(no subject)
Well, I've just spent the last several hours (no exaggeration!) being entirely fascinated by a pair of websites:
www.conelrad.com, and its companion blog, http://conelrad.blogspot.com (aka Conelrad Adjacent). Together they comprise a remarkable archive of the ephemera, media, and pop culture of the Cold War.
The kids of my immediate peer group - born in the mid-60's, at the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of Gen X - have a peculiar historical gap in our education. Our textbooks seemed to largely end with WWII, save for a brief mention of the space programs. The veneration of our parents' generation as "the Greatest Generation" was yet to come, and when it did it still concerned itself largely with that war and not with what came afterward. We had "M*A*S*H*" and "Apocalypse Now," but suddenly the Reagan Era and the Computer Age were upon us, and there was no time to go back and attempt to understand the years between Hiroshima and Germany's reunification. We laughed at Richie and the Fonz, idolized the ill-fated glamorous Kennedys, but without grasping the culture that produced them. Vietnam was a single shorthand term for a crippling nightmare (physically, mentally, emotionally, politically); Korea was an incomprehensible country with a gap in its middle that sent cheap little cars here during the oil embargo; political awareness was something that came about with the Flower Children.
At least, those are the things that stuck in our minds. I probably know more about the Tudor dynasty than about American politics of the 1950's and 1960's. Yet from what little I do know of the era, it seems our national political pendulum is swinging back toward attitudes that would not have been completely out of place at the time. The bogeyman now is the Islamic terrorist instead of Ivan the Communist, but the rage and the fear seem uncomfortably familiar; and Senator McCarthy would feel right at home with some of the tirades launched by the popular punditry.
But the Conelrad sites (the name comes from the original version of the Emergency Broadcast System - itself a legacy of the Cold War - and stood for CONtrol of ELectronic RADiation) are fascinating, in that they capture the human, everyday side of the time. It's less about major political shifts and swings (although the multi-part series on the blog about the infamous LBJ "Daisy" ad clearly shows the beginning of the attack ad's hegemony over issue-based political spots) than about the way Mr. and Mrs. Everyman lived in the shadow of the omnipresent Bomb.
The paternal earnestness of the Civil Defense materials - notwithstanding their now-risible advice - harks back to a time when the first terms that came to mind for an elected leader were "public servant," "leader," "legislator" instead of "politician" or, worse, "crook." When Mr. and Mrs. Everyman felt that writing a letter to their Congressman or even to the President was both reasonable and likely to elicit a polite and potentially useful answer. When we believed in Science-with-a-capital-S, even though it scared us too.
I could natter on for a while...but go take a look for yourself.
www.conelrad.com, and its companion blog, http://conelrad.blogspot.com (aka Conelrad Adjacent). Together they comprise a remarkable archive of the ephemera, media, and pop culture of the Cold War.
The kids of my immediate peer group - born in the mid-60's, at the end of the Baby Boom and the beginning of Gen X - have a peculiar historical gap in our education. Our textbooks seemed to largely end with WWII, save for a brief mention of the space programs. The veneration of our parents' generation as "the Greatest Generation" was yet to come, and when it did it still concerned itself largely with that war and not with what came afterward. We had "M*A*S*H*" and "Apocalypse Now," but suddenly the Reagan Era and the Computer Age were upon us, and there was no time to go back and attempt to understand the years between Hiroshima and Germany's reunification. We laughed at Richie and the Fonz, idolized the ill-fated glamorous Kennedys, but without grasping the culture that produced them. Vietnam was a single shorthand term for a crippling nightmare (physically, mentally, emotionally, politically); Korea was an incomprehensible country with a gap in its middle that sent cheap little cars here during the oil embargo; political awareness was something that came about with the Flower Children.
At least, those are the things that stuck in our minds. I probably know more about the Tudor dynasty than about American politics of the 1950's and 1960's. Yet from what little I do know of the era, it seems our national political pendulum is swinging back toward attitudes that would not have been completely out of place at the time. The bogeyman now is the Islamic terrorist instead of Ivan the Communist, but the rage and the fear seem uncomfortably familiar; and Senator McCarthy would feel right at home with some of the tirades launched by the popular punditry.
But the Conelrad sites (the name comes from the original version of the Emergency Broadcast System - itself a legacy of the Cold War - and stood for CONtrol of ELectronic RADiation) are fascinating, in that they capture the human, everyday side of the time. It's less about major political shifts and swings (although the multi-part series on the blog about the infamous LBJ "Daisy" ad clearly shows the beginning of the attack ad's hegemony over issue-based political spots) than about the way Mr. and Mrs. Everyman lived in the shadow of the omnipresent Bomb.
The paternal earnestness of the Civil Defense materials - notwithstanding their now-risible advice - harks back to a time when the first terms that came to mind for an elected leader were "public servant," "leader," "legislator" instead of "politician" or, worse, "crook." When Mr. and Mrs. Everyman felt that writing a letter to their Congressman or even to the President was both reasonable and likely to elicit a polite and potentially useful answer. When we believed in Science-with-a-capital-S, even though it scared us too.
I could natter on for a while...but go take a look for yourself.