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FRANCIS WHEEN. Strange Days Indeed. The Golden Age of Paranoia
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. The Paranoia Blues
ONE. Sleepless Nights
TWO. Stick it to the End, Sir
THREE. Going Underground
FOUR. Madmen in Theory and Practice
FIVE. Going on a Bear Hunt
SIX. Days of the Jackals
SEVEN. Such Harmonious Madness
EIGHT. Eternal Vigilance
NINE. Crossing the Psychic Frontier
TEN. The Road to Ruritania
ELEVEN. Lords of the Beasts and Fishes
TWELVE. Morbid Symptoms
THIRTEEN. In the Jungle Labyrinth
CONCLUSION. Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOTES. Introduction
One: Sleepless Nights
Two: Stick it to the End, Sir
Three: Going Underground
Four: Madmen in Theory and Practice
Five: Going on a Bear Hunt
Six: Days of the Jackals
Seven: Such Harmonious Madness
Eight: Eternal Vigilance
Nine: Crossing the Psychic Frontier
Ten: The Road to Ruritania
Eleven: Lords of the Beasts and Fishes
Twelve: Morbid Symptoms
Thirteen: In the Jungle Labyrinth
Conclusion: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
PRAISE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
For Pat Kavanagh
Title Page
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The world we now inhabit, and often take for granted, was gestated in that unpromising decade. The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made on 3 April 1973 in New York City by its inventor, Martin Cooper of Motorola, who had been inspired by Captain Kirk’s portable ‘communicator’ in Star Trek. The first personal computer, the MITS Altair, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, prompting a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Bill Gates, and his friend Paul Allen to design a Basic operating system for it. Their partnership, initially called Micro-soft (sic), had total earnings that year of $16,005. (By the end of the century, its annual revenue was more than $20 billion.) On April Fool’s Day 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled their Apple I computer.
The gestation occurred partly because we inhabited a world that could no longer be taken for granted, or indeed taken at all. Throughout the Seventies there was a rising hubbub of discontent, a swelling chorus of voices saying it couldn’t go on like this – whether ‘it’ was a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy, a jackbooted Latin American dictatorship, an enfeebled British corporatist democracy, or merely the quotidian headache of trying to make a phone call without a mechanical chorus of clicks, wheezes and crossed lines, as of a thousand boiled sweets being unwrapped simultaneously during a tuberculosis epidemic. Even the steady drip of small daily frustrations felt like torture, as in this litany from Douglas Hurd’s diary during the autumn of 1971, when he was the British prime minister’s political secretary: ‘All the mechanics of life crumbling around us – heating, cars, telephone etc … Telephone mended, light fuses blow. No progress on cars or heating … Demented by no progress at all on selling car or repairing heating … The bloody paper fails to insert my ad … Still getting nowhere on central heating … Finally we have two cars which work, and boilers, taps and radiators ditto. This has taken three months.’
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