The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies by Thomas Hine

Think, if you will, about a history book written by that cool, young, teacher you had in high school that taught you a lot more than what was in the curriculum. (If you were paying attention) Picture flipping through  (yours, your parents or grandparents) yearbooks with a pretty serious study of the decade for annotation. Not too heavy, and a quick read, The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies by Thomas Hine is worth a check out. Especially read through the filter of 2021, you’re bound to see the 1970’s were both a great time to be alive, and one plenty of people would rather forget. 

Blundering political officials, pandemics, technology booms, and ever changing cultural shifts. No..that’s not 2020 I’m talking about! Somehow we have managed to cram the entire decade of the 1970’s into the first 7 months of 2020. Just like shag carpet, disco, avocado green toasters, and TERRIBLE baseball uniforms are looked back with laughter and maybe a slight twinge of remorse, we’ll look back at 2020 with a little bit of humor and nostalgia. 

Despite the 1970’s being comical on many fronts, there were in fact some seriously positive advancements as well. Solar panels on the the roof of the White House (though hardly conceivable today), the glass ceiling coming ever closer for women entering the workplace in huge numbers (there are cracks at the edges today), and a reconnection to home (quarantine 2020) are all groovy advents of the 1970’s people tend to forget. Hine mixes close study of the highlights, but still manages to sprinkle ties to quarks like streaking, and the trend of talking to your house plants just as easily as that cool teacher sat on their desk and made faces at the principal behind their back. 

The 1970’s were a mixed up, mad and crazy time, but what time isn’t in it’s own way. Still people learned to mellow out, the hustle, presidents are capable of utter stupidity, and we all need to take care of the Earth we inhabit in the 1970’s. A enjoyable read through The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies by Thomas Hine is, like the getting rid of that AMC Pacer, worth your time.