On 6 June 1944, nearly 160,000 soldiers from the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy and commenced the reconquest of Western Europe from the Nazis. The man in charge of this massive operation, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, would go on to be elected president, ushering in an era of peace, stability, and mass affluence.
Yet by the end of the Fifties, Eisenhower was rejected by the nation’s tastemakers as dull, doddering and spent: Ike, they said, played golf for eight years. As the GIs were domesticated by middle-class life in the suburbs, there came a new hero to behold: JFK also fought in the war, but his distinguishing traits were youth, manly vigour and an irrepressible sense of hipness, which had special appeal for those born after the war — the “Baby Boomers”.
Responding to this air of expectation was Norman Mailer, the enfant terrible of the literary world, who in both his novels and his personal life exuded machismo: an angry undercurrent of male alienation that flowed just beneath the surface of the reigning suburban culture.
Weeks before the 1960 election, Mailer wrote his first political essay. Published in Esquire, his aim in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was not just to boost Kennedy as the hero Americans needed, but to attack and discredit everything the Eisenhower era represented: its deeply “square” ideas of manhood — arising from notions of duty, responsibility, self-control and an engrained respect for authority — sounded almost Victorian to Mailer’s ears. “A tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result” of Ike’s leadership, he claimed. In place of the conformist “organisation man” of the Fifties, Mailer envisioned a new and vital masculine archetype for the Sixties, someone who can “touch depths in American life which were uncharted”.
Holding up JFK as the vessel, Mailer hoped that politics could be fused with the “underground river” of the American psyche — the unconscious realms of myth, art, instinct and aesthetics — and thus turned into an arena for limitless self-expression. His vision was a potent expression of the Sixties ethos, predicated as it was on the individual’s restless spirit of rebellion against the institutions.
Though that decade saw the rise of feminism, a no less important but overlooked development was the change in the dominant models of masculinity. The old masculine archetypes — the GI, the pioneer, the sheriff, the crew-cutted astronaut — represented the austere vanguard of modernity which heralded the arrival of civilisation and progress. The new male archetype birthed by the post-Boomer pop culture — the long-haired rock star, the brooding beat poet, the hippie wildman, the Third World guerilla, Mailer’s own “White Negro” — were sensuous rebels against modernity, who sought to topple the structures of civilisation in the name of a heedless and undefined freedom.
This permissive cultural emancipation of the Sixties after Kennedy was then enlarged by the neoliberal economic emancipation of the Eighties under Reagan, which entrenched the new moral status quo, or what may be called “the Boomer consensus”, based on the formula of hedonism plus markets. This dispensation was embodied in equal part by the two dominant Boomer politicians of the Nineties, the liberal Bill Clinton and the conservative Newt Gingrich, who both expanded the reach of unregulated markets, shrank the size of the state and subjected US politics to their boundless egos and libidos.
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