me' decade of the 1970s, and he simply could not function appropriately in the world as it was in late 1979 and early 1980, a problem that was emphasized by the clumsy economic policies that lead America into a recession not once, but twice between the period between 1978 and 1982.

While it was a sin forgiven upon the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, no person would make the mistake of blaming the young Republican administration for the economic problems of the early years of that decade.  It was a well-known, but often unspoken fact that the American public placed the responsibility for the crisis totally in the hands of those who were in office during the previous four years; the public certainly included Jimmy Carter among those guilty for the turmoil.

The oddity that one must note is that in the early 1980s, although there was a 'new wave' of the conservatives being swept into office, the American public was still in a very progressive mode as far as social issues were concerned. 

It became a national obsession to level the playing fields in both corporate America and in public arenas, no matter what the cost.  America threw itself even more than ever into the pastime of making all new buildings fully accessible for the handicapped, and rehabilitative programs thrived with tremendous amounts of energy and money. 

Pop culture was certainly not to be left out of this picture, with films like Dolly Parton's "Nine to Five" making tremendous gains in the way women were viewed in office settings, and men were, as the women's liberation viewed it, finally put in their rightful place; a classic stereotype of the domineering male office boss held hostage in his posh mansion while the clever blue-collar blondes and brunette secretaries revolutionized their corporate world.

Films such as Marlo Thomas's 1976 "Free to Be You and Me", was a blatant, but admittedly groundbreaking, revolutionary - style example of social programming for young children.  The film series gained a cult-like status among the progressive suburbanites who were raising what would be, in their hopes, the best generation of young Americans to ever be made. 

A central fact to keep in mind when analyzing the culture is to remember what was not there as we known of it today: cable television.  Americans were still very much in the hands of broadcast television, media which was distilled down from an elite level of management.

In 1979, one's best hope of escaping ABC, CBS, NBC, or Public Television, was to install a home satellite dish.  And in 1979, it was no minor investment: $30,000.

Public television engulfed the children of America, and while usually less provocative than Marlo Thomas's productions, the vast majority of what the PBS machine was churning out was flat out liberal rhetoric, fine tuned for the attention spans of young children.  If the Women's Liberation movement had no other triumph, it undeniably had the young minds of the country firmly within it's grasp.  The aim of their effort was simple: no subsequent generation of Americans would ever be taught that there was a 'dominate' sex.

With American publicly-funded media in it's control, whether because it appealed to the moral senses of television executives, or perhaps just because it appealed to the good ratings they pulled for the young age range, the Women's Liberation was not going to let go of this powerful asset.  To the contrary, the youth of the 1980s were bombarded with an almost never ending stream of slick psychological mechanisms that slipped into everything: "Sesame Street", "The Electric Company", "The Romper Room", "Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood", "Inside Out", "Today's Special", "3-2-1 Contact", and "Voyage of the Mimi" are just a sampling of what the 1970s and 1980s would produce for American children.  In each of these productions, there are common themes; the shows projected a world in which everyone is equal, no matter what social position, racial identity, or sex one might be.

The values exalted in the Christian Churches, such as 'love one another', 'be kind', 'be honest', and 'respect others and the earth' were 'secularized', for lack of a better word, and then repackaged into educational venues and directed, often by direct satellite link, into the classrooms and libraries of Americas' public schools as government-funded public television programming. 

Entire curriculum packages were developed to be used in conjunction with television programs, and under the guise of "free teaching materials", and American elementary school teachers were given a new direction; not only did they instill intellectual ideals into their pupils, they now had the responsibility for producing 'good citizens', a rough term that was coined in the early 1980s as the 'new' ideal student. 

A seemingly endless stream of magazines, books, and audio recordings was produced in connection with many of the programs on PBS, and the liberal media followed children from the classroom to the bedroom to the library reading room.  The overall presence was inescapable, and pop culture even picked up on the obsession with a series of movies involving characters from "Sesame Street", films that took the nation's youth by storm. 

Not only could the liberals alter the ideals of a nation's youth, they now could promote 'Secular Christianity' while making millions of dollars to further fund their gregarious "not for profit" foundations for the pursuit of learning.  By 1983, the liberal media outlets had become a self-propelled machine, turbocharged with massive combinations of government grants and corporate sponsorships.  Such partnerships were not lost upon the bottom line, either: they often bought the companies involved massive tax breaks, making the resulting good public relations merely a side effect of making great monetary profit.

The epitome of this naive secular moralism married to capitalistic dreams came to full fruition in 1982 when the Walt Disney Company opened the spectacular "EPCOT Center" in Orlando, Florida. 

Suddenly, the liberals not only controlled the new 'secular religion', they now had an actual Mecca, a place that families would take great pains to reach, only for the purpose of fulfilling the promise of the idealistic liberals.  The multiple boycotts that the conservative religious right wing would inflict upon Walt Disney, and specifically Walt Disney World, are all the evidence one needs to see just how symbolic the resort was of liberal American suburbanites.

