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Re: Land this sucker...
On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Don Smith wrote:
> And, um, between WWII and the 60s were the 50s, and one could argue that
> McCarthyism and the blacklisting might be part of the slippery slope.
Yeah -- when I read that bit about the '60s, I couldn't help thinking that
the '60s were, after all, a *reaction* to something more restrictive.
FWIW, my favorite comment on the '50s at the moment comes from this review
of _Pleasantville_ in Cornerstone magazine:
http://www.cornerstonemag.com/imaginarium/movies/pville2.htm
[ snip ]
Let me say plainly (in order to eliminate a tiresome red herring) that
I, myself, am no great friend of tub-thumbing right-wing moralism. And
there's no doubt at all that much "conservative thought" today truly
does constitute a vain attempt to recreate a lost American utopia that
never was. But surely any old stick at all is not good enough to beat
these people with? I mean, can it really be to anyone's advantage to
paint these great Twentieth century upheavals in quite such cartoonish
colors? Undoubtedly the Fifties really were unhealthy in some pretty
fundamental ways; these people seem to have taken a sort of abstract
joy in structure for its own sake and just why this is the case would
have been a profitable subject to explore. I personally think that the
events of the preceding twenty years had left those who came of age in
that decade with something akin to post-traumatic shock syndrome. Think
of it: an American born in 1930 spent his childhood in the Great
Depression, his adolescence during the greatest war in human history,
learned of the Holocaust about the same time he learned the facts of
life, and lived his teen years under the perpetual shadow of the
H-bomb. Is it really so unintelligible that such a person should reach
adulthood with a hell-bent determination to carve out a quiet little
niche for himself and stay there for the duration? Similarly, Fifties'
Dads just a bit older likely celebrated their 21st birthdays in
God-forsaken WWII hell-holes straight out of Saving Private Ryan (a
film which makes, by the way, a nice chaser after Pleasantville --
Private Ryan, where heroism requires a bit more than learning to
masturbate in the bathtub). But however understandable it may have
been, the morbid quiescence of the Fifties -- a whole society resolved
to sit very, very still in hopes that things won't unravel any further
-- ought not to have been tolerated as long as it was. The world did
need, and badly, the kind of spiritual renaissance which the youth
movements of the 1960's promised -- and at least partially delivered.
[ snip ]
--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- peter at chattaway_com ---
"I detected one misprint, but to torture you I will not tell you where."
Winston Churchill to T.E. Lawrence, re Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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