Time's flow is uniform; it is we who break it into periods. Hungering for significant moments, for turning points, for stops and starts and new beginnings, we invented the second, and the millennium. However, time leaks across the limits we impose on it. Intellectually, the 20th century could be said to have begun in 1890; politically, in 1914. Looking back now, we recognise that much of what we think quintessential of the 1960s did not in fact arrive until the 1970s. The "Me Decade", Tom Wolfe called the 1970s, as if the 1960s had really been a time of selflessness and brotherly - and, of course, sisterly - love. In fact, the most emblematic figure of the 1960s is the lone gunman waiting at his high window for the motorcade to swing by.
Being human, it is inevitable that we should seek to discern pattern and order in the times through which we live, to find, in the critic Frank Kermode's term, the sense of an ending. Here at the close not only of the century, but of the millennium, we fix our gazes on the calendar as eagerly as when we were children we would wait with an almost fearful eagerness for the moment when the nines turned to zeros on the motor car's milometer. And like children, too, we look back at the long road that is our past and the past of the world unwinding in the rear window, and play the game of I Spy.
What do we spy? Horrors, mostly. Offspring of the Nuclear Age, we grew up in the shadow of the Valley of Death, and are left with a deep, uneasy sense of being survivors. Those of us who are old enough to have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis will remember the terror of that week in October 1962, and the ashen sense of anti-climax when it was over.
But how many remember another, perhaps even more perilous, October crisis, when at the height of the Middle East war in 1973, an embattled Richard Nixon, facing the prospect of impeachment over the Watergate scandal, put US forces on worldwide nuclear alert against the possibility of Russian troops being sent to rescue an encircled Egyptian army in Sinai? Hindsight not only enlightens, but frightens: after the alert was cancelled came the story, wholly believable, that Israel had already issued its own nuclear threat, when the prime minister, Golda Meir, sent a message to the Russians warning them that her country's nuclear weapons, the ones they had always denied they had, were targeted not on Cairo or Damascus, but on Moscow. Phew.
The world did not have to wait for Kennedy or Kruschev, Nixon or Golda Meir, to hear the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen. One has only to read the stories of Elizabeth Bowen set in London during the Blitz to share in the giddy sensation of being present not only at the ending of a world, but of the world. After the war came the years of stringency, when the race, finding itself battered and bloody but still, however totteringly, on its feet, began to pick up the overturned chairs and set the ornaments - the china dogs, the framed photograph of mam and dad's wedding day, that lady with the borzoi on a leash - upright on the mantelpiece again. It took until the end of the 1950s for the parts of a world to be put back together, only for the flower children of the dawning Age of Aquarius to come romping in and start jumping on the furniture and setting fire to the curtains.
Perhaps the most significant social phenomenon of the post-war period was the realisation by big business that not only did the youngsters suddenly have money, but that it would be child's play to take it away from them. Pace Philip Larkin, it was not sexual intercourse that began in 1963, but the popular culture industry - though, come to think of it, that is probably what Larkin meant. Oh, how we danced through that decade, believing the baddies had been banished and that from now on, as the song had it, love would rule the world. Then we grew up, had children of our own, and in the sour dawn of the 1970s we saw that nothing much had changed, except that we had a terrible hangover.
Easy to generalise, of course, yet the years between 1969 and 1980 do seem marked by a general aspect of disappointment and bitter regrets. The 1970s was the decade of false starts, of bright dawns that turned to darkness at noon. Nixon's foreign policies - and in that area, if no other, he was the best US president since Roosevelt - promised a new age of international de- tente. Watergate, the oil price rises, the appalling carnage attending the end of the Vietnam war, the unacknowledged but ever-deepening social and political crises in the USSR, all put paid to those hopes. The lights began to go out again, literally so in Britian, as the miners' strike of the early 1970s brought down Edward Heath's government and showed the English, if they still needed showing, that the days of glory were gone for good. We even had an IRA ceasefire, in the summer of 1972 - remember? It lasted for 13 days.
The decade did begin with the end of a war, when, on January 12th 1970, the breakway state of Biafra, its forces exhausted and its people starving, capitulated to the Nigerian government. For more than three years we had watched in horrified fascination as the Ibo people - the Jews of Africa, as they were called - fought in vain for independence. The war reached a pitch of savagery we thought could not be surpassed, but that was before Rwanda, before Bosnia, before Kosovo; before Bloody Sunday, too, and Bloody Friday, and the Dublin and Clones bombings. By the time the 1970s were properly under way, we did not need tribal wars in far-off lands to show us what neighbour is capable of doing to neighbour.
