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PARTISAN REVIEW
shut: a still, tree-lined street, undistinguished frame houses sur–
rounded by modest areas of grass, a few automobiles. For certain
purposes it is assumed that all "real" Americans live in towns like
this, and, so great is the power of myth, even the born city-dweller is
likely to believe vaguely that he too lives on this shady pleasant
street, or comes from it, or is going to it.
("Father and Son-and the FBI")
The film's purpose was to separate "real" Americans from secret
fifth -col umnists, to isolate the foreign virus of Communist
treachery within the native heartland. It was an expression of the
xenophobia and paranoia that touched the early fifties, when
foreign ideas, when ideas in general, were held suspect. (As
Warshow says of the vengeful anti-Communist father in the
film, "what is being upheld is, precisely, stupidity," a "hatred
and contempt for the mind," which Warshow as an anti–
Communist himself finds particularly appalling.) But cold war
ideology was only a rear-guard action, the last gasp of the
mythology of an unspoiled America as the real America moved
forcefully onto the world stage.
1£
the regional cultures were partly a product of American
isolation and provinciality, the direction of culture since World
War II, despite the chauvinist parenthesis of the 1950s, has not
been towards a national culture but towards the internationali–
zation of culture. Godard called [he discontented French youth
of the sixties "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola."
It
was not
only American industry and technology that conquered the
world but also American popular culture, some of it obliquely
European in origin, for it was no longer centered, as in the
fifties, on insipid artifacts of canned Americana but sometimes
showed a complexity and sophistication that can be traced
to
the
influence, of all things, of European modernism. Whatever the
differences of quality and scale-and those differences are
great-the lyrics of the Beatles or Bob Dylan, for example, have a
clear kinship with the language and vision, the obscurity,
bleakness and fragmentation, of the writings of Rimbaud,
Kafka, and T.S. Eliot.
The expansion of higher education, along with what
