Читать книгу Summer of Fifty-Seven - Stephen C. Joseph - Страница 8

Our tendency to paste headline labels upon decades (such as “The Fifties: The Silent Generation”) is misleading for at least two reasons. First, any ten-year period in American history is suffused with such variety, across all facets of life, that any single label is of necessity simplistic. But, second, carving off ten-year periods that start out with a year whose terminal numeral is zero, and end with a year possessing the terminal numeral nine, places artificial and rather irrelevant bookends in the river of time, inevitably adrift, bobbing askew in the currents.

One could argue that the crux that was to shape American culture for the remainder of the Twentieth Century, that was of primary impact in shifting virtually all the ground from “before” to “after”, took place during the latter years of the Fifties and the early years of the Sixties.

From: Eisenhower Two, the coming of Castro, Jim Crow at Little Rock, the Bomb, the emergence of television as a major entertainment and commercial force, Sputnik, Elvis and the bridging of the black/white divide in popular music.

To: John Kennedy alive and then assassinated, the Beatles, the Bay of Pigs, the Pill, videotape and the primacy of television as the primary information source, Martin Luther King.

If there was ever a time “before the deluge,” it was that crux. At the beginning, there was a prevalent adhesion to Mom and Apple Pie, within a generally accepted cultural and social order. By the end, there were Vietnam and the Rebellions of ’68, and everything was up for grabs.

Red Skelton, a brilliant mime and comedian of those decades, performed a TV skit that exemplifies well that late-Fifties/early-Sixties crux:

The drunkard’s wife decides, once and for all, to teach him a lesson. She inverts the furniture and objects of his living room, nailing the furniture to the ceiling, on which is glued the carpet, hanging the pictures and mirrors upside down, and so forth.

Skelton enters after a night on the town, unsteady of gait, humming tunelessly to himself, smiling innocently. He stops, confused. Everything is familiar. Everything is, in one sense, in its proper place. And yet nothing obeys the laws of memory or the laws of accepted physics. He, himself, is marooned on the ceiling, and unable to get himself “right side up.” Lost in space.

To have come of age in the late 1950’s, as a White American Male, was to have your fingers upon the door handle of that room, but to have not as yet turned the knob.

This is one story, of such a time, and place, and person.