Ms. Warren may be justified in such a quandary as America has been held captive by the very principles that the culture uses to distinguish itself as “exceptional”.
Traditional American Values.
However as we have been witnessing, time and again these traditional values appear to come with some ugly baggage. Many people today prefer to deny that baggage and even claim persecution when their values of bigotry and prejudice are challenged. These perceptions can be attributed to the convergence of societal movements that lead to a re-framing of the American identity.
Michael Dwyer, assistant professor at Arcadia University in his dissertation Back to the Fifties: Pop Nostalgia in the Reagan Era, has some interesting thoughts on this reversion that America has experienced over the last 35 years and it seems it could actually be called revisionist.
Dwyer states, “In the years when Ronald Reagan emerged as a political force, “the fifties” became an intensely powerful sociopolitical concept that signified much more the chronological years of 1950-1959. The formulation of this concept is reflected in the slew of Hollywood films that sought to recreate, reinvoke, or re-imagine fifties youth culture in the Reagan Era.”
“The goal ultimately aimed to reconceptualize 50’s nostalgia in the 1980’s where the notion of the “fifties” was first cleansed of the historical tensions (like racism and women’s rights) that actually gripped the era, then made to stand for transcendent values not tethered to any particular historical moment but indicative of timeless, traditional, “family values.”
The success of this process, he argues, contributed to the rise of neo-conservatism and worked as a sort of retroactive historiography that altered our understanding of both “the fifties” and “the eighties.”
Dwyer contends that “the nostalgia for fifties youth culture which is a fundamental feature of these films was utilized by a range of populations throughout the Reagan Era for diverse and often competing political and ideological purposes.”
“Nascent Reaganites would point to the fifties depicted in Back to the Future as a time of morality and order to which the nation must return.”
“Liberals would identify the fifties in American Graffiti as a time of innocence that was eventually betrayed by the national sins of Watergate and Vietnam.”
“Others would understand the fifties in Grease as a time of naïve and archaic conventions to be mocked and scorned, while still others would attempt to recover the traditions of political activism in the fifties of Hairspray.”
“As these examples suggest, pop nostalgia did not (and does not) have an inherent ideological operation but rather served as sites of contestation over the cultural definition of the fifties. Thus, the fifties that emerged in the films of the Reagan Era is the product of a network of overlapping and competing meanings.”
Let’s Look at Back To The Future,
“Hill Valley, 1955 is so legible to the film’s audiences because by the time of the film’s release its “fantasy version” of the Fifties had gained hegemonic status in the national popular, and become part of the collective memory and cultural identity of the United States.”
“Just a
s Marty coaches his father from a wimp to a rescuer, Reagan sets out to coach America from acting the part of the ’wimp’ of the Carter years.”
Return, not Rejection
Dwyer goes on, “Reagan’s phrases like “renew the American spirit,” “recapture our destiny,” and “rebirth of the American tradition” gesture backwards to the period (in Reagan mythology) when America strongly embraced its values of “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.”
Both the Back to the Future and Reagan’s rhetoric, Dwyer argues, “fix” the fifties on two levels.
“The fifties are first repaired by omitting the historical tensions and controversies that actually characterized the decade (segregation, the Kinsey reports, Cold War paranoia, etc.) and highlighting the bright, cheery, prosperity of Small Town USA.”
“The fifties are “fixed” again by freezing them in time—creating a monolithic “fifties” that was cut off from the historical, cultural, and political events that surrounded it.”
“This is visible in the most prominent piece of the film’s set: the stopped clock adorning Hill Valley’s town hall. Marty travels back in time to re-start the clock—which not only ensures his prosperity in the 1980s, but also establishes his fantasy version of the past as reality.”
Add to this, Michael J. Fox the actor portraying the lead first gained popularity as a Nixon-loving Young Republican character Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties.
The character itself was a running gag on the show that two “freedom loving hippies” in an ironic twist of fate were parents of a young conservative that embraced the principles his parents had rejected while young.
But to say Michael J Fox was positioned intentionally into these roles would take us into the realm of conspiracy when in fact it may just be the synergy of the time that produced the same effect, just without conscious guidance.
Another example of this re-framing of contemporary history is the sit-com “Happy Days”,
If you look at the earliest episodes there was great detail to costuming to reflect an accurate portrayal of a prototypical 1950’s family. The success of a nostalgia based program would require such accuracy to sweep the viewer into the story.
However, as the shows success grew and was accepted into American pop culture, that costuming changed as clothes and hairstyles became more contemporary to the 1970’s and in a way negated how the 1960’s impacted American culture. Happy Days was no American Graffiti but it was constant fixture as television was at that time was literally programmed by capitalist agendas much like today.
Recall also the show had an actor connection with Ron Howard who starred not only in American Graffiti but also the Andy Griffith Show as a child. His connection from the original era to the present cannot be discounted.
Happy Days popularity made it a beloved fixture in the American mindset while advancing the view of a turbulent era from a more personal subjective perspective than an objective social one.
Many shows followed such personal re-framing such as Dukes of Hazzard which took the southern white culture of local corruption and libertarian independence but drained all racial context in the attempt to sanitize the entertainment value. Recently, the show was pulled from re-runs due to the recent Confederate Flag controversy.
However this re-framing of history, whether conscious or not could explain the conflicts occurring within American culture today in which America embraces the idea of conservative values’s while denying the racism, xenophobia, and religious zealotry those values bring with them.
What it did was reinforce perceptions that civil rights issues were no longer a problem because no one talked about them any more.
Perhaps more precisely, the voices that were being broadcast never talked about them any more.
source: http://mddwyer.mysite.syr.edu/documents/dwyer-2-abstract.pdf
The Grasshopper 