1972: The First Year of the 21st Century
by Dominic Patten
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dominic PattenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-01
ISBN: 0060857684
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Summary of 1972: The First Year of the 21st Century
You can draw a direct line from the bloody and dramatic images of hooded terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics to September 11, 2001. From Richard Nixon's trip to China and d?tente to the collapse of communism and the reality of globalization; from playing Pong to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; from the porn chic of Deep Throat to Jenna Jameson and today's $12 billion porn industry. 1972 was the year of the Rolling Stones; the break-in at Watergate; and the debut of Nike, The Godfather, and Prozac. It was the endof the sixties and the beginning of the future.
1972 was an extraordinary year that gave birth to the times we live in: it saw the dawn of a new America, and a new world of terror, mass culture, and technological progress, where capitalism and conservatism triumphed. In Europe, Northern Ireland erupted on Bloody Sunday, and Britain entered the Common Market. In the Middle East, the Shah of Iran furthered his own dreams while Syria and Iraq allied themselves with the Soviet Union. Nixon's visit to China, and the first USA/USSR agreements curbing the spiraling arms race started a global power shift, while his landslide re-election brought the resurrection of the Right in American political life and hammered the final nails into the coffin of New Deal liberalism.
In this provocative look at a crucial year in modern history, award-winning journalist Dominic Patten asserts that, contrary to the beliefs of many baby boomers, it was 1972, not 1968, that was the true year of change. The tremendous cultural, political, and technological transformations of 1972 were signs of a real revolution - a revolution on Main Street.
After the events of 1972, the husk of the USSR did stumble through another sixteen years of existence, but the Berlin Wall had begun to crack, the Great Wall of China began to expand, and America's emergence as the world's sole superpower was solidified. The embrace and arming of the Shah lead directly to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. An Islamic theocracy that has the dubious dual honour of ultimately unleashing the brutal ambitions of Iraq's Saddam Hussein upon the world and facilitating the environment that bred Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Perhaps most prophetically, the hooded killers of Munich looked into the TV cameras of 1972 and conjured a future of endless invasions, intifada, and that terrible September day in New York in 2001.
At the same time most of America found the temptation of the cinematic flesh still hidden away, as it was in the 1950s. That changed in July when Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace as the woman with her clitoris in her throat, became the moneyshot for a sweaty palmed generation. The first Triple-X flick to spread to sold-out screenings in mainstream theaters all across the country, Deep Throat was a cultural gangbang. Hell, it became a date movie.
-From 1972
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