JOHN SCHERBER
AN AMERICAN VOICE IN MEXICO
SUDDENLY IT’S 1960
In the fall of 1956 the first of the
big-finned cars hit the showrooms. Chrysler Corporation, now a division of
Fiat, but then one of the Big Three American manufacturers, led the way, borrowing
the concept from the tails of airplanes, the vertical panel that keeps the
plane’s rear section from wagging back and forth like an eager dog. Excitement
was in the air. The message was clear: these new cars were so advanced, so
swift of pace, so futuristic, that they needed these tail fins just to stay
predictably on the ground and pointed in the right direction. Plymouth’s mantra
that year, trumpeted from billboards all across the land, was ‘Suddenly It’s
1960.’ A mind-boggling thought at the time.
Dodge, DeSoto, Chrysler and Imperial
all sprouted similar fins.
Only Dodge and Chrysler survive today,
two poor cousins living on the sufferance of an Italian automotive giant.
Ironically, DeSoto died in 1960, Imperial passed to its reward in 1975, and
Plymouth blundered on until 2001.
These winged chariots were emblematic
of an era that felt itself launched on an unending uptrend. Folks who play the
markets will tell you that this kind of optimism heralds an approaching fall.
It was an era still running on the momentum of WWII. Television shows and
movies were populated by men in uniform to a degree that would be astounding
today. The nation’s leaders had realized early in 1942 that in order to win a
world war fought on two fronts, everybody would have to be pulling together. Dissent
was akin to treason. Draft dodger and deserter were new names for the lowest
kind of human. Everybody needed to be facing the same way if the world were to
be saved for democracy. There was a very practical kind of truth in this. The
problem was that this kind of thinking did not end when the war did.
Naturally this attitude was enforced
to such a strong degree that it had enormous momentum even after the war was
over. It became useful in shaping a consumer society with common values. It was
only a step from saving the world to going on to produce the most desirable
goods for the victors, who certainly deserved it. After all, when the war ended
so many industries had been converted to production of war materiel, that
demand was strong in nearly every sector. It was a perfect world for business
and for a population returning to normal life, eager to borrow, spend, and
reproduce. The Korean War of 1950-53 only reinforced the key role of the
military without altering the new consumer ethos.
In television, when the male characters
were not in uniform, they still were often father figures in charge of a stable
family life, where if they were sometimes mocked in a good-humored fashion,
their authority was never in question. It was also an era of variety shows,
comedy and dance acts derived from Vaudeville and musical theater of an earlier
time.
Yet, subtly, and beneath the rigid surface,
tiny cracks were starting to appear. People in the arts of painting, music, writing,
sculpture, and theater continued to move farther away from conventional values,
even as those were reinforced at every point by television and Hollywood. It’s
easy to see from this distance how unsatisfying the consumer culture was, even
as its glitzy façade projected a glare that made this hard to discern at the
time. The Beatnik phenomenon rose during the later forties with its frank
rejection of the contemporary culture. In the mid fifties a movie about
troubled youth was made with the title, Rebel
Without a Cause, as if there could be no possible cause for dissent or discontent,
no other set of values to consider. Even as late as 1960 it was still possible
to say to someone with a straight face, “You mean you’re a nonconformist?” As
if the value of conforming to current values was so clear it neither invited nor
required any questions.
As time passed this sense of subterranean
discord spread and grew. People began to suffer chronic neck pain from always
facing in the same direction. Contrariness
began to look more attractive simply as something different from the long and
increasingly boring adhesion to mindless consumer values. The bigger car,
longer, wider, lower, with sweptwing design, automatic everything, labor saving
features and more convenience than anyone knew what to do with. As
counterpoint, the Civil Rights Movement created graphic scenes of unrest.
Politicians sensing an opportunity with black voters were quick to promise a
pace of change that society could not deliver. Tensions ratcheted upward.
The pinnacle of this period in terms
of polished window-dressing was the Kennedy White House, touted by a press that
was slavishly painting a picture of a Father Knows Best family with a hint of
royal lineage. This was constructed of whole cloth for a clan that had made its
early money in bootlegging and was desperate for status. Two younger Kennedy princes
were being groomed for the job when their turns came. Cue the theme music from
Camelot in the background. It all began to have a sense of inevitability, and inevitability
can easily become stifling.
Suddenly it’s 1960; or worse, suddenly
it’s 1963. The longer lower cars with the immense stabilizing fins creep
through the destabilized streets suddenly gone silent but for the muted sounds
of weeping behind locked doors. Their toothy grills still smile toward an
infinite future. The government gathers its friends in council and closes ranks
around the idea of an implausible assassin with no motive, one perhaps
demented, one who must have acted alone. Forty-six hours later he is murdered
in police custody, never having seen a lawyer, never to be heard from again.
But somewhere a door has swung open
marking the end of an era. It is like the lid to Pandora’s box, the catalyst
for change rushing out all at once in unmanageable quantities. And as if in a heartbeat,
it all comes apart. Audible in the background are sounds of crystal shattering as
the elegant but insubstantial façade falls into a sparkling heap. It is a
moment of Shakespearean tragedy, where the crude regicide takes the vacant throne
and the creatures of madness come howling to the surface, soaring off on the
winds of war.
The sixties have begun.
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