Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 100

92 The Popular Culture Review 1. There is a sixties revival going on. Scholars and journalists attribute momentous significance to the sixties. If these claims are to be believed, the sixties were the most significant decade in American history. A recent Time (Jan. 11,1988) cover story held that the sixties "reverbrates still in the American mind." Newsweek (Sept. 5,1988) also devoted a cover story to the sixties. Newsweek described the decade as an "undigested lump in the national experience." The nearly simultaneous publication of several excellent books on the history and development of the sixties raises again the issue of the meaning and significance of American politics and culture during that decade. Of particular interests are Tom Hayden's Reunion, Todd Gitlin's, The Sixties, and James Miller's Democraa/ is in the Streets. 2. Mailer employs the metaphor of plastic frequently in his work. In Why Are We in Vietnam?, Mailer's hero D.J., a scatological theoretician of American Socety conceptualizes a society that is governed by the force of sterility—"the Great Plastic Asshole." The corporate system in the novel is used as a paradigm of American life. The corporation manufactures plastic plugs, society produces low and medium grade "plastic assholes." 3. In The Armies of the Night and Of a Fire on the Moon, Mailer continues to indicate that American society has become the captive of its own engineering, its own sterile unproductive vision. The Pentagon, that (1966, p. 117) "plastic plug" of totalitarianism "spread its technological excrement all over the conduits of nature. "NASAland" (1970, p. 354) was run by the digital computer, a form of "plastic brainpower" which signaled the final triumph of the square over the hip. In The Prisoner of Sex Mailer comments (1971, p. 152) that "more that one piece of engineering would yet take up squatters rights in the ovum." The final mystery is obstructed by the diaphragm in the garden. And worse "that plastic prick, that laboratory dildo, that vibrator." The mysterious actions of nature, the force of fire, the transmission of thought, the myst W'