A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s

Extract

A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s. By Mary Caputi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 232p. $58.50 cloth, $19.50 paper.

Given the controversies that have plagued the present administration, it is little wonder that critiques of neoconservatives have been produced by scholars from all perspectives. Even Francis Fukuyama, widely reputed to be one of the great neoconservative thinkers, has released a trenchant critique of neoconservatives' ideas and policies (America at the Crossroads, 2006). In her contribution to this growing chorus, Mary Caputi argues that neoconservatives have used and abused history in creating a mythical image of America's past, an idealized narrative about American life in “the fifties” that she contrasts with the complex historical strata of the chronological 1950s. She argues that the neoconservatives have cultivated, popularized, and exploited a misleading and incomplete image of a “kinder, gentler America” to generate a peculiarly powerful melancholia that haunts us with the memory of what we (supposedly) were and what we might (erroneously wish to) be again. Only by seeing through this idealized vision of that decade can we “understand that America's true identity is not located in some mythological register of time” and thus “let go of the worries and sadness that drive the need for foundations” and moral certainties (p. 27).