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