We’ve Been Through This Drill Before

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, February 17, 2022

 

San Francisco, as we all know, is a lawless place. Over one 72-hour period during the summer, a mob of young men tore absolutely savagely through the city, looting liquor stores, overturning streetcars, defacing statues, and attacking women in the streets. Some 1,000 people were injured, 13 of them killed. No one knows how many women were sexually assaulted, but at least a half a dozen women required medical attention following violent rapes. You wouldn’t know about that rampage from reading the mainstream media — unless you happened to be reading an issue of Life magazine from August 1945, when thousands of young men suddenly liberated from the prospect of being sent to fight in the Pacific celebrated Japan’s surrender with riots and rapes.

 

Ten years after those awful (and quickly forgotten) events, the nation would be scandalized by the relatively benign pelvic performances of Elvis Presley. Ed Sullivan swore that Elvis would never appear on his show, but the rising popularity of the singer forced him not only to reverse his edict but to pay Elvis a record-setting fee for his appearance. Elvis’s concert performances were labeled obscene, and a Florida judge threatened to jail him if he did not constrain his gyrations.

 

Ten years after Elvis burst onto the scene and 20 years after the rampage in San Francisco, Americans would declare that they were in the midst of a “sexual revolution.” It was the age of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll — and judicial and legislative action, too: The 1965 Griswold decision made contraception more widely available, and in 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan of California signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law. In 1972, Playboy’s circulation reached its all-time high of 7 million, and the pornographic film Deep Throat grossed more than $1 million, a first for a film of that type, playing not only in so-called adult theaters but in ordinary cinemas around the country.

 

We remember the 1960s as a time of great social change, which they were. But the so-called Sexual Revolution did not take place in the 1960s. It took place in the 1940s. The precipitating event was not an Elvis Presley concert — it was the war, during which young American men far from home for months or years on end engaged in sexual promiscuity on a scale that would have been difficult to manage in the small farm towns and tight-knit urban neighborhoods from which most of them came. The soldiers brought those new sexual habits home with them, with predictable consequences.

 

As Jon Zobenica relates in American Scholar:

 

By 1945, an unprecedented one in three marriages ended in divorce, up from one in five as recently as 1940, and the rate was still climbing. Rapes were up 27 percent in 1944 compared with the prewar average, and rape statistics were much higher among youths, with the total number of juvenile delinquency arrests (for a variety of serious offenses, including rape) 100 percent greater in 1945 than in 1939. Magazines of almost every stripe were fretting about an epidemic of venereal disease, with Ladies’ Home Journal reporting that in 1944, “11,000 girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen acquired syphilis.” Illegitimate births had increased, and had done so most sharply—according to Jane Mersky Leder, author of Thanks for the Memories—among the 20-something wives of military men. Then again, also according to Leder, a 1945 U.S. Army survey found that 80 percent of “GIs away from home for two years or more admitted to regular sexual intercourse. Nearly a third of these men had wives at home.”

 

What happened in the 1960s was not a sexual revolution — what happened was that the sexual revolution of the 1940s went public. And when it went public, the political response focused on the public aspects of it, particularly on the matter of alleged obscenity in books, magazines, and music. As attorney general in the early 1960s, Robert Kennedy oversaw a federal investigation of the lyrics to the song “Louie, Louie,” which were suspected of being obscene. His brother, the president of the United States of America, averaged one new sexual partner per diem, if the account of our old friend Gore Vidal is to be credited. There is something comical about the thought of the attorney general fretting about purportedly obscene pop-song lyrics while the president was busily working his way through the Radcliffe student body, the White House secretarial and intern pools, the Warner Bros. stable, and his in-laws. But the president’s shenanigans were mostly private. The thing about popular music is, it’s popular. As such, it is public, and for that reason of intense interest to the politician. President Kennedy’s antics were swept under the rug, but “Louie, Louie” was all over the radio.

 

It is less comical to think about New York City Mayor Eric Adams trying to get social-media companies to ban rap videos while women are being butchered in their homes in Chinatown, murdered by lunatics set free and left at large by the city’s failed criminal-justice system.

 

But the new mayor’s new fixation on “drill rap” is the 21st-century version of the panic over “Louie, Louie” and Elvis’s pelvis. The social problems are real, and the music is tied up in them, but it is not the music that causes the social problems, which precede their pop-culture manifestations by a generation or more. Drill rap was born of the unholy union of gangster rap and social media, and it is the music’s relationship with technology that gives it a large cultural footprint. This is a familiar pattern: There were fewer than 10,000 televisions in American homes in 1945 when those San Francisco riots happened, but there were 60 million televisions in American homes by the time of Woodstock. Which one of those do we remember? Similarly: MTV was launched in 1981, the compact disc appeared on the market in 1982, and the Tipper Gore-led panic over rock lyrics was institutionalized in the form of the PMRC by 1985.

 

The 1980s–1990s panic over song lyrics was accompanied by a similar panic over the supposedly satanic character of role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons — and also, most consequentially, by a fantastical panic over “satanic ritual abuse” in the nation’s day-care businesses, a mass delusion and moral panic that bore a striking resemblance to the Salem witch trials. Of course, American parents in the 1980s were right to be worried about their children — the divorce rate had more than doubled from 1960 to 1980 and reached an all-time high in 1981, disrupting millions of families, hurting millions of children, and, not coincidentally, driving up the demand for day-care services. But American parents could not face themselves and what they had done to that generation of children, and so they settled upon a motley crew (and a Mötley Crüe) of pop-culture villains: Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Ice-T, Twisted Sister. Gary Gygax and Dungeons & Dragons were blamed for 28 murders and suicides, with hysteria ginned up by Ed Bradley and 60 Minutes. Dee Snider from Twisted Sister was hauled before Congress, to hilarious results. Of course, the problem wasn’t the songs and never was. But the truth was too horrible to face.

 

Mayor Adams has found his Twisted Sister in drill rap. Banning those videos won’t do any good, but it would be less painful than talking about New York City’s real problems.