Being a teen-ager in the '70s was a lot like 'That '70's Show' on Fox. But there was a much darker side to it that doesn't come out in that sit-com. The whole nation was darker. We'd been through the Vietnam war experience -- the protests at home -- the loss of the war -- the political spinning of it all. We'd been through Watergate together -- waited in line for gasoline -- watched our economic might begin to crumble to the powers of globalization as we hummed around in our Honda Civics. Simple relationships between men and women were (rightfully) under the gun and the battle between the sexes was metaphorically won on the tennis court.

We watched our embassy in Iran fall and expatriates abused. We heard our nation called the Great Satan and watched our president being burned in effigy in the streets. The echo of Kruchev's shoe banging on Kennedy's desk still rang in our ears as we felt the wind chill from the cold war blowing our futures into a huge mushroom boom. Our government began wracking up debt like there was no tomorrow. Orwell's 1984 didn't seem that far off and the lack of national leadership punctuated the report from the assassin's bullet at the grassy knoll the decade before.

If I may insert parenthetically: It's really no wonder that Ronald Reagan was elected president at the end of the seventies. When he called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire it was really all over for Jimmy Carter. In short -- to use a 90's phrase -- he had it at hello.

We were a very wealthy nation with a huge self-esteem problem. Collectively it seemed we searched to find a raison-detre. In an anthropomorphic sense our country was shaking off adolescence and entering young adulthood as we celebrated our Bicentennial year.

In that kind of mood it's always nice to suppose there is something more evil than us. It was not surprising that movies like The Godfather, The Exorcist, and the Omen were huge successes. Images of Mafia thugs being really bad reminded us that we -- driving around in our fossil-fuel burning ecology wrecking poor quality American made gas guzzlers back and forth to school, work, and church every day -- were not such bad people. Images of demonic possession let us escape into the notion that there really is supreme evil in the universe and that sometimes we have no control -- hence the phrase made popular by the television variety show Laugh-In; "The Devil Made me Do It". And what better escape could there have been than an apocalyptic presentation of the New Testament's Revelations in the movie 'The Omen'. We could, for 90 minutes or so, rest easy in our unrest, that it didn't matter how much mutually assured destruction existed in the arsenals of the world's superpowers. Because there was underneath it all this universal battle between omnipotent powers of good and evil that rendered our most frightening technology mere toys.

I remember being taken to see the movie 'The Omen' by a youth minister with a group of other teenaged miss-behaved males -- ostensibly with the goal of 'scaring us straight'. I can't say that his ploy was totally ineffectual because seeing the movie did spark my interest in things Biblical. It sent me on a search. I'm sure our heroic youth minister would have been quite distraught at the conclusions I drew though. It was, after all, what could be called a millenarian sect of a basically fundamental Christian church and it would be accurate to say the end result was my total rejection of his philosophy.