The two great seismic shifts - the cliche is older even than the decommissioning impasse - of the 1970s were Watergate, and the quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC, announced to the West like a grotesque Christmas greeting on December 23rd, 1973. The other abiding crisis was Vietnam, but that war would have been over by the close of the 1960s, except that the victors had not sufficient strength to seize the spoils of victory, and the defeated could not recognise defeat. As it was, the bloodshed and the carpet bombings dragged on until the peace deal was at last signed in Paris in January 1973, and the US finally extricated itself from its worst nightmare since the War Between the States.
WATERGATE was different to any political scandal of modern times in that it became a public entertainment, an extended television soap opera - sit-com, some would say - with more twists and turns and dirty deeds than the hackest of hack screenwriters would dare impose on a plot. Night after night our dinners went cold as we sat openmouthed before the spectacle of someone we had always thought a spiv being revealed as a full-scale political crook.
And as for the supporting cast! Remember Gordon Liddy, the thriller-writer and self-styled James Bond who cackhandedly "led" the Watergate burglars? Remember the creepy Haldeman and the creepier Erlichman? Remember John W. Dean III and his porcelain-skinned wife? And who could forget the sweating and putty-coloured John Mitchell, and his wife, the egregious Martha? Yes, it was quite a show.
What also made Watergate singular was that it involved so little financial chicanery. Never mind Deep Throat's injunction to "follow the money": compared to the amounts involved even in our own dear scandals of today, the slush fund to re-elect the president was peanuts. More surprisingly, more disappointingly to some, there was no sex. That is, unless you count John Dean's not unreasonable plea that he could not possibly go to prison because of the things a white boy as pretty as he was - and he was almost as pretty as his wife - would suffer at the hands, at the least, of the ordinary indecent criminals he was likely to encounter on the inside.
Aside from the politics of the affair - and was it all that politically significant? - Watergate had the long-term effect of killing the fond notion that once they attain high office, politicians - through the beneficent effect of dealing daily with affairs of state and international strategy - become somehow different from the rest of us: better, nobler, more far-sighted.
This was a myth clung to dearly by Americans - lacking as they do a royal family around which to spin their fantasies - who would want to dream about Richard Nixon, as Queen Elizabeth's subjects are said to do constantly about her. The fact that Franklin Roosevelt's legs were paralysed was kept from, or ignored by, the American public throughout the 12 years of his presidency; John F. Kennedy was dead a long time before we learned of his womanising, and his far more seriously dodgy politics; even Lyndon Johnson, one of the best presidents the US ever had, got away with some whoppers, including the infamous Tonkin Incident, which he faked in order to justify the intensification of the Vietnam war.
Nixon himself believed in the divine right of presidents; there is a fine scene in that bad film, Oliver Stone's Nixon, which shows its doomed protagonist flinging from him the tapes he had secretly made of his own foulmouthed conspirings with his henchmen, and muttering in horrified denial that "The president doesn't talk like that!"
If Watergate was entertainment, there was nothing to amuse the West in the "oil shock" at the end of 1973. Christmas that year saw the first queues at petrol stations since the days of the Suez crisis. Road speed limits were reduced to 55mph, the BBC went off the air each night at cocoa-time, and there was even talk of dousing the Christmas streetlights.
THE YEARS of runaway inflation that followed the OPEC price rises gave us a tiny taste of what life must have been like in Germany in the 1920s. Not only did money fall in value, but it also lost its symbolic strength. Suddenly we saw the peculiar confidence trick on which the monetary system is based. The passages in Goethe's Faust Part II on the invention of paper money that had once seemed impenetrable all at once made perfect sense. The pound in your pocket seemed as insubstantial as a wad of lint.
As the decade limped to a close, the portents of the future began to multiply. In Britain in July 1978 the first test-tube baby was born; on February 1st the following year, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran; in March, Three Mile Island nuclear power station very nearly blew up; in May, Margaret Thatcher was elected British prime minister; and in the dying days of 1979, Russian forces invaded Afghanistan, one of the major mistakes of late communism that within 10 years would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It seemed almost as if the spirit of history does think in decades, after all.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Literary Associate Editor of The Irish Times
ONLINE LOGO HERE
All Articles published so far in this series are available at The Irish Times on the Web, at: www.ireland.com/newspaper/ special/1999/eyeon20
