She was Seven in ‘75
Cartoonist and illustrator Ellen Forney keeps busy with fine art and illustration projects these days, but she’s probably best known for “I Was Seven in ’75,” her series of reminiscences of growing up in the “Me Decade” that appeared in the mid-1990s in the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger (and were subsequently collected in the Fantagraphics graphic novel Monkey Food). The strip featured incidents from her family life told with warmth, humor and meticulous period detail and were drawn in a deceptively simple and inviting style. Humor arose not only from typical family dynamics and childhood situations, but from the fact that the Forney clan in the 70s tended toward the tie-died, pot-smokin’, free lovin’, folk singin’ end of the cultural spectrum, representing an ideal of family life not often seen today. Forney’s close observation and ability to infuse nostalgia with a 90s sense of knowingness without appearing smug or overly self-conscious made the strip not only enjoyable but also artistically accomplished.
Still, most people considered it a light read. When Ellen’s brother Matt – an old high-school friend of mine – was in town a few years ago, he expressed some dismay at his sister’s apparently low ambitions for her work. “I like it, but what’s the point?” Matt, a journalist who has lived in Beijing for the last decade, saw “I Was Seven” as autobiography spiced up with trendy retro kitsch. Or maybe he was just hacked off that one of Ellen’s better efforts had made fun of the Shawn Cassidy feathered hairdo that he sported in seventh grade.
What Matt missed by being over in China is how much the landscape had shifted in this country. Since the late 80s, the Right had been on a holy war to discredit and vilify the entire social project of the 60s and 70s, embodied, in their view, by the demon in the White House known as Bill Clinton. This critique was not only, or even primarily, political. It was a broad attack on so-called “permissive” values: drugs, secular culture, feminism, homosexuality. And at the center of this agenda was the restoration of the 1950s authoritarian family, to the degree that the term “family values” became code for right-wing social policy.
In this climate, it was by no means innocuous to suggest, as Ellen did, that parents who took their kids to nudist camps, who smoked pot and left it around the house (where, in one memorable incident, it was discovered by a curious babysitter), and who hosted wild parties for their swinging friends – could, nevertheless, be good parents and good people. Parents in the 90s had been systematically programmed into a state of total paranoia over the health, welfare and future prospects of their kids. Parenting was refined into a science, and parents were expected to sacrifice all aspects of their pre-child individual identities and don the blank stage masks of Ozzie and Harriet as a necessary predicate to save their kids from the evils that lay at the end of every suburban cul-de-sac.
In a gentle, non-didactic way, Ellen’s work pointed out that there was a time not too long ago when parents didn’t follow all the Rules and didn’t suppress their own legitimate adult interests and activities just because they happened to have kids. Nor were kids passive ciphers, subject to ruination if exposed to the wrong influences. In Ellen’s realistic portrayal of the era, even seven year olds were able to perceive and make judgments about the world around them, independent of the values of their family and surroundings. Of course there were struggles, hardships and failures as there are today. But despite the cultural predominance of this now-heretical cultural paradigm, the world didn’t end, and many products of the “Seven in ‘75” era grew up to be happy, healthy and successful on their own terms. An obvious point, perhaps, but one that very few people were making in the 1990s, and fewer are making today.
9:21:32 AM 
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