the end of a decade

"Sometimes I see how the brave new world arrives..." 

In terms of its popular music, the 1970s was a by turns entropic and hyperactive ‘hot mess’ of a decade; Abba closed it out perfectly, with ‘Happy New Year’, the ultimate low-serotonin turn-of-the-year anthem – I mean, just listen to the words, they were a sort of Scandi version of The Smiths.

"It's the end of a decade and in another ten years' time...?" 

Of course, we remember what did happen at the end of ’89. If we don’t, we read Timothy Garton-Ash but perhaps we should read Agata Pyzik too. Reflecting on her own childhood (in Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe, East and West), she says that “the major cultural feature of socialist Poland [was] high-mindedness”, adding:

“1990 killed many interesting bands who identified with the previous era of resistance. Now Poland was drowned with the hideous poor quality clones of the Western bands and our music industry in a way still hasn’t got out of that crisis, in which it resembles the rest of the world. The [Iron] Curtain was the dam which was protecting culture from money being the only reason it was made. With the obliteration of political tensions, and especially in the newly democratized countries, nihilism, punk, angularity, difficult obscure lyrics, weren’t welcome, opening an era of the new Paneuropean post-socialist realism, in which everything was beautiful.”

As a Westerner, if you were to ask me whether I’d have liked to live or grow up in any of the so-called People’s Democracies then the answer’s no, of course not. I mean, I liked going to gigs as a teenager too but I wouldn't have liked being beaten up by the militia for attending them. Indeed, I’d suggest that from the days of the Marshall Plan onwards, we (meaning Western Europeans) were the main beneficiaries of authoritarian communism in that the hearts-and-minds aspect of the Cold War kept our own ‘ruling classes’ (can one still use that term?) honest – hence the trente glorieuses, income inequality reaching a historic low point during the mid-1970s despite the other travails of that decade and all the rest. The 0.1% don’t have an ideological Other to contend with any more and they haven’t properly reckoned with the Climate Emergency yet; would that they had (on either count), it would concentrate minds.

(See also what St. Augustine says with respect to Rome and Carthage, in the early part of City of God - he asserts, in essence and with 'references back' to previous political debate, that Rome went into a precipitous moral decline with Carthage's destruction. Does anyone doubt that we're living through a sort of Late Empire phase in the West at this moment?).

So, yeah, Happy New Year and that. Here’s to a world where every neighbour is a friend, here’s to Anyone-But-Johnson and Anyone-But-Trump and here’s to the European Union, a battered social democratic bulwark against the worst imaginable outcomes – which I reckon the U.K. will rejoin, probably in the early 2030s: who’s for organising a sweepstake? Better, who's for organising a movement?