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How We Got Here: the 70'S HOW WE GOT HERE: THE 70’S. Book review David Frum How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life—For Better or For Worse. (Toronto: Random House Canada; 2000) pp. xxiv + 419 pages, hardcover, ISBN 0-679-30966-7 James Allan Evans h, the seventies! According to tion in faculty hiring, produced a well- t was a period when experts created my calculations, David Frum footnoted report which concluded I problems for the best reasons, and A was only ten years old when that they did. There followed a brief then established programs to repair they started, but he is a qualified post- bout of academic breast-beating, but them. For instance: dyslexia, which NAFTA observer, having spent his boy- the Canadians are not a recognized baffled educationists. “Dyslexia” does hood in Toronto and his university victim group and in any case, the not refer to tiresome rhetoric, as its years at Yale and Harvard. The war in attention span in the Groves of Greek roots imply, but rather the Vietnam ended in the 1970s with an Academe is short. The Symons Report inability to read. Parents noticed that undignified American exit. While it generated no “rights” and was soon some of their offspring, who had been lasted, it brought Canada a string of forgotten. The péquiste government of taught reading according to the most Vietnam refugees, and refugee partners René Lévesque was elected, and up-to-date methods, could not read at or mothers, including Diane Francis Quebec’s first referendum closed the all. Weekend Magazine, which was still and Jane Jacobs, and founded the only decade in 1980. The Canadian dollar published in the seventies, printed a industry which has continued to flour- started its downward slide. In Ontario, story of a dyslexic teenager who ish in British Columbia under the pres- the Hall-Dennis Report modernized hanged himself in despair. Circa 1978, ent NDP regime: marijuana produc- education, and in the process gutted I attended a meeting of the Vancouver tion. In 1976, Tom Symons, a former the schools: Before Hall-Dennis, a Association for Learning Disabilities president of Trent University who had graduate of the Ontario Grade 13 where the speaker was a former dyslex- been commissioned by the Association could enter sophomore year at the ic who had overcome her learning dis- of Universities and Colleges of Canada University of British Columbia, while ability and now ran a private institute to respond to the complaint that soon after it he (or she) could barely which taught dyslexics to read. A con- Canadians suffered from discrimina- qualify for first-year entrance. cerned mother asked a question. Was POLICY OPTIONS 75 OCTOBER 2000 James Allan Evans dyslexia a modern ailment? What into the conflict. Only unbelieving ammunition. There is some irony to caused it? Air pollution? Too much Canadians thought the reason was the fact that it was Sen. Edward TV? Lead poisoning from the water that American territory was attacked at Kennedy, whose brother as president pipes? Why had no one mentioned Pearl Harbour and that Japan’s allies, had entered the Vietnam quagmire in this malady when she went to school? Germany and Italy, declared war on the first place, who mobilized a Senate The reason, the speaker replied, the United States. But in the 1970s the vote forbidding the Pentagon apply was that the method she used to teach faith of the United States was shaken. money left over from 1972 and 1973 dyslexics to read was the method by Frum has a point. Some of the appropriations to assist South which, once upon a time, everyone was trends he notices antedate the 1970 Vietnam. To give South Vietnam taught to read. Thus the schools used to New Year and others flowered after the money “would perpetuate involve- produce fast readers and slow readers, decade ended, but it would be unfair ment that should have ended long but, slow or fast, everyone mastered to confine his thesis by the Gregorian ago.” The North struck again in late reading. But with up-to-date approach- calendar. Consequential social and 1974, the South collapsed, and at the es, the “slow readers” that obsolete end of April 1975, the last Americans teaching methods produced, became Frum has a point. Some left their allies behind and made a victims of a Learning Disability. swift exit from Saigon. of the trends he notices Frum thinks the retreat was a mis- o much for the seventies in antedate the 1970 New take as Talleyrand defined mistakes: S Canada. In the United States, how- Year and others flowered that is, worse than a mere sin. But he is ever, future global trends were being after the decade ended, too young—or too comfortable—a crit- born, and David