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What’s Your Favorite Decade?

As the 00s come to a merciful close, American Polymath’s panel of experts looks back on their all time favorite decades. Evidently, some members of the panel fancy decades well before or after they were born.

1340s

The Black Death wiped out half of Europe and a heaping helping of the remainder of Eurasia in 1347 and 1348. Living in the 1340s would have been quite unpleasant, but the consequences of the decade of the Black Death have been felt throughout the world over the past six centuries: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Exploration, the Wars of Religion, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and a thousand other eras and movements which have happened since. Reading about history would be pretty boring if the world had just kept on keeping on like it had for the eight or nine centuries since the fall of Rome.
-Clayton Trutor

1950s

MASH is my number one all-time favorite TV show. I like the book just fine and the movie is good too, but the TV show is better because I really like B.J. Honeycutt and Officer Bill Gannon Without the 1950s and the Korean War, there would be no MASH, so I am sticking with this era of prosperity and Yankee dominance as my favorite decade.
-C.J. Charbonneau

1940s

For me, the answer is simple, the 1940's. No other single decade has had such a profound influence over the structure and organization of human society. Enough change happened in this single decade to rival the impact of the New World on Europe. Of course, there are the events we traditionally think of as dominating the decade: the rise and fall of fascism, the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power, the decline of the British Empire, the Holocaust and creation of Israel, as well as the well-intentioned creation of the United Nations.

As indelibly seared into contemporary world consciousness and experience as these events and institutions are, they will eventually fade into the cold objectivity with which we hold the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre or the Battle of Waterloo. They are important, or they were important.

It is the technological triumphs of the decade which, for better or worse, will remain the continual companion of the human race. Behold, the bounty of the 1940's:

Computers, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear power, Jet Engines, Ballistics technology, MICROWAVE OVENS!!!!!!! VELCRO!!!!!!
-Andrew Beck

1930s

Maybe it was reading The Grapes of Wrath in high school, or maybe it was hearing my grandfather’s stories about the world he was born into, but I've always felt a real affinity for the 1930s, even before our recent economic woes brought the decade to the fore. Old country music, moonshine, overalls.

I'm sitting in a cubicle right now, and the last song I heard on the radio was Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA." Where is Woody Guthrie when you need him? And given our current economy, I'm wondering if future historians might look at the 1930s as the beginning of America's glory years, when we battled the Depression and worked our way to a global dominance which lasted until the late 2000s, when, in a shining example of history repeating itself, we bankrupted ourselves and gave away our good fortunes and crawled whimpering back into obscurity.
-Jon Sealy

1960s

The decade of “Assassinations and Good Vibrations,” as Mike Love put it on the title track of his late 70s solo album Looking Back with Love, combined about as much unbelievable or crazy or terrible shit in a ten year period as any decade I know about. I wish I’d been born about ten years earlier so I could have watched it all unfold on television while still being too young for the draft.
-Francis Lilley

The First Ten Years Following the Creation of the Known Universe

My favorite decade would have to be the first ten years following the creation of the known universe. Back then, man, what wasn't possible! Granted, much of the action occurred in the first nanosecond after singularity, but favorite decades can come like that, heavily front-loaded. 

I imagine you're ready for some highlights from that very special time, but first we need to back the fuck up. For the longest while, the universe and every "thing" in it wasn't nothing but a "dot" the size of—well, good luck trying to measure it because in order to measure it you'd need a ruler with really fine little-ass lines on it, wouldn't you, and what's a ruler made of but motherfucking wood, and at that time wood is, like—wood isn't even at the threshold of being laughable. There's no pine. There's no oak. And you can put mahogany the fuck out of your mind right now. In addition to being small, it's infinitely hot and it's infinitely dense, this dot. If you tried to pick it up and put it in the pocket of your Chinos, you'd be all ah! ah! make it stop!, because either your fucking thigh would melt or the dot would bust on through the cotton lining and land on the top of your foot and continue on into whatever you were standing on like you weren't even there. This dot would be the heaviest-ass thing you ever picked up. Except you couldn't pick it up, not because it's too heavy and you're just a sissy with next to no muscle tone, uh-uh, you couldn't pick it up because to pick it up would require two things: I.) Time, and II.) Space. But guess what, numb-nuts. Both of these commodities are in short fucking supply and even if they weren't they'd be inside the dot, and what's more, at the moment, before singularity, the whole freaking concept of inside and outside doesn't amount to whack. So have fun trying to slip the fucking thing into your Dickies, man. Plus, you wouldn't want it in there anyway because in about a minute and a half it's going to explode and just try to picture your sorry ass on the receiving end of that shit. You'd be riding along in your '94 maroon Hyundai listening to Menudo and oops. Where you going to fit all that resultant shit now? Best be renting your ass a U-Haul.  

Next up, bam! Here comes the emergence of the weak force, which ranks up there with the release of Pet Sounds. Don't let the name fool you. Weak force. And don't be getting all up in its grill and like Yo, weak force, why you so weak, bitch! You take away the weak force or, worse, you get another one of your dumb-ass ideas and make the force weaker, even by just a little, and you, me, and everything we know are seriously fucked in ways that I don't have time to be delving into. Need another example? Fine, top this for a decade-making moment: The formation of motherfucking hydrogen nuclei. You feeling me now? That’s right: the moment H2 got its shit together and its all-pervasive freak on. You like breathing? Like to swim, do you? Hard to do either without the lightest element of all. So next time you're at the Laundromat, get your head out of your ass and put your hands together for the Hadron epoch, which was tres fucking short but sweet while it lasted. Or how about the birth of helium? Or the sad moment when the neutrinos decided they'd had enough of chilling with other particles and were all like, fuck this shit, let's start passing right on through everything. They never looked back. I wasn't there, but I'm the last guy who's going to go busting their balls. It's not like I'm Wolf Blitzer, looking all bearded and concerned and standing in the middle of the fucking Situation Room with these cartoon artist renderings of neutrinos hauling ass in stylized canoes behind him on the big board and Wolf's all, "Neutrinos—they used to bind to every particle in the universe. Now, they're parting ways. We'll ask White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs about the President's plan to get them back—next, in the Situation Room." Fuck that noise. 

My second favorite decade is the 70s.
-Pete Duval