The 1970s were known as the “Me Decade.” Author Tom Wolfe coined the term in an August 23, 1976 essay in New York magazine.
Wolfe was a practitioner of what became known as the “New Journalism,” a subjective form of reporting and writing that revolutionized the field. Wolfe actually coined that term, New Journalism, too. The genesis story of both terms is a perfect meta-illustration of both. Wolfe included within the club of New Journalists star scribes Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, and others. Their works, very long-form and immersive, appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Playboy, and more. New Journalism pieces were as much about the writers as they were about the writers’ subjects.
For his part, Wolfe penned a number of nonfiction books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Painted Word, The Right Stuff, and From Bauhaus to Our House. He wrote five novels including The Bonfire of the Vanities. His byline appeared over countless magazine articles. He became famous, in addition to his keyboard output, for dressing foppishly, in a signature style. In a post-mortem article in Esquire (Wolfe died in 2018), Jonathan Evans wrote:
Just hearing his name conjures up images of an immaculately put-together man with bright eyes, a boyish face, and a suit—almost certainly bespoke, and almost certainly a rich shade of cream.
Wolfe was essential to the story, as were Thompson, Mailer, and the rest. Over the next four or so decades, not only writers but their readers were swallowed up in New-ness and Me-ness. It has become a Me World.
Let me put it another way: the story didn’t exist without Thompson, Capote, Mailer, et al. This book, this magazine article, they were saying, isn’t so much about the presidential campaign of 1972, the gory murder of a family in Kansas, or the execution of Gary Gilmore as it is about Me.
Americans not only celebrated Me-ness, they came to worship it. The 1960s might be viewed as a sort of Kumbaya Decade, when we all held hands and worked like hell for civil rights and against the Vietnam War (even though that view is mostly mythical). Our fuzzy memories of the ’60s produce images of the community ascendant, so much so actual communes became big things — that is, until one commune produced a psychotic, drug-addled, spectacularly murderous clan, the Manson Family. Next thing anybody knew after Charlie and his acolytes became known to America, togetherness was not only out but dangerous. That pushed us along to becoming more Me-ish, too.
Books and magazine articles came out by the score starting in the early 1970s and continuing to this day telling us how to be true to ourselves, how to find the real Me, that Me was OK, that you can’t love anybody until you love Me, that Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, is the center of the known universe. I’ve even found an essay on LinkedIn, of all places, titled, “Focus On Yourself and Everything You Want Will Fall Into Place.” Someone named Rhonda Byrne became a jillionaire in 2006 after her book, The Secret, was published. Its basic premise was if you think it, it will be.
The universe, if all these spiels are to be believed, exists within your own cranium. “What is life?” George Harrison asked in 1970; the answer, repeated ceaselessly over the next half-century-plus, is Me.
Truth eventually became secondary to Feelings. By the turn of the century, arguments could be short-circuited by one side or the other declaring, “Well, that’s my truth.” Do angels exist? Does god answer prayers? Can Uri Geller bend spoons? Can we contact the dead? Forget evidence. Forget proof. All that counts is My Truth.
An aside: Larry David tackles the idea of prayer — for my dough, the ultimate Me exercise — in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Let me put myself in god’s shoes for a second,” he begins. Well, just watch…
Anyway, the history of this holy land now is dependent on tens of millions of voters’ Personal Truths. Crime is rampant, a lot of them say despite the fact that crime statistics show otherwise. Global warming, institutionalized racism, gun violence, all bacteria are bad, one human year is equivalent to seven dog years, people use only 10 percent of their brains — all are argued over by people citing that infallible authority, My Truth.
An entire major political party in America now is steered by an insupportable charge, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Again it doesn’t matter a bit that there’s no evidence it happened. People believe it.
It’s Their Truth. My Truth. Me.
That’s all that counts.