Frum has written a ic to analyse the trauma that Vietnam lively book about it, full of much rant but... consequential social inflicted. Hitherto, Americans had and right-wing angst—and some sub- and psychological upheavals won all their wars; even the War of stance. Frum is the son of the late took place in the United 1812 had produced a nice victory at Barbara Frum, a Canadian who now States in the seventies, New Orleans. Vietnam was different. It lives in Washington, a contributing was a clear defeat, and the response editor of the Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly some of which Canada was was peculiarly American. In World War Standard, a columnist for the National spared at the time, though I, Canada which had a population of Post, and, despite his youth, a conser- we have since experienced less than nine million, lost more sol- vative in politics in a period when the fallout. diers in four years than the United conservatives have redefined them- States did in Vietnam, and on the selves as followers of Thomas other side of the globe, Australia Jefferson, believing that the least gov- psychological upheavals took place in which sent men to fight in Vietnam ernment is the best government, while the United States in the seventies, alongside the Americans, suffered the left yearns for social engineering. some of which Canada was spared at more casualties in proportion to the Frum has zeroed in on the 1970s, the time, though we have since experi- size of its population and emerged the decade (as he sees it) which formed enced the fallout. from the defeat without the scars the American mindset at the start of which the United States suffered. Even the twenty-first century. Before the he war in Vietnam ended. By now, 25 years on, the United States seventies began, Americans went to T spring, 1972, only 92,000 shrugs off the idea of compensation church in great numbers, and opted Americans were left there, down from for the ecological damage it caused for the traditional denominations. a half million when Nixon became with Agent Orange, for compensation They were oddly patriotic—even president, and at the end of March, sounds like reparations, and repara- nationalistic—from the viewpoint of North Vietnam struck. With US air tions are what vanquished enemies Canadians who were not used to so support, the South Vietnamese army pay. If Vietnam were to apologize to much bunting or hands held over the drove back the North Vietnamese. In the United States for the defeat, it heart when the flag paraded by. Their January, 1973, Henry Kissinger ini- might be worth half a billion dollars in republic had never known defeat, and tialed a US-North Vietnamese peace aid. Of course, Frum does not follow they were convinced of its morality accord, and promised the South that it that line of reasoning. and generosity. Most believed they could rely on US air power to help, if entered World War II out of an altruis- North Vietnam attacked again. he angst-driven presidency of tic impulse to help Britain and the Congress ignored the promise and T Jimmy Carter closed off the Commonwealth, though there was a chopped military aid. Without petrole- decade. Symptomatic of the reaction paranoid cadre who imagined that um the South Vietnamese airplanes against the strident anti-communism Britain had inveigled the United States could not fly and the army ran short of of the fifties and sixties was an order 76 OPTIONS POLITIQUES OCTOBRE 2000 Book review from the Massachusetts Supreme example of the United States is not judicial muscle was the ordering of Court that Alger Hiss be readmitted to reassuring. Activist courts had a pro- school busing to enforce integration. the bar. All decent people thought him found effect on American society in Frum cites the case of Boston, where an innocent victim of Nixon’s the seventies, and proved Lord Acton’s school busing was enforced by Judge McCarthyist phase—until the Soviet maxim that “Power corrupts, etc.” W. Arthur Garrity, Jr. Busing lacked KGB files were opened after the Cold Canadian judges who lack even the grass-roots support among either the War, and the charge of spying turned minimal checks on their power that white or black community, but Garrity out to be true after all. American judges have, will no doubt pushed forward with the sensitivity of The fashionable perils that prove Acton right once again. a Gauleiter. No one could fault his ulti- alarmed the media were overpopula- The turning-point in the United mate aim, which was to erase a regime tion and Global Cooling. Paul Ehrlich States, according to Frum, was Goldberg of asymmetrical rights that had vic- revived the Malthusian thesis in his vs.
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