"It's quiet now
And the silence is alone
except for the thunderous rumbling of things unknown
distant drums very present
but for the piercing of scream
and the whispers of things
sharp sounds and then suddenly hushed
to moans beyond sadness -- terror beyond fear"
-- Marilyn Monroe, Fragments
"There was something wrong in our ends as well as in our beginnings, in what we are after as well as in what is after us.'
-- Lincoln Steffens
The
Fifties, when they are thought of at all, are generally regarded in the
popular imagination as little more than a dim precursor to the
full-blown extravaganza of the Sixties -- gray flannel suit discarded
for tie-dyed threads, Ozzie and Harriet off to the orgy. There are
grains of truth to this conception, of course. Certainly, mainstream
culture in the Fifties tried to maintain -- and impose -- an impossibly
constricted image of "normality." But beneath the placid picture spread
by television, advertising and other cultural and commercial redoubts,
the Fifties were seething with crosscurrents and complexities that were
no less turbulent and transformative than those of the Sixties. (And of
course many of those Sixties tourbillions were simply continuances of
currents that began or gathered force in the Fifties: the Civil Rights
movement, the youth counter-culture, etc.)
So the "decade" prism is not wholly useless as a instrument for looking at the past to find some illumination of the present, of what we are, how we got here. Arbitrary as it is, the decade is one of the "distant mirrors" we can use to deepen our understanding of reality -- and, perhaps, to help us escape the tyranny of the Now, which screams its urgent demands into our ears, leading us so often into ignorant, unconsidered actions and reactions.
In any case, although the decade of the Sixties has hung over the collective consciousness like a heavy cloud for almost half a century, I often think the Fifties are a more accurate mirror for our times. Some of the parallels are striking: pointless wars; covert op and regime-change operations; unrestrained surveillance of the population; hysterical fears of a bestial, implacable Enemy striking us from without and infecting us from within; a frantic, panicky religiosity obsessed with sexuality, among many others. Think of how Norman Rosten (in a quote from the article excerpted below) described the era: a time of "cowardice on a national scale," when "strong citizens fell before the rhetoric of pygmies." Can anything better describe America in the 21st century?
There is also a degree of deadening conformity in the land now that recalls those gray flannel days. Not so much in lifestyle (although there has been an astonishing amount of "backlash" and regression to more rigid gender roles and family structures in last two decades), but decidedly so in politics. For despite the frenzy and mouth-foaming fury of our political debates today, beneath the surface there is a remarkable consensus. Both parties support empire, militarism, corporatism, exceptionalism, oligarchy, executive tyranny, torture and the shielding of torturers, indefinite detention, extrajudicial killing, regime change (covert, overt, by proxy), special ops, black ops, rendition, the drug war, the terror war, undeclared war, war crimes, the relentless expansion of the "National Security" apparatus, the militarization of police powers, slashing the social safety net, serving the needs of Wall Street and the One Percent, and so on and on and on.
There is no disagreement whatsoever on any of the basic tenets of the current system, no attempt or desire within either party to make any kind of deep or serious changes in the increasingly corrupt, imbalanced and now almost totally dysfunctional structures of power. Neither party holds out any kind of alternative vision or ideal or aspiration, other than that what we have now should go on and on, and that their particular faction should be in control.
There are of course some differences
around the edges, mostly to do with cultural and social mores. (But even
here, the differences are not always as sharp as many believe. To take
one small example, Barack Obama -- who, as we recall, campaigned with
anti-gay preachers and invited the anti-gay, pro-rich "megachurch" maven
Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration -- is still
burdening schoolchildren with the same kind of mendacious "abstinence education"
programs beloved by George W. Bush and the panicky sex-obsessives on
the Right.)
But it is safe to say that, in many areas -- the relation
between labor and capital, for example -- the politics of the Fifties
sometimes saw more profound and considered alternatives in the direction
and structure of the national system being put forth by the main
parties than we see today. (Not that there weren't also many areas of
convergence and consensus. For example, both parties at that time fully
supported "confiscatory" tax rates on the rich -- a policy which somehow
did not prevent one of the greatest economic expansions in history
during that era.)
