Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 91

The Astro-Turf Garden 83 A pessimistic attitude won favor among many of the politically and culturally disaffected radicals of the sixties. A profoundly negative view of the possibility of nature forms a sharp contrast to earlier artists, writers, and radicals who wholeheartedly affirmed the organic. In his influential book The Machine in the Carden (1964), a study of the pastoral myth in American literature, Leo Marx described the significance of pastoralism in American culture. The root of this pastoralism, Marx suggested, was the impulse, in the face of society's increasing complexity and oppressiveness, to withdraw to a simpler environment "closer to nature." It found desirable characteristics and values in simple country pleasures. "Pastoral ism," Marx (1980, p. 53) held, had "won the favor~or the serious consideration of Western culture's most gifted artists, writers, and intellectuals." The subjects of Marx's study experienced the freedom to not only reject technology, but to find some hope in the affirmation of the pastoral. However, for radical dissidents of the sixties the possibility of an escape to nature became increasingly problematic. They rejected both the organic pastoralism of the Old Left and the escapist pastoralism of romantic writers and artists. What is involved is a revision of an attitude that embraced nature in the face of technological advance. The metaphoric conception of the machine as the destroyer of an unspoiled landscape gives way to the fatalistic notion of the landscape as completely defiled. For these dissidents the very idea of nature, and its iconological embodiment, notably "the garden” is transfigured. They describe an inverted, or post industrial form of the pastorial—an Astro-Turf garden. For many of the dissident voices of the sixties, the natural, the primitive, and unrefined is held to be overwhelmed by the fraudulent surface of American life. Not only is modernity made to seem antagonistic to the integrity and concerns of the self, it is the embodiment of social forces, which, if unopposed, may be expected to defile and desecrate the natural environment, the ground on which the pastoral hope has always rested. These responses evidence a highly fatalistic conception of the recent past: the alien, abstract, largely external character of the intervening force, the sense of tyrannous circumstances closing in all at once upon a landscape of eroded possibilities.