As I write these lines, on the brink of the 21st century, I am aware of a nostalgia in my time about the decade of the ’50s. I don’t share it, even though I spent those years as a loved and sheltered child and was spared the bulk of its outrages. But make no mistake, it was not a good time. For the generation starting families after the horror of the war and the despair of the Great Depression, it must have seemed a paradise: the economy was booming as an undamaged and relatively untouched America and its awesome industry and limitless resources expanded into the desolation that was the rest of the world. But beneath the flood of appliances, cars and suburban houses there was no soul. The country was provincial, cruel to those who did not share in the new affluence and still riddled with the same injustices it had dragged into the new century from the previous one. America, for all its bounty, has always promised more than it could deliver. Of course, there was some progress, unions had turned the workplace into something somewhat less oppressive than it had been in the past, higher education started to filter down to the masses, and social legislation was providing some cushion for the lowest levels of society. The social price we would pay for television, tract housing, and the automobile was still not obvious; and neither was the tremendous cost to our natural resources this brave new affluence was to impose on our future. As long as things were getting better no one seemed to notice that they still were not very different. A new enemy, the Communists, replaced fascism, and America responded with a kinder, gentler fascism of its own. Unlike some of my liberal friends, I believe the Reds were a genuine menace and a response to them had to be mounted, but the fifties were a time of myopia, simple solutions, and black and white morality. Blacks were still oppressed, women were still second-class citizens, and a prudish Victorian sexual pathology emerged to throttle the coming puberty of the baby boom generation. Perhaps the most troubling problem was a failure on the part of society as a whole to admit there was a problem. There was a malaise in the air, psychiatric pseudoscience, fundamentalist religion, and reactionary politics flourished. The Cold War and the shadow of the Bomb touched everything, but I doubt that fear of nuclear annihilation ever had the grip on the population that modern historians perceive. What did have America in a stranglehold was a crushing conservatism (not necessarily political) coupled with a morbid fear of being different. It seemed that with affluence came conformity. It was a time when growing your hair long was considered perverted and all popular culture, music and entertainment, seemed hopelessly banal. The arts, which usually rescue us from times like these, turned inward, confusing incomprehensibility and lack of discipline with profundity and innovation. Even those few who sounded the alarm were either dismissed as fools or attacked as subversives; who remembers the Beats today? The generation of heroes who survived the depression and won the war turned petty and mean in their middle age and a cheerfully drab commercialism smothered the land. It was something new in America: the corporate welfare state.

This was the time when I began to physically mature with the usual teenage complaints of acne and rebellion, the brutal testosterone tyranny that grips half the human race as our emerging evolutionary imperative to reproduce collides with civilization’s multiple layers of regulation and control. I have come to see that the rush to the suburbs, so desired by my parent’s generation in order to prepare a suitable place to raise children, became the ultimate source of many of the social problems that plague us today. City kids are tough and street-wise, and are forced to learn to deal with the urban landscape and with each other in order to survive. Country kids are brought up in a wholesome environment of hard work, traditional values, family and community. But the children of the suburbs live in the worst of both worlds, a sterile and barren wasteland which is stultifyingly uniform both internally and in comparison with other suburbs. It is an environment with little to offer children or adolescents in the way of stimulation or education. The major form of socialization is television, which has its own commercial agenda far removed from the enlightenment and challenge of youth. The only escape from this planet of loneliness is the automobile, since no other form of suitable transport is available. Waiting to get old enough to acquire a driver’s license is how most of my generation remembers the interminable years between puberty and the first girl friend. Rather than interacting with an extended family and with a variety of acquaintances of various ages as I had in the city, the suburban youth lives in a world with only two types of inhabitants: parents and other teenage wretches in the same boat. That the two tribes should come into conflict and adolescence extend to late in life is inevitable. The postwar demographic phenomenon of the baby boom only aggravated the situation by creating a large cohort of children of similar age who grew up together in the same drab universe.

The creation of suburban culture replaced the extended family with the nuclear family, and community died with it. This is a unique social phenomenon, even the immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had their ghettos, and the virtues of close-knit city neighborhoods and small towns are pretty universally recognized. Without family and community a new form of social organization has arisen, where most of our friends and acquaintances do not know each other; the automobile and the telephone are the only way we have of interacting with them and they are strangers to one another. Only the workplace and the school offer any sort of community, and these are institutionalized and artificially homogeneous environments. Our parents were raised in another time and were already socialized under more conventional conditions, so they were immune to the negative effects. The collapse in social institutions that most of us more or less accept as a fact of modern life, has nothing to do with the breakdown of morality or the banning of school prayer or any of the other straw men that our conservative commentators are always whining about. The problem is that capitalism worked too well for our own good.

But the smell of change was in the air by 1960, it was my first new decade, and although a purely arbitrary milestone, there was a psychological barrier lifted when the old decade ended. I had a vague understanding of the social forces I alluded to in the previous paragraphs, but I dismissed my misgivings about where the country was headed as simple growing pains: we were going to the planets, perhaps in my lifetime, and no problem could long survive the assault of reason and science.