These thoughts about the Fifties and its
continuing significance were prompted by a recent article in the London
Review of Books: a thoughtful essay by Jacqueline Rose
on some of the deeper (and wider) meanings represented by the
quintessential star of that decade: Marilyn Monroe. The piece is marked
by unexpected angles and resonances that throw light on the present
while helping deepen our understanding of the past. Below are just a few
excerpts, but the full piece -- all 10,000 words of it -- is worth
reading. Rose writes:
".... It is something of a truism for psychoanalysis that one member of a family can carry the unconscious secrets of a whole family, can fall sick, as it were, on their behalf. My question is: for whom or what in 1950s and early 1960s America was Marilyn Monroe carrying the can? This is not, I should stress, the same as asking: what or even who killed her? Or: did she commit suicide? These are questions that I see as a diversion and to which in any case I strongly believe we can offer no definitive reply. I am interested, rather, in what she, unknowingly, but also crucially for my argument knowingly, is enacting on behalf of postwar America. 'Perhaps,' Cecil Beaton wrote, 'she was born just the postwar day we had need of her.' He could be talking of the First World War: Monroe was born in 1926, an infancy scarred by the Depression along with everything else. But 'postwar' can also refer here to the Second World War, which comes to its end exactly as her star begins to rise. This is a moment when patriotism, to cite Weatherby, was 'an excuse not to think.' He is alluding to McCarthyism and the Cold War. When another radical journalist, I.F. Stone, listened to Eisenhower's inaugural address, what he heard behind its rhetoric of freedom was the drumbeat of war (although Eisenhower was reluctant to send troops to the region, the build-up to Vietnam would start on his watch). ... One of Eisenhower's first moves as president was to appoint Charles Erwin Wilson, the head of General Motors, as secretary of defense. He is the man who said: 'What is good for General Motors is good for the country and what is good for the country is good for General Motors.' 'No administration,' Stone commented, 'ever started with a bigger, more revealing or more resounding pratfall.'"
[Shades of Obama's first appointments: Larry Summers and the Goldman Sachs gang in charge of economic policy, Bush holdover Robert Gates in charge of the war machine, etc.]
"To say that Monroe was attuned to this is again an understatement. In 1950, a mere starlet with a walk-on part in Joseph Mankiewicz's All about Eve, she took the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, the original muck-raking journalist, onto the set. All about Eve is another of her films about the lengths to which an actress will go to make it. Steffens is famous for having taken the lid off city hall corruption ('Hell with the Lid Lifted' was the title of a famous dispatch from Pittsburgh). His heroes were beggars, prostitutes and thieves."
"Like Monroe, Steffens detested ignorance above all else. He preferred the honesty of crooks to that of good, ignorant men who 'sincerely believe things are as they seem and truthfully repeat to you the current lies that make everything look all right.' The malaise went to the very heart of the nation: 'There was something wrong in our ends as well as in our beginnings,' he wrote, 'in what we are after as well as in what is after us.' He was writing in the 1930s but already for Steffens, the power of the moneyed oligarchy meant that democracy in America was effectively dead. He was one of the first American writers to expose the political dangers of a credit-driven economy: 'There is indeed such a thing in America as sovereignty, a throne, which, as in Europe, had slipped from under the kings and the president and away from the people too. It was the unidentified seat of actual power, which, in the final analysis, was the absolute control of credit.' When Weatherby interviewed the playwright Clifford Odets, in the throes of despair about what he saw as the collapse of political hope, Odets asked, 'What's the problem?' and then answered his own question: 'In America -- I won't talk about the rest of the world -- the problem is: 'Are peace and plenty possible together with the democratic growth to use them?' Can you have democracy and growth or does a moneyed economy by definition wrest control from the people? Let's just say that this problem has not gone away.
"According to Ben Hecht, Monroe said that Steffens's autobiography excited her "more than any other book I had read.' She was excited by it at the exact moment when the world, for very different reasons, was about to be excited by her, when she was on the verge of gaining access to one of the citadels of American power. Mankiewicz spotted Monroe reading Steffens on his set, and warned her not to go around raving about him in case she was branded a radical; Fox removed his name when she put him first on a list (for a publicity stunt) of the ten greatest men in the world. She told Hecht that she carried on reading it in secret, hiding the second volume under her bed. ...
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