EPCOT was unlike any place or concept that the world had previously seen.  The closest direct relation would be the World's Fairs, and for all intent and purpose, EPCOT was conceptually similar, but the actual goals of the two entities were quite different. 

The World's Fairs, which interestingly terminated that year with the final fair held in Knoxville, Tennessee, had been originally spawned by Victorian fascination with new technologies that were originally quite slow to disperse to the mass public. 

Traditionally open for several years at a time, the World's Fairs by 1982 were very much geared to be an urban renewal project set in a locale which was economically deprived.  And in the early 1980s, it was Knoxville which fit the bill perfectly.  Winning the honor of hosting the World's Fair during that time period was a very competitive process, and a clear demonstration of the difficult straits many cities had found themselves in prior to the economic boom that began in August of 1982. 

Through more positive reinforcement than ever seen before, young Americans were trained to strive to be as open-minded and loving as one could possibly be.  Life was presented as one large classroom, with opportunities to both learn from and to teach others at every turn.  Learning was no longer a part-time obligation for future labor class citizens; it was a structured atmosphere of social programming and training, both at school and at home, through socially liberal suburban parents, or, if nothing else, obligatory liberal public television programming that would quickly become the baby-sitter of the decade.

Should a child, God forbid, have been born into a family that only watched commercial programming, then that child was still guaranteed a healthy dose of liberal values in the form of popular sitcoms.  While certainly driven by the bottom line and profitability, television executives from the commercial branches of the profession were not immune to the desire to present what would have been considered ultra-modern philosophy in their programs.  The striking difference is not in the way they socially programmed both children and adult viewers, but in the content that made up the storyline of such programs.

Within the commercial realm, comedy, or perhaps drama, replaced the heavy emphasis placed upon educational elements prevalent in public television.  They did not lack any of the social values presented in public television, they simply were more subtle in their ways of presentation; so subtle that one might surmise that the entire industry was participating in a mass program of subliminal stimulation of sorts. 

Certainly not anything like the original experiments involving flashing words for one frame of a movie to influence the patrons to buy popcorn and beverages, but in a more broad and obvious way, television was uniformly influencing the minds of America with very little effort.  This is not to be immediately perceived as an evil concept; one must keep in mind that the new values reinforced via television were of 'Secular Christianity', with a liberal spin on how one interacts with other people and the value that one places on the importance of others.

The most disagreeable examples of producers pushing the envelope to the extreme can be found in television programs such as "Three's Company", which portrayed a lifestyle that many Conservative Christians would term as "living in sin". 

Those same people who had issues with "Three's Company" also often had problems with shows such as "CHiPS", which co-starred a non Anglo-Saxon in a major role, and consistently had women in positions of authority or heroism; "Webster", which was exceptionally liberal in it's presentation of the life of an upper-class, married Caucasian man and woman adopting an African American boy; and "All in the Family", an early commercial series that challenged many social misconceptions during the 1970s. 

The efforts of such television programs de-villified sincerely innocent lifestyles that had, until the 1980s, been terms for castigation and ejection from popular culture and Middle - Class society.

One of the last holdouts for conservative values was "Stanford and Son", a show which depicted African Americans not in a necessarily bad way, but often in classic Southern stereotypes and awkward (and often embarrassing) situations that did not do anything to promote what the contemporary African American represented and believed in.  One must note that the show did not survive long into the 1980s, and quickly became a lame dog, living only for several seasons as reruns in unpopular time slots. 

One also must keep in perspective that the show's concept originated in a totally different environment, the mid-Seventies.  Consistently, "Stanford and Son" reiterated false conservative ideals regarding African Americans, such as low economic status, a squalid existence in a decaying urban area, occasional mild incompetence, brash mannerisms, and a sense of style that was decades out of touch with the 1980s. 

The excesses of the 1970s were not forgotten either; the early 1980s, however, would put a different spin on things, with a slight tinge of subtly mixed in with the values of pop culture as it was in the late 1970s.  It was during the first two years of the Eighties that there was a divergence in the ruling parties of popular culture.  As the former disco 'Stellas' moved on towards a new version of the American Dream, a new digital youth emerged.  For the first time, most teenagers were exposed to various forms of electronic entertainment not applied during earlier years.  Within the first two years of the Eighties, a very quick trend to come and fall was the synthesized music that still held to some disco roots. 

In the dying breath of the original disco, the youth culture quickly backlashed and ushered in a completely underdeveloped form of music, primarily punk from the British Isles.  Just as in the 1960s, several brilliant artists of this initial movement spurred on what the American version of things would be: New Wave.  The new wave ideals of post-1982 were extreme to anyone who was not a part of the movement, or at least not in an applicable age bracket.

The culture of youth exploded during the early years of the 1980s, and one such example of this development was the roller-coaster rise and fall of the video game arcade movement.  During 1982 there were countless contests and championships held to discover the national elite of video gamers, and the socialization that happened in such venues perhaps contributed to the apparent tight-knit society that teenage culture had transformed into.  Along with the sounds of new-wave music pumping out revised social values and issues, this generation that found itself in high school prior to 1987 was exceptionally different from previous generations of teenagers.

1983 would feature an event that stalled out some of the boundless energy of the supporters of the "open school" movement, that being a wave of federal reports commissioned by President Reagan that quite simply bashed the contemporary models for public education. 

The liberal design of a school without classroom walls attracted mostly liberal teachers, and more often than not, these people who were being hired into open schools were fresh college graduates.  Open education theories had first gained a following during the late 1950s among a group of British researchers who had an interesting in methods of educating children.  By 1957 the researchers had collaborated with architects to produce conceptual drawings and blueprints of an ideal design for a totally "modern" public school.  To many educators, their ideas were radical: eliminate the walls that divide classrooms, integrate the various subjects, and generally allow students to formulate their own curriculum by choosing from a wide variety of subjects.

The first categorical "open school" was built in the very late 1950s in Great Britain,  with a great deal of success and a surprising amount of parental approval.  The open school became a nation-wide trend in Great Britain, as did the concept of breaking education into three levels: elementary school, middle school, and high school.  Until that time period in Britain, there had only been elementary and high school programs, with the elementary school handling grades one through seven, and the high school handling grades eight through twelve.

The creation of the middle school concept meant that new school buildings had to be constructed all throughout England, and thus the middle school program was united with the open school concept as a way of revolutionizing the educational process for students in grades five through eight.  Politicians liked the entire trend because a school without interior walls was somewhat cheaper than a comparable traditional school.

Altogether, it seemed as if the researchers had created a near-perfect model of how a government could efficiently modernize its school districts on a very reasonable budget.  American researchers took note of the success of their British counterparts and began to advocate for open schools to be built in the United States.  The more liberal regions of the country were quicker to jump on the bandwagon than conservative areas, but by 1965 it was possible to find open school supporters in almost every school district in America. 

As the Cold War pressed on, American politicians were interested in ensuring that American children would stay far ahead of their Russian counterparts.  Without much thought, they quickly began to pass legislation that provided federal dollars for school districts to modernize their facilities.   By the late 1960s, the open school concept was at the height of its popularity, and being without interior walls was the rule, not the exception, for new middle school construction.

This brings us back to the event that happened in 1983 to reverse the nearly three decades of success that the open school had enjoyed. 

The conservative element was none to pleased with the liberal tone that the public school system had developed during the years following the closure of W.W.II.  Overpowered by new teachers' unions and private funding of public school initiatives, the liberal element was certainly in control of what was going on for a majority of the years falling between 1947 and 1983.

There were, however, resulting excesses that doomed the anticipated full-out takeover that many liberals imagined was destiny up until 1983.  A study conducted in 1979 that probed the progressive schools of that time found some disturbing shortcoming in how theory was being applied in real life situations.

The most embarrassing of the facts revealed was that the number of elective courses offered in liberal school districts was reaching outlandish levels by early 1979.  In one example, a high school in California offered more electives than it did core courses; in all, there were over 70 elective courses available to students, and a dangerous number of those students at that school were graduating with more credit hours based in electives than in their supposed core curriculum.

The idea of social promotion, that is, to allow students to proceed through the various grade levels regardless of academic performance, was a concept that was borne out of good intentions that in reality did not pan out as academic benefits.  True, force-feeding students through the system prevented any backlog of students that were staying in school for more than the de-rigure thirteen years, and such policies did ensure that the cost-per-student for each diploma issued was consistent and economical.  However, the fact that many American students were flying through high school with a majority of their time devoted towards elective credits was just the kind of startling factoid that the conservative politicians needed to discredit the liberal methodigy that was so prevalent in America in 1983.

It was a time of spending and ever-growing federal deficits, and with the endless pork-barrel projects that were riding along on every type of bill passed through congress in the early 1980s, the timing could not have been more perfect for the federal government to condemn it's own educational system.  President Reagan himself gave a great deal of public commentary on the issue, and he had a report that was several hundred pages in length to back up his statements.

The problem was that a vast majority of Americans did not bother to read what that lengthy report actually said, and simply took the critical statements of the President as the gospel truth.  This fact was the trigger for a domino style effect that cascaded down through the levels of government all the way to the principals' desks in every public school in America.

Essentially no school district was immune from at least some of the criticism in the federal report, and thus a nasty series of blame games began to take place.  The American public was none to pleased that student John Doe was graduating with an emphasis on basket weaving, and whether such things were true in any given school district, parents and activists in every district across the nation became very vocal about "returning to the basics of education", an obscure movement that was summed up in the catch phrase of "Back to the Basics".