.In the United States of 1939 a good many conditions prevailed that seem rather odd today. But some unseen hand, invisible spirit, has always been at the heart of the American experience…
..And change of all sorts is the heart of the story of the modern world- or is it? Two traps, it would seem, lie in wait for the student of change. One is the tendency to look on the appearance of drastic change as an illusion arising from the inexperience, cultural egotism, and lack of perspective of the beholder- an attitude summed up in the phrase “plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.” It has all happened before; it seems new only because it has happened to us. The other is the habit of accepting change to uncritically: of building up a zephyr into a hurricane, of calling a fad a revolution, of accepting all change as permanent and significant and thereby forgetting that life tends to repeat itself and that human events, like natural ones, move in cycles.
—Photos of the famous Plexiglas Pontiac from the 1939 New York World’s Fair are few and far between. The one above appears in a brochure for the General Motors Exhibit Building. The caption reads: “Fisher Body exhibits this full size transparent car, the first ever constructed in the United States. Advancements in body engineering, with emphasis on the contribution of increased vision to safety, are graphically presented against a background of aluminum and gold murals by Dean Cornwell.” —click image for source…
Obviously, the American temperament makes us more prone to fall into the second trap. Pessimism, faith in permanence, and world-weariness have never been the American style. But then, change has been the central fact of the entire American experience. Daniel Bell once wrote, ” The United States is probably the first large society in history to have change and innovation built into its culture.”
—For those who have not read “Grapes of Wrath”
We are whining over $5.00 per gallon gasoline?—
In fact, America is probably the first nation in history in which advocacy of things as they are is automatically and permanently a defensive position: we unhesitatingly equate change with progress. Beginning with President Johnson’s 1965 speech “We want change. We want progress…and we aim to get it,” down to the packaging of President Obama as the candidate of change, the words progress and change have become synonymous and part of the American DNA. At the most conservative , we allow ourselves to be rueful and resigned about change. Even when we go in for pickling the past, the kitschy nostalgia of a Rockwell America, or the Woodstock rut, there still manages to be an aura of advance about the movement; anyone who has visited colonial Williamsburg will have to admit that it is the damndest, most up-to-date restoration of the past they ever saw. There is a truism, an axiom in de Toqueville’s early nineteenth century observation of America as the country of permanent and institutionalized re-invention on the individual level…( to be continued)…
COMMENTS
