A great big pussy.

The Southern states and southern cities might boom for all kinds of reasons in the Seventies, helping to concentrate wealth, population and political power in the most conservative part of the nation but there is one city that grows dramatically due to the entrepreneurial zeal and business acumen of one of Americas greatest and least lauded of entrepreneurs, George Jung.

If anyone can be hailed as truly having made a market in the Seventies, without any of the distorting effects of advertising or reliance on government aid, through heroic levels of risk tolerance in his involvement with the Medellin drug cartels and constant innovation in terms of avoiding the "regulatory" powers of the police, it is George Jung, with his appropriately Austrian sir name. Ted Demme's pedestrian but popular 2001 Blow tells his story as America's first major league cocaine smuggler. The city founded on the cocaine trade is of course Scarface Tony Manero's mincing ground Miami, through whose banking and real estate sector vast amounts of drug money is laundered and whose subsequent crimewave and internecine drug wars gives birth to one of the most popular TV programmes of the time, Michael Mann`s slick neo-noir series Miami Vice. Jung gives America a whole new reason to get out bed in the morning, a whole new confidence, a whole new way of dealing with those increasingly long working weeks. A classy new drug, cleanbright and ego-boosting that helps to bleach away the fuggy, longhaired torpor of the dropout Sixties. Turn on, tune in, cash out.

The cities of the South, the country itself has gone soft and been feminized by the permissive Sixties. Latino immigrant Tony Manero, who has nothing but his word and his balls to live on, sees it as “a great big pussy, waiting to get fucked.” Passive, ready to be claimed and controlled, an unexploited and vulnerable resource  for the man with enough strength and will-to-power to take it.

The cocaine doesn't stay in Miami of course, it goes everywhere, especially New York, fuelling the spectacular bacchanals of Studio 54 . Here, in another telling synergy of the early 1980s, once the club has passed its heterotopic heyday ex-Hippie and student radical Jerry Rubin (the embodiment for Christopher Lasch of the 70's culture of narcissism) newly converted to the wonders of finance capitalism, hosts early evening get-togethers for the new mavens of Wall Street there, under the auspices of Business Networking Salons Inc.

Cocaine, lifestyle counterculture, investment banking. Welcome to the Eighties.