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Hello, 1950s
Cold War culture makes a comeback

BY NINA WILLDORF


YOU COULD SAY it all started with a well-known blonde named Martha.

She cooked, she cleaned, she crafted - and a generation adopted her as their household-artist inspiration. Over the past 10 years, Martha Stewart has become not only a cultural icon but a mentor for many who aspire to her seamless blend of easy elegance, business savvy, and unrelenting resourcefulness.

But Martha Stewart and her empire stand at the beginning of the story. These days, gray-haired grandma is also a font of domestic inspiration. At the turn of this young century, tying on an apron suddenly became a voguish fashion statement, meat loaf shed its irony, and grandma's thrifty advice suddenly acquired new relevance.

Call it the comeback of Cold War culture, a fascination with the '50s, a hankering for homemaking, all spurred on by stifling the subversive. As the threat of terrorist attacks menaces our well-being, and the government deems "civil liberties" a gray area and regards people not fruuum here sketchy enough to interrogate and deport, cultural trends harking back 50 years have taken new hold on the American imagination.

It's Donna Reed and June Cleaver. It's Grease and Elvis. It's kitsch, but it's now cool in a less ironic way. And if young folks have thus far dipped only their toes into the trend, get ready for their full immersion in 2002. The scariness of the current war, along with the fear aroused by the government's newfound heavy-handedness, has catalyzed a trend that had already been seeping into our kitchens, our homes, and our lifestyles. Afraid of the world? Bake a pie. Can't speak out about how you don't really feel patriotic? Knit a sweater and keep quiet. And hey, go reinvigorate the economy already!

THE SIMILARITIES - both political and cultural - verge on the eerie.

In 1953, back when the Soviet Union was Public Enemy Number One, social theorist David Reisman - author of The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950) - spoke at an academic conference on the subject of totalitarianism. He proposed launching a full-on "nylon war" - literally bombarding the Soviet Union with stockings and other consumer goods in order to make friends with its citizens and encourage their alienation from Communism. Today in Afghanistan, the US government is substituting grain for consumer goods, dropping dinner for starving Afghans along with cluster bombs. But the inescapable irony of simultaneously killing and feeding, threatening and gifting, remains.

One of the most disturbing intellectual trends of the '50s was the blacklisting of writers, artists, and performers working in Hollywood. Names of filmmakers suspected of smuggling subversive pro-USSR, pro-Communist thoughts onto celluloid were placed on a secret list circulated throughout the entertainment industry, which flushed their careers down the proverbial toilet. Five years ago, the idea of the blacklist was widely condemned as something marking the darker side of another era. Today, not so. Second Lady Lynne Cheney, for one, hopes to revive a '50s-era muzzle - this time, in the ivory tower rather than Hollywood. Last month, Cheney, one of the founding members of the aggressively conservative nonprofit watchdog group American Council of Trustees and Alumni, stirred up controversy when the group took scholars, students, and university presidents to task for making unpatriotic statements. The organization compiled a list of what it deemed egregious anti-American statements made by academics and posted it on its Web site (www.goacta.org/Reports/defciv.pdf) under the heading "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It." Some remarks cited in the report were as insidious as "Ignorance breeds hate," which was the cautionary yet dangerous thought of Wasima Alikhan of the Islamic Academy of Las Vegas.

In another similarity with the '50s, today's fears of anthrax and terrorist attacks parallel the atomic anxiety of yesteryear. What University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Filreis had to say in a 1999 paper on the cultural aspects of atomic anxiety sounds awfully familiar right now: "Once the bombs had been dropped, could Americans go on and play ping-pong or poker, go shopping, shoot cap-pistols in fringed jackets and Dan'l Boone caps?... The normal was no longer normal. Every innocent act had the potential of the acutest dramatic irony. Every ping-pong game could have the feel of false innocence, of denial." He quotes from Paul Boyer's 1985 book By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age: "American culture had been profoundly affected by atomic fear, by a dizzying plethora of atomic panaceas and proposals, and by endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality."

 

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Issue Date: January 3 - 10, 2002

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