The Phelps idiots burned a Koran and an American flag at the White House.
UrsaMinor-- I've been seeing a number of articles on, and interviews with the author of 'Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class'. I have yet to read it myself but it just moved up to the top of my list. It might sound silly, but my own conversion to Christianity in 1977 was in large part fueled by the growing mindlessness and meaninglessness I felt I was drowning in during the height of that disco era. Sounds like a good read.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51zLBaOaTzL._BO2,204,203,
(review from the Amazon.com page)
An epic account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the '70s, Stayin' Alive is a wide-ranging cultural and political history that presents the decade in a whole new light. Jefferson Cowie's edgy and incisive book--part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film, and TV lore--makes new sense of the '70s as a crucial and poorly understood transition from the optimism of New Deal America to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.
Stayin' Alive takes us from the factory floors of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit to the Washington of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Cowie connects politics to culture, showing how the big screen and the jukebox can help us understand how America turned away from the radicalism of the '60s and toward the patriotic promise of Ronald Reagan. He also makes unexpected connections between the secrets of the Nixon White House and the failings of the George McGovern campaign, between radicalism and the blue-collar backlash, and between the earthy twang of Merle Haggard's country music and the falsetto highs of Saturday Night Fever.
Cowie captures nothing less than the defining characteristics of a new era. Stayin' Alive is a book that will forever define a misunderstood decade.
