Concerning the classic books of our youth, Inger, have you noticed that in the 1970s there seemed to be an overwhelming obsession with 'forces beyond one's control?' At least in "post-Gas Crisis; post-Meat Crisis; post-Garbage Crisis; post-Watergate Crisis; post Vietnam; post youth revolution; post having to listen to "Band on the Run" every third song on AM Radio All Summer Long" U.S.A. It seemed like, en masse, there was some desire to be confronted with something insurmountable and horrid at each turn~ so the warm fuzzy eco-friendly Mother Nature of 1969 to 1974 was transformed into a "being" (personified by Killer Sharks, Killer Bears, Killer Bees; Killer Piranha) who not only hated you but wanted to see you dead. Suddenly the afterlife did not seem as pleasant as it once did, and if you did not have the Gateway to Hell in your basement, then it was likely that at some point you'd encounter a haunted oven or at least an "unclean spirit" that would drive you out of your house in the dead of night. And, no doubt, while you were outside of your haunted house you'd either be abducted by a cult or hacked to death by Manson would-bes. Virtually everything you would care to eat was, of course, the worst sort of poison, but that did not matter since we were all slated to die in either a nuclear attack, a nuclear meltdown, or in a UFO invasion. City living would, doubtlessly, transform you into a murderous drone a la Taxi Driver, and fleeing to the country would either see you killed by an animal on the rampage or by your Deliverance-like neighbors. If spared that, you'd only be abducted from an isolated hillside by aliens who would use you as a lab rat. And, all of that paled to insignificance beside the real hovering horror ca. 1978: WHAT IF PRESIDENT CARTER GETS RE-ELECTED?
What did one do in such bizarre and trying times? One sought bizarre solutions. Whether it was through odd totalitarian movements; weird behavior modification; off the wall diets; Pyramid Power; Primal Screaming; Consciousness Raising; Mood Rings; Chanting; communal exorcism; biorhythm; Kirlian photography;past life channelling, the 1970s offered a witches brew of choices for those who sought to smooth out the potholes on life's highway with indulgent histrionics~ it wasn't called the Me Decade for nothing! For those of us not old enough to pay $500 to be dumped nude in the desert and forced to walk home, and those of us blessed with parents who did NOT put us on the "nothing but pureed rice" diet, it all seemed so puzzling and undesirable: uncontrollable forces colliding with horrific solutions.
>And, like you, I am also aware of incidents for which I have not heard an entirely satisfactory explanation. That doesn't mean they're supernatural in origin, of course - odds are there's the 'perfectly good' explanation these things demand
...that is soooooooo un-1970s.
