GG_sm Lorna Mills and Sally McKay

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levittown


Last night as I was watching TV my normally restless clicky-thumb stopped on a show called The Fifties, The Fear And The Dream. The imagery that caught my eye was Levittown, a model new community in New York for GIs returning from the war to have their families. Thank you for the f88king ugly suburbs, William Levitt. The show, however, a simple straightforward Canadian-made history, cast these middle-low income burbs in a contextual light that made more sense to me than usual, the extreme social value placed on an affordable patch of lawn a reward for enduring wartime: enough with catastrophic world events, time to look after me and mine. It was an understandable reaction, too bad it's now an internalised, systemic ideology. There's a good website on Levittown here (where I stole the picture above).

My friend J. reminded me today that the USA is based on single heros doing big things, while Canada is based on groups of individuals doing small things. My reiteration here is oversimplified, but this idea somehow oddly helped me in my current anxiety about the USA. The grand symbolic gesture of the nuclear bomb...too much power...is a singular icon. Nuclear physics also employed powerful, charismatic, and icnonic personalities. In some lights Oppenheimer is the most romantic, tragic anti-hero I can imagine: responsible for the A-bomb and the deaths of cities of people, remorseful and politicised, arguing passionately against Teller's (who, I just found out, is the inspiration for the Dr. Strangelove character...makes perfect sense, duh) plans for the H-bomb and the potential deaths of countries, continents, even planets. There is footage of Oppenheimer in the documentary, a man in pain in an impossible position, speaking, imploring his country to see people in other lands (ie: potential victims of hydrogen bombs) as "men like ourselves". I've been looking for the quote and can't find it. But I did find this (below), I think from the same interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1954.
Oppenheimer on secrecy: "The trouble with secrecy is that it denies to the government itself the wisdom and the resources of the whole community, of the whole country, and the only way you can do this is to let almost anyone say what he thinks - to try to give the best synopses, the best popularizations, the best mediations of technical things that you can, and to let men deny what they think is false - argue what they think is false, you have to have a free and uncorrupted communication.

"And this is - this is so the heart of living in a complicated technological world - it is so the heart of freedom that that is why we are all the time saying, `Does this really have to be secret?' `Couldn't you say more about that?' `Are we really acting in a wise way?' Not because we enjoy chattering - not because we are not aware of the dangers of the world we live in, but because these dangers cannot be met in any other way.

"The fact is, our government cannot do without us - all of us."

- sally mckay 5-15-2004 9:29 am [link] [8